Salient Online Marketing Tips for Pandemic Restrictions

Online marketing is a very effective way to keep your business moving even amid pandemic restrictions. It is online marketing that provides the convenience and effectiveness to remain in business even when free and unfettered human interaction is severely restricted. That is made possible if the proper strategy is in place to market a business through successful online marketing campaigns. Restrictions no doubt pose huge challenges for many businesses particularly small and still struggling businesses. The most viable way around these challenges is online marketing. Without it, many small businesses do face very tough times getting their marketing messages out and to sell their products/services. Online marketing lends itself to marketers as an effective way to promote products/services even in the midst of pandemic restrictions.

Here are a few tips that can help make that possible and result-oriented.

Build Your Online Visibility

If your business is not visible online, it is virtually impossible for it to make sales. So, you must take very conscious steps to systematically build your online presence. Because of the restrictions, many more people are going online to search for products, shop, and generally do business. Your business can take advantage of this increased online consumption if it has a strong and robust online presence. Increased online presence helps the visibility of your business. This visibility is made possible by way of robust SEO strategy that helps your website to appear within Google’s top search engine results pages, SERPs. That visibility makes it possible for people searching online to easily find your business.
 
Optimize Your Website for Local Searches

Yes, most businesses particularly small businesses are local.  Because most people are forced to stay at home during the pandemic restrictions, it is just natural and more convenient for such people to patronize local businesses more and more. To take advantage of this, small business owners must make sure to implement local SEO strategies to optimize their websites for “near me” searches. With these local SEO strategies, customers and prospective customers can easily find your website, thereby increasing the likelihood of your business getting more purchases from local people.

Connect with Customers on Social Media

Even with pandemic restrictions or do we say because of it, many people get on social media daily either for entertainment, news or even mere socializing. Most people are spending most of their time in their homes and some take to social media to fight boredom. Marketers can latch on such opportunities to push their products and their brands on social media. Some other people could even be on social media, looking for updates and deliberately interacting with their favorite brands. Business owners can take advantage of this to strengthen their brands through deliberate promotional efforts to connect customers and prospective customers.

Make Special and Attractive Offers

Making special offers to customers at times like this tends to get good attention. You must be able to think outside the box to serve your customers better in the unfortunate situations they now find themselves. For effectiveness, business owners can highlight special offers through PPC ads and social media. If you offer customers special and attractive offers, you are being proactive in your marketing efforts. These efforts are likely to prompt your customers to positively respond to your offers by making more purchases from your business. For such offers, you can consider special discounts, price adjustments, bonus offers and even giveaways. These offers can positively help to keep your customers engaged and your revenue streams flowing steadily.
 
Market with Pay-Per-Click, PPC Ads

Business owners can effectively use PPC ads to gain competitive advantage at times like this when more and more people are staying in their homes and spending more time on the internet. With PPC ads, business owners have great opportunities to promote their products/services directly to their target consumers. That makes competitive advantage easily possible for their businesses and the results can be very encouraging.

Optimize to Effectively Compete

In online marketing, everyone is out there on the internet doing about the same things to promote their businesses. Business owners who tend do these same things slightly differently tend to have some advantage in the market place. These are business owners who can leverage better the power of SEO. A good SEO helps to increase organic traffic to websites. The ultimate aim of a good SEO strategy is to stay on top of the SERPs of major search engines particularly Google. That way, people easily easily find your website when they do search with specific keywords with which your website is optimized. That means if you endeavor to optimize your website and content regularly, it is difficult for it to lose out to your competitors in the SERPs rankings. A loss in ranking ultimately translates to a loss in organic traffic, leads, customers and even sales revenue.

Have a Long-Term SEO Strategy

Like the Boys Scouts motto says, if you are a business owner, “Be Prepared.” There is no way the current pandemic restrictions will last forever. Things are bound to change with time. Be sure you are fully prepared for that eventuality. This is because when normalcy returns as it is bound to, people’s shopping and buying habits will also change. So, you must take steps now to formulate your SEO strategy with a long-term perspective. What you do today for your SEO campaign will inevitably impact your future organic search traffic. If you halt your SEO campaign now, it will be a great setback for future campaigns. Therefore, you must continue your SEO campaign with the post-restriction business environment fully in perspective. It will help you to remain competitive even in the post-restriction era.

Why only Essential Information is Needed in Your Advertising Campaigns

What determines what you put in your ad is where you are placing it and the message you want to convey. It is therefore not a clear-cut thing to simply say put a little information or plenty of information. If you are advertising online particularly on free sites, you are severely restricted to the number of words the site will admit from you. That clearly determines the amount of information you can provide. You may not really have much of a choice about how much information you can provide because of these restrictions. What really matters is be sure that your message is captivating enough and conveys all the information you want to put across no matter how short the message is.

Any and every ad is designed to grab as much attention as possible. If you use pictures or banners, you need fewer words to grab maximum attention because of the pictorial effects of pictures/banners. Even if you use test ads, the fewer the words the better for attention-grabbing purposes. Most people look at ads and from the images they are attracted to take a closer look. The attention span of many people is also very short. For such people, the smaller the ad information, the better.

All told, I believe it is better to provide less information in your ads for reasons adduced above. That is what is more result-oriented and most effective.