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.

How to Use Technology to Shape your Small Business Marketing Strategy

Millions of small businesses are currently relying on digital technology to do business online. That is made easier by the increasing reliance on mobile devices particularly cellphones to do business from anywhere in the world. For this reason, any small business marketing strategy that tends to ignore this reality is not likely to succeed. Since having an online presence is now one of the most preferred business options for millions of small businesses, they do need a marketing strategy that leverages internet technology to get results. Since more and more shoppers as of necessity now begin their searches for products/services online, a marketing strategy that ignores that fact is not likely to be of much use to any small business. Your small business can manage to stay ahead of competition if you create a robust online presence for it by way of deliberate and effective marketing strategy leveraged on internet technology.

 

Here are a few things you can do to enhance that quest.

Leverage New Technologies for Data Storage

At the moment, many small businesses rely on cloud-based business tools to provide inexpensive data storage solutions for their businesses. Among these tools are new point-of-sale technologies which allow small businesses to store customer data online rather than separate data-based servers. Employees’ personal information and data can also be stored online instead of in physical files. This allows the businesses to access and share information remotely. That guarantees safety, privacy and secrecy which are business essentials.

Market with Social Media

With over 4 billion active users of social media worldwide, small business marketing strategies can always take advantage of such huge market. Because most social media users spend a considerable amount of time on social media daily, small businesses can always take advantage of that to post new products and deals on social media 24/7 from anywhere they are in the world. Thus, these businesses can rely on social media to help them bolster website traffic as a viable and easy way to productively engage customers and prospective customers 24/7.

Optimize Your Website for Local Searches

Most small businesses are local. For this reason, prospective customers tend to first search for businesses “near me” on Google before making contact. This is why marketing experts strongly recommend that you optimize your online business for local searches. That optimization includes weaving the city, county and region of your business naturally into your website content to put your business first on the list when prospective customers conduct an online search particularly on Google.

Send Tech-Enhanced Direct Mails

You can send direct tech-enhanced mails to consumers aside from social media and email marketing. However, for best results you must always make sure the direct mail company you choose provides facilities for tracking, 2D barcodes and POS integration. If in addition the company also has some Informed Delivery and mobile apps to enhance your experience and generate a better ROI, so much the better for your business.

Market with Emails

Email marketing may be “old school” and very common, but it remains a very good tool to reach customers and prospective customers. Most small businesses depend on emails to send information about new deals, promos, price slashes/adjustments and any other “hot” marketing information. Emails if effectively used help to generate traffic, leads and even paying customers.