By now, virtually everyone in the world has an understanding of the effects of the novel coronavirus (COVID19). Not only has it affected the healthcare industry directly, it has also left or is having severe impacts on the governments and economies of the world. Many organizations are taking measures that will save them amid the pandemic, and the governments of many countries are also on their toes to ensure they strike a balance between saving lives and their economy.
For instance, Central banks across the Asia Pacific region have moved to provide ample liquidity, cut interest rates and other quantitative easing. That is good, but what will businesses do to stay afloat? Many business owners and strategists are gravely concerned about what their business has to do to survive during this pandemic.
If you are in that shoe, there are steps you must take not only to ensure that you stay afloat but also thrive despite the impact of the coronavirus. You already know about and use SEO and digital marketing to a large extent before the pandemic; however, let’s find out eight other creative ways you can use them now to combat this deadly virus’ impact on your business.
1. Interview Your Audience
The benefits of interviewing your employees and customers cannot be overemphasized. Get them to tell you about their views on your business through video calls and make sure to record. Later, these videos and transcripts will provide insights for social media content, engagement strategy, blog posts, media releases, and so much more.
2. Audit Your Content Assets
This period that the whole place is on lockdown is an excellent time to improve your content performance with a mini-audit. Whatever form you take to audit your content is not essential, what you want to do at the end of the day is get the opportunity to review the performance of your previous content, alongside the approach you used. This will help to update your content ideas, optimize with new CTAs, relaunch a new promotional strategy for your business as things gradually get back to normal.
3. Clean up the Administrative Mess
Most business people are guilty of this. There are so many files uncleared for several months, open contracts you didn’t close, blog articles you haven’t written, comments you haven’t responded to and many others. Now is the right time to do them all.
4. Get Online Reviews
Yelp and other online review websites are probably littered with reviews about your business that you haven’t answered. Now is the time to do that. The good thing is you don’t have to answer all the reviews. You should also have a structure for taking note and responding to online reviews going forward; you can hire & train an employee if you want.
5. Update Your Business Profile
If your business serves your locality, now is the time to update your Google My Business profile. Whether you operate on special hours or days, let your customers know how to find you.
6. Update Your Website
Because of the daily activities in your business, you might have been leaving money on the table by not harnessing the potential of your website. With time on your side now, it’s a good time to update your website and make it the lead magnet it was meant to be.
7. Deal With Unnatural Links Properly
The last thing you want to see happen is that your SEO efforts are not yielding the efforts you wanted. So, spend some time now to fish out whatever problems your SEO avenues might be having and deal with all unnatural links on your website before it deals with you.
8. Embrace an Outreach Strategy
Whether it is wise to cut down on online outreach amid the pandemic will depend on a few factors. But importantly, it will depend on the kind of relationship you have with your customers before now; and even if you don’t regularly get in touch, nothing is stopping you from doing so now. Get creative; offer reassurance, and provide social connection. The coronavirus is changing a lot of things in the world, but it is also giving you some breather to use SEO and marketing creatively to your advantage. Reach out to your customers in this period, update your website, and deal with unnatural links and therein might lie some revenues you haven’t been hatching.
Drop us a line and let us know any questions you have about combating coronavirus impact.
Want more awesome content? Head to our WeChat account (The_orangeblowfish) or hang with The Orangeblowfish on Twitter. Stay tuned for TOBF news and more posts about creative industry topics such as brand storytelling or photo styling!