How To Trim, Not Turn Off, Your Marketing During Coronavirus Pandemic

Everyone is feeling the impact of the coronavirus pandemic as it has taken over the world. Businesses, sports, entertainment, events and more have been shut down for months and the ending is still not in view. It could last another week, month or longer. While staying safe is the top priority, business owners have to make difficult decisions. Some are lucky and can either remain open or are actually doing more business than usual. Grocery stores, delivery services, certain retail chains and construction businesses are thriving right now.

However, if you’re not one of those lucky ones and you are either shut down or running at lower-than-usual performance, you need to cut down on costs as much as possible. That includes your marketing budget, but you never want to completely stop your marketing. Think of marketing like the breathing of your company. If you stop that, you won’t have a company down the road. Yes, it’s easy to say that there’s no reason to spend money if you will not see a return but think of it a different way. Your competitors are stopped as well and when they start back up, they will spend more than you and be more aggressive than you simply because they know there will be new opportunities to grab consumers.

The trick to winning a race isn’t by doing the same thing everyone else is, it’s by outsmarting them. Here are some ways you can trim your marketing budget without shutting it down completely:

1. SEO: This is the service everyone needs to keep doing during the coronavirus pandemic. SEO takes months and years to produce top page rankings and not only can your rankings be improved during this time, but you can jump in front of competitors as they shut down their search marketing efforts. Imagine, when this is over, being ranked on the top page of keywords you were once ranked on page 2 or 3 for?
2. Email: What better way to reach 100,000 potential consumers at a fraction of the cost of other marketing channels than by using email marketing? It’s a great way to introduce yourself and engage with consumers who are spending most of the day on their phones.
3. Social media: Social media is the best way to connect with people right now and engagement has never been higher. Even if you are cutting back your spending, you still need to post every day with updates and try throwing some content in that offers people something beneficial or even a distraction.
4. Google search: If you run AdWords to get to page 1 of Google and your cost per click is high, try to lower your daily budget or even switch to display targeting. Right now, a lot of businesses are seeing lower numbers in search volumes relevant to them. While this normally means you would use less budget, in some cases it has competitors spending far more per click to get whatever traffic they can. Don’t fall into this and get into a bidding war.

These tips can help you to trim your budget but stay active and aggressive with your marketing during the coronavirus. Remember, you may not see a big return on your efforts today, but this will offer a real benefit to your business when this situation is finally over.