POST COVID MARKETING SUPPORT FOR SMES
Three key marketing considerations
UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMERS
Understand what’s happened to your customers – how their business dynamic has changed, how they’ve had to evolve their own strategies and what they need from you in the ‘new normal’.
CHANGE YOUR MINDSET
Change the way you think. As with your customers, you might have to respond to their changing needs and re-invent or re-purpose what you do and how you do it. Identify new sales streams and revenue opportunities.
DIFFERENTIATE YOUR BRAND
Differentiate from your competitors. Find new ways to connect with your customers – not just about price and the bottom line, but a more emotional connection – seek out your brand truth and bring it to life.
ADAPT YOUR STRATEGY FOR A POST COVID WORLD
The pandemic has forced many businesses to change the way they operate…whether looking for new sales channels, new customers or diversifying into new markets. Identifying opportunities, making the most of your digital assets and ensuring your brand has a competitive advantage is crucial to any success.
WHETHER B2B OR B2C - LEVERAGE YOUR CUSTOMER DATA
Many SMEs don’t have either the time or inclination to turn a customer list into a more strategic marketing list. By that I mean a customer list that contains more than a name, address and purchase history, but a way to link all the data together so you can start to segment customer types (households/age/life stage), predict types of products/services that specific groups might want to purchase, help identify new sales channels and create a pipeline to search out and engage with new customers.
CONTENT CREATION – TELL YOUR BEST STORIES
It’s a proven fact that people/consumers/customers engage with a good story. It infiltrates the emotive side of the brain that helps create that elusive and hard to win connection. You may have to change your pre-covid stories to something more relevant and sympathetic with your customer needs. Consideration then needs to be given to how you disseminate those stories – by video, a blog, engaging with a market influencer, advertising or social media – all determined by the way your audience consumes the media around them.
TAKE A MULTI-CHANNEL APPROACH TO CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
The pandemic has driven more and more people online and research shows that consumers rely at least three+ channels to make purchase decisions. By channels, we’re talking about social media, email marketing, direct mail, streaming video/audio and paid search. By utilising everything in the marketing mix, gives you a better chance of communicating your key messages to the right audience and create some kind of emotional as well as rational engagement.
TEST & LEARN – AND NEVER STOP OPTIMISING
The digital marketing world is a fast moving, ever changing environment. Your marketing effort needs to reflect this. It’s a continuous cycle of testing, learning, refining and testing to get higher click throughs, conversion rates and rankings to achieve the metrics you need. Focus on testing key messages, content/video, creative execution and promotions to find which generates the best response and the best return on investment.
For more information or an informal chat about your business or marketing requirement, please call me on 07879 602995.