I would like to not talk about the negativity surrounding us right now. I strongly believe that the best thing about the human race is how fast we learn to adapt to new conditions. And it’s this survival instinct that will help us come out of the other end of this pandemic. In the world of business, it’s a time for do or die. And when you come to that situation, you are more open to trying out things which you probably would have never thought of doing otherwise. As the coronavirus rages across the world, businesses and brands across the world are scrambling to find new ways to find their audiences. And in search of that audience, which is now held up in confined territories, brands are finding alternative ways to fill their pipeline. And that is where content marketing and the digital space comes into the picture. With the virus blowing up all large-scale events and trade shows, marketers are now looking at content marketing more than ever. In the past 10 days, I have talked to atleast 5 business owners who have had to shut down their operations (mostly because of the industry they work in) and were now starting to build new streams of business that reach out to the audience digitally. They mostly wanted to know how they could improve their reach through their website? This trend has also been confirmed by the leads on our website. There have been businesses owners calling me to know how they could build a better website and attract more customers online, marketing heads looking for more content and brands looking for a stronger digital presence through content marketing. So, what is content marketing? According to Content Marketing Institute, “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” Simply said, content marketing is a part of digital marketing where content plays the lead role in building connections with the audience. Content marketing relies on an ongoing relationship with the customer by creating trust and loyalty and imparting value at every stage. Over the years, content marketing has moved beyond just writing blogs and content pieces to encompassing SEO, social media, email and content distribution. See this infographic on exactly why content marketing works. Why does this make sense now? The graph below gives a bird’s eye view on how conversion rates have been declining across industries since COVID-19. Image Source As you can see, apart from industries like Food, Pharma, Media, and Healthcare, everything else has seen a massive dip. But there’s a silver lining through this whole situation. According to eMarketer, consumers spent 6.1 hours a day online on average in early January. This number has spiked to 7.3 hours in February and March since many parts of the world went into isolation and lockdown. Which means that online marketers have a more captive audience than ever before. And this could hold the key to recovering some lost business and powering through the crisis. At Justwords, we’ve been observing this very closely as we help our clients navigate this very challenging time. In the last month or so, we’ve devised our own playbook. This playbook is all about using digital marketing, particularly content marketing service, as an anchor to tide through these times. Here are some of the most important steps: 1. Use online marketing tools to retain existing customers Needless to say, you will lose some customers as people lose their jobs and businesses start scaling back. Having said that, this is the time to make sure you’re communicating the value you’re delivering to existing customers so that yours is the last product/service that gets hacked. Here are some simple tools you can use: Marketing automation If you’ve always planned to set up personalized, targeted ways of reaching out to existing customers, this is the time to do it. Use a strong marketing automation platform (WebEngage, MoEngage etc) to find the perfect way to communicate with your customers — through a combination of emails, push notifications, app/web content, chat, and so on. Make sure that you’re staying with them through the user journey, communicating about the extraordinary situation, how you’re adapting to it, extra services, etc. Delivering a superlative customer experience at this point will go a long way to retain customers. It’s also a great long-term strategy because your staff will now have free time to focus on content creation services and ROI-generating activities. Generating success-based content It’s really important to share stories about your success and effectiveness at this time. If you’re a B2B company, creating compelling case studies and whitepapers is a great idea, as are video testimonials. Of course, it’s important to be mindful in your messaging — make sure your content reflects the fact that we are in the midst of an extraordinary crisis that we need to come together to beat. Don’t allow your content to ignore the ground reality. Stay on top of social This is the time to really up your social media game when it comes to existing customers. Create a low-cost plan to reach out to customers at every stage of the social media funnel. Use monitoring tools like Hootsuite and Brandwatch to keep a firm eye on what customers are talking about — whether it’s your brand in particular or the industry in general. Also, make sure you add to the conversation — in a way that’s respectful and appropriate, but also adds real value. 2. Leverage dirt-cheap advertising You may be tempted to pull out all your money from online advertising. But think twice before you take this step. Online engagement is at an all-time high as people are spending more time indoors and on their devices. At the same time, many businesses are withdrawing ad spends which means that the auctioning system is
