Come Back Strong After the Pandemic
Times are tough right now, for many businesses. There are not many industries that haven’t seen a dramatic shift in not only the volume of business, but also the way to DO business. If your business has declined and you are not investing in marketing at the moment, there are still things you can do yourself to come back strong. A good place to start, is to clean up your digital marketing. Here are some tips:
Do Your Own Social Media Audit
- Make a list of your social media URLs, including all old pages that you don’t think you have access to and duplicates. Put these in a spreadsheet and check off each section after you’ve reviewed and/or edited it.
- Check your branding on each social media site. Are they consistent with one another AND your website? Make sure to check logos, colors, voice and look/feel.
- Are your logos and profile images current?
- Is your bio up-to-date?
- Has your contact info and physical location changed?
- Are all the links working properly?
- Do your product or service descriptions reflect your current offerings?
- When was the last time you posted an update?
- Assess how many followers you have, engagement metrics and any other data that helps you determine from where you’re starting
- Are there new features that you should take advantage of?
Clean Up Your Social Media Pages
Now that you know how it all looks, clean it up! Go through each section on each platform and fix the things you don’t like. For example:
- Update your cover banner or video. Your cover is the section at the very top of the page of some social sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn
- Take a more recent headshot and upload it
- Change any of the contact info and physical addresses
- Edit your links so they go where they’re supposed to go (test them again to make sure!)
- Add new credentials, accomplishments, videos, photos and recent news
Audit Your Website
Next, you’ll want to go to your website and pretend to see it for the first time. Does it…
- Look modern, load quickly and have good visual appeal?
- Load quickly (speed test can be found at: https://tools.pingdom.com/
- Have a padlock up in the URL telling the visitor that it’s secure?
- Tell you EXACTLY what the business does and how it helps your visitor?
- Provide you with action to take (shop now, click here, schedule a call, etc).
- Give you an opportunity to get something for free(opt-in)?
- Look good on mobile?
- Reflect your current products and services?
- Have an accurate and current “About us” page?
If you don’t have a web designer or know how to make the required edits yourself, we may be able to help you or refer you to someone who can. Click here to set up a time on our calendar.
Create a Digital Marketing Strategy
Whether or not you plan to handle your marketing yourself when business picks up, it’s a great idea to come up with a strategy. You can either implement this strategy yourself, or hand it over to your team or digital agency to implement for you. Here are some steps to create a basic strategy:
- Define or review your target audience. Who are they? Have they changed? How old are they? What do they like to do? Where do they hang out? What are their biggest problems, challenges or issues?
- Create a list of content topics.
- Start with a Google sheet of blogging ideas.
- Brainstorm quick social media ideas, such as tips, quotes, statistics, trivia and short videos you could do
- Create a content calendar for the quarter or year
- Jot down all of the promotions/sales you plan to do for the period of time with dates, details and launch plan
- Decide what budget, if any, will go towards advertising and include that on the calendar
- Determine how often you will publish your blog and craft the topic around your other planned activities
- Figure out the resources you will need to implement your calendar. Items, such as:
- Graphics
- Written content
- Video
- Scheduling tools
- People
- Factor in curated content too: what industry blogs (not competitors) can you share content from? (Always give credit!). For quick and easy content, follow the pages of the industry and share to your audience when appropriate.
Bring it all together
Once you have audited your current digital marketing status and have created your move-forward strategy, here are a few tips for bringing it all together:
- Don’t think you have to implement it all yourself. There are many resources out there to help you. Start with searching Fiverr for affordable project tasks. We love Fiverr for things such as, banner creation, videos, graphic design, and more. Here is our referral link (we may earn a small commission if you use our link to sign up). http://www.fiverr.com/s2/bd2fc67b91
- Re-purpose your content. This can save you valuable content creation time and frustration.
- If you have a great blog post from 2 years ago that is still relevant, dust it off, update it and launch it again!
- Once you post a blog or video asset, create your social media posts to share it. One article could net you 3 or 4 social posts where you point out a teaser to your article. Example: If your blog post is “5 Tips to Spring Clean Your Home all Year” you could make each tip into a social post. Don’t reveal all of it in the post, because you’ll want your reader to click through to the article. Instead, say something like “Do you know what you can put in your freezer to keep it smelling fresh all year? Check out our blog post to get this great home hack”.
- Get organized. If you have a team, this is especially important but so it is for keeping your own sanity! A system for organizing your posts prior to scheduling is just as important as having the right scheduling tool to get it done! Create dated folders for future posts and then archive the posts which were already published. Keeping these in the same area makes is stress-free and easy to share with others. Some of our favorite tools for this are:
- Google Drive
- DropBox
- Basecamp or any other project/team management tool
- Trello
- Be Realistic. Coming up with a digital marketing strategy may seem easy-peasy when you’re locked down and don’t have as much business activity going on. BUT once things pick up, you don’t want your strategy to be so crazy intense that you can’t implement it. You want it to become a natural part of your everyday business, whether you implement it or someone else does.
- Take action. I know it sounds trite, but even the smallest steps toward consistent content distribution WILL help you get more visibility. Craft your back up plan for those times when you can’t be in creation-mode. For instance, repost a blog or curate an article someone else wrote. Remember, you don’t have to spend hours and hours on this!
Finally, remember to be authentic with your voice and your brand. Don’t over produce anything and remember that done is better than perfect!
If you would like a comprehensive digital marketing audit, complete with evaluation, review, recommendations, a real action plan and custom recorded video presentation for your brand, set up a free discovery call at: www.meetwithwordflirt.com
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