10 Ways to Improve Your Performance Marketing During COVID-19

Business is anything but usual right now.  

Markets have changed dramatically, and you need to adjust your marketing efforts to meet rapidly changing audience needs. As you look for action items to help you navigate this unusual environment, read our list below – it will help you understand your audience’s mindset and meet them where they are in their customer journey. 

1. Solve Your Prospects’ Problems 

You thought you knew what your customers wanted, but they have changed their shopping patterns dramatically. People are navigating online touch-points differently depending on whether you are a business-to-consumer or business-to-business brand. 

To engage in this current market, you’ve got to solve your customers’ problems and ease their pain points. Of course, solving customers’ problems is essential in any market, but right now the nature of their problems has changed, and it’s important to understand how. Brainstorm with customer service, your sales reps, and others who are communicating directly with your customers and prospects. What questions are customers asking them? Can you create content that answers the most-asked questions during this crisis? 

2. Improve Your Online Presence 

Maybe you’ve been waiting to improve your online presence, and now you see how far behind you are. How effective is your online fulfillment? What kinks in your delivery need immediate attention?

Now it’s going to be even more expensive to upgrade – not so much in the price of the upgrade, but in the time it will take to ramp up. Do not keep waiting. Make it a priority to do that website upgrade, migration or consolidation. In reality, an expensive overhaul may not be feasible right now, but what incremental improvements can you make to improve your online presence in order to quickly adapt to the way the customer journey has changed?

3. Upgrade Your Team 

Are you missing key talent and specific skill sets to solve a rapid change in customer behavior? If so, upgrade your team – or, if you are operating in crisis mode and lack the time to recruit (which is the reality for many businesses right now), collaborate with an agency that immediately brings you the skills you need. Crisis situations make us realize that we need more help to get our marketing messages out to the public.​

4. Let Prospects Try Your Services for Free 

As B2B brands are aware, many companies are struggling financially.  If you are a B2B brand, and you can help those customers through this rough spot with your software or services, just think how loyal they will be once things get back to normal. 

Open longer or credit card-free trials if you can afford to do so. If you have a great service that you know others will benefit from, give them a limited time, free-for-all-features access. Once they start using your tools and find out how beneficial they are, they’ll buy in. 

Witness all the food delivery services that are offering free delivery. We know they can’t do that indefinitely, but for those of us that have never done food delivery, we could become loyal customers of the first service we try. One free delivery could make a lifelong customer. 

5. Fill Your Content Gaps 

Even before this all happened, you knew there were gaps in your content. Now that you’re more focused on online sales and communication, what landing pages need to be upgraded or created? 

Do you need more awareness content? Many potential prospects may have never heard of you, and don’t know that you provide solutions to their problems. Do a quick audit of your content and determine the percent of content you have in each stage of the journey. 

One of the great tools to use for an audit is Screaming Frog. The software will crawl your website so you can easily see what pages you currently have published and then sort and filter them for your audit. 

Most companies will find the largest percentage in their decision stage with product and pricing pages. The other stages are just as important. 

See the graphic below to set goal on the percent of content needed in each stage. ​

6. Activate Your ‘Owned’ Audience 

I have recently received several emails from companies that I haven’t heard from in years. I’ve been on their email lists, and this is the first time I’ve heard from them since I signed up. How many emails of people do you have in your database that have never heard from you? 

Now is the time to activate that audience. What I mean by that is to actively engage with them. Not with a MESSAGE FROM OUR CEO… but, with content that is useful and compelling enough for them to come back to your website rather than unsubscribe. Depending on how many products you sell, you may want to segment your audience and filter the content you send based on the specific interest they showed in your products. 

7. Increase Your Reach 

Omni channel marketing is a must. Your prospects are consuming content in multiple formats on multiple websites prior to making a purchase. If you’re not in these channels, then you are not a choice. Make sure as you’re creating content that you can repurpose in multiple channels. Start with the content on your site and then repurpose to sites where you can increase your reach more easily, such as Facebook and Instagram.

8. Update Your Google My Business (GMB) 

Many businesses are missing this. Prospects are shopping locally, especially for fast and takeout food. Update your Google My Business (GMB) pages to include your new hours, what is open specifically, what third-party services deliver your products or services. ​

Don’t forget to also update the hours and location specifics on your own website.  For more on this topic, please read “How to Keep Your Brand Fresh During a Disruption,” by my colleague Nick Wineland. In addition, Google is maintaining a help page for businesses that need to revise their GMB listings with content specific to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

9. Make Sure You Are Measuring 

Even in the best of times, you need to monitor results, so you know cost per lead, cost per acquisition and overall marketing costs. Now, it’s more important than ever.  

You need to be able to quickly test ideas, measure the results and correct course as needed. We know more prospects are online than ever before, so you want to maximize your engagement and close ratios as quickly as you can. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and within the data is the answer to the question, What do we do next? 

10. Learn From the Professionals 

There’s a lot of excellent information out there right now to help you navigate this time; make good use of it. Visit the IDX COVID-19 site for insights to help you. And to learn how we can help your business respond to the challenges of COVID-19, contact IDX.