Three best practices to help you pivot your marketing strategy
If your organization has struggled to identify where and how to invest in digital marketing in the past, here are three focus areas to get you up to speed during an uncertain time.
By Joel Chang
As social distancing guidelines remain (whether in states extending their deadlines completely or areas who are re-opening with restrictions), marketers must anticipate how the next normal will affect consumer behavior and adapt their digital marketing strategy. With many large events cancelled until 2021 and people on-screen and online for longer periods of time, there’s an opportunity for organizations to leverage various digital marketing channels to reach prospects on a wide scale, increase brand awareness, and gain a better understanding of their customer.
While this may sound straightforward enough, if your organizations has heavily relied on event marketing or has been slower to adapt in general, it can be challenging to connect with customers online and invest in the right technology to support digital marketing.
Below are three best practices to help your organization pivot to a digital marketing strategy during this period of uncertainty.
Focus on your customer
More than likely, the impacts of this pandemic will cause customers to emerge from this crisis with a shift in values and change in priorities. This shift in perspective will directly influence how customers spend their time and money.
Now is the time to evaluate and update customer personas to understand your target customers’ needs and pain points so you can meet them where they are. When creating personas, consider how dimensions such as customer age, location, and income have been affected by the pandemic and how that relates to your digital strategy.
For example, has the age range for LinkedIn users expanded as more people are using it to build connections and find opportunities in this disrupted economy? Keep in mind that buyer personas are based on real people and actions, therefore, continuing to assess pertinent customer data over the coming months will help you refine your persona and ensure they are relevant for your marketing campaigns.
During these difficult times, it is critical your organization demonstrates that you are focused on customer’s needs and values. Highlighting corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives or emphasizing ethical practices through social media channels or content marketing are examples of methods to help connect with your customers on an emotional level.
Incorporating empathy by emphasizing your understanding of customers circumstances, be it showing consideration for those who have been financially impacted by this pandemic, or calling out actions that your organization is doing to help mitigate the emotional stress of consumers, creates an authentic way for you to connect with your customers. Incorporating this human level connection in your digital marketing strategy will help increase the success of your campaigns.
Re-evaluate your online presence
When it comes to digital, your online presence is key to how customers engage and understand your organization’s brand. Evaluating your website is a great starting point since that is typically the center of your online presence.
As a marketer, if you are noticing that your website is receiving little to no traffic, or receiving traffic but the conversion rate is poor, those are clear indicators that your online presence needs a boost. This could be as simple as ensuring that your website is visually appealing and intuitive or updating your website’s content and landing pages so that it addresses your target customer’s needs.
Take this opportunity to also re-evaluate the purpose of your website. For example, is your website mainly set up for e-commerce, or for sharing relevant content to engage and create a community? This purpose may need to change, as what customers want from your website may be changing.
Hand in hand with revamping your website comes a strong search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. After all, if your customers are unable to easily access your website through the search engine result heap, they can’t engage with your brand. From generating on-page content to updating title tags and meta descriptions, making sure that your website includes relevant search terms is crucial to getting visibility with your customers.
Another significant component of your online presence is how your organization leverages social media channels. Social media has been, and is increasingly so, an effective tool for individuals to stay in touch and connect with friends and family, especially when the return to in-person interactions will be a gradual transition. Understanding which platforms your target customers use, which platforms are best for your organization, and which type of content is appropriate for each platform, can help you receive recognition and publicity for your brand and build a social media strategy.
Refresh your metrics and reporting
A common challenge for marketers when pivoting to a digital strategy is working with a limited marketing budget and developing quantitative indicators that show the business impact of digital marketing activities. This is where setting up realistic business goals and creating and tracking data-driven Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) come into play.
Simply put, KPIs are measurable values that provide you insights into the performance of all your digital campaigns. Since most digital marketing activities are quantifiable, selecting KPIs that align with your business objectives is important to help you understand which marketing activities have the biggest impact.
For example, if one your objectives is to reach out to existing customers in order to minimize churn, focus on click through rates (CTR) as a KPI to determine which digital campaigns your customers are connecting and engaging with. We’ve discussed this digital way of working as foundational to being a data-driven marketing organization.
Once you establish your KPIs, spend the time to set up intuitive reports that will enable you and your business partners to sift through the data and analyze patterns with customer behavior, campaign performance, and financial performance. Robust reports help you understand business impact and determine whether or not your digital marketing efforts align with both your organization’s goals and the needs of your customers.
Joel Chang is a marketing operations consultant specializing in marketing automation and digital marketing. He helps clients build, integrate, and optimize marketing strategies and support technologies to achieve their goals and transform their business. Reach him at joel.chang@slalom.com.
Slalom Customer Insight is created by industry leaders and practitioners from Slalom, a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation.
