How to grow business in the post-pandemic market

Top 3 ways to grow business in post-pandemic market

If you’re in engaging with your audience online, guess what? You’re in digital marketing. If you’re new to the digital economy, you can use digital marketing to reach your target audience, have conversations with them, get more sales, and scale to a level of profitability you would likely never achieve otherwise.

The world is going through a tough time, many established businesses are struggling to survive. The epidemic caused more damage to local businesses and startups. In this article We’ve put together some of the most impactful digital marketing methods to help you grow your business in the post-pandemic market.

The term “digital marketing” covers so many things these days. It’s tough to know how to use your budget and get the return your business needs.

Consider this as a sample of the blueprint for the different ways you can grow your business online, reach more customers around the world, and ultimately expand the potential of your business.

We’ve segmented this into three sections:

1. Paid Ads
2. Organic Marketing
3. Marketing Strategies

Each one has its upsides and downsides. It’s your responsibility (or your agency team) to decide which will have the highest impact on your business.

#1 Paid Ads

Paid ads can target audiences that are actively searching for your solutions, or you can use them to bring more people aware of your brand. Companies pay to get their ads in front of their audiences on platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, even Twitter, and Pinterest offers advanced ad targeting.

For example, you can pay Google every time someone in your target audience clicks on your ad. This is where the term “pay per click, or PPC” comes from.

You can set your paid ads to achieve many different objectives, like purchase conversions, brand awareness, engagement, app installs, etc. There are different payment models for each of these, such as pay-per-impression, pay-per-install, etc. Most marketing channels offer either paid search ads or paid display ads, or both.

Paid Search Ads

The number one Search ad platform in the world is the Google Search Network. Just think about it for a second. How many times do you search on Google for some type of solution, service, or product?

Here’s what happens around 3.8 million times per minute:

• A person searches for a solution, product or service online because they are either ready to buy, or will be soon. They are considered “high intent”. They will search and find a website, and if you can solve their problem, they are highly likely to convert now, or soon.
• Paid ads appear at the top, above organic search results. People are far more likely to click the first link that meets their needs. Everyone wants instant gratification, so they go immediately to the site that makes the most sense.
• To even get to the organic results, people have to scroll down the whole page!

Paid Display Ads

Display ads are what you see on many websites, this is part of the Google Display Network. Other major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, & Pinterest have their own display ad systems. These types of ads have proven to be effective for businesses trying to reach the right audience.

Display ads show up as a mix of images, text, and/or video. The Google Display Network (GDN) is used by thousands of advertisers to reach users on hundreds of thousands of websites and apps across all publisher categories, from large, well-known sites to niche sites and audiences.

Stated simply, the GDN will place your display ads alongside related content and in front of audiences across thousands of sites.

Paid search and display ads are just two stars in the galaxy of digital marketing. Once someone clicks through your ad, they need to be brought to a landing page built for a conversion action.

The conversion type depends on your business, it could be something like making a purchase, sharing contact information, or signing up for an email newsletter. Getting a website visitor to take an action is called Conversion Rate Optimization. Making sure your visitors have a frictionless, enjoyable experience on your website will help your paid ads generate actual revenue/leads/profit.

Paid Social Media Ads

One big difference between Google search or display ads, and paid social media ads is – you can engage users with paid social media ads. Advertising platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter – all have their own systems for businesses who want to run ads to their users.

For example, you can target people on social media who visited your website, people who have purchased from you before, followed your social page, watched another video ad of yours on Facebook, or commented on your Instagram post.

You can also target people based on demographics, online behavior, and even their interests! Facebook & Instagram have the world’s most advanced ad targeting platform. That’s why 93% of advertisers run ads on these platforms.

Paid social media ads are so effective at driving sales, if you know the right strategies because the targeting options are so detailed, you can show your ad to extremely specific audience segments. On Facebook & Instagram, you can deliver extremely relevant ads to people at every stage of your marketing funnel to move them closer to converting.

Once you have defined your target audience, you can target them with your ads using a wide variety of strategies & tactics on Facebook & Instagram.

Here are the top-level options for targeting with Facebook & Instagram ads:

• Location: Geographic location of where audiences live based on country, state, city, zip code and even phone number
• Demographics: Age, gender, relationship, education, job title and more
• Lookalike: Audiences based on similar fans, clients and website visitors
• Behaviors: Audiences based on previous actions, likes, clicks, and devices used
• Interests: Based on interest categories, hobbies, liked Facebook pages
• Website Custom Audiences: Audiences based on bounced traffic from your website and landing pages
  Mix combinations of these targeting options to find out your optimal reach.

Mix combinations of these targeting options to find out your optimal reach.

Retargeting

So far, we’ve learned about the “why” and “where” of paid ads, now let’s talk tactics. On average, retargeting ads are 76% more likely to be clicked on than cold ads (the first ad people see from you). Retargeting (or sometimes referred to as remarketing) gives you more opportunities to run your ads to people who have engaged with you online.

Since these people have already shown interest in what you offer, they’re a lot more likely to return and convert than “cold” leads because we already have some kind of relationship with them.

In the below retargeting ad, we see J.Crew using some great best practices for retargeting ads:

• They’re creating urgency to buy in their copywriting “the clock is ticking….”
• They’re offering a discount, which they didn’t do in their initial ad. Typically, you don’t want to give away discounts with cold audience ads, because people will get too used to you giving discounts, plus it becomes harder to incentivize them with your retargeting.
• They give free shipping. Consumers love this. You can mark up your prices to cover this cost.

#2 Organic Marketing

If you aren’t ready to invest your budget into paid ads, don’t worry, you can still make an impact with organic methods. Though it’s a more long-term approach to building your online presence.

The way to do this is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content creation/publishing. With this method, you have to produce valuable, relevant content over an extended period of time and find ways to distribute it so as many people as possible in your see it. Essentially, you will need to think of yourself as a media company. You don’t want to be the commercials between the TV show, you want to be the show.

We can help you with these methods to grow your business. After all, we do it for ourselves too, and it pays off. Paid ads and organic methods aren’t mutually exclusive. If you really want to grow, create a comprehensive strategy that includes paid ads and organic methods.

Content Marketing

Your company’s content can be published on multiple channels, but it will have to be adapted for each channel. For example, Twitter allows a limited amount of text, Youtube is all about video, and Facebook can be a mix of both. Content marketing is a powerful way to engage your audience, build your brand, and establish yourself as an authority in your industry.

Content marketing can be done by:

• Creating blog posts on your company blog or guest posting on other blogs.
• Creating social media posts (not ads) and posting across all your social channels.
• Using content distribution platforms like Medium, Quu, and many others.

Remember, this is a long-term game. You likely won’t see results immediately, but over time, consistency and valuable content will propel your brand to the top.

Backlinks (Link Building)

Backlinks help you increase your search engine rankings by having other websites link back to yours.
These links can appear in places like websites, blog posts, landing pages etc.
Backlinks can require a lot of strategy, effort, and time. You’ll need to reach out to website owners and make deals to connect your site to theirs.
The higher traffic and authority the other person’s website has, the better quality the backlinks will be, which leads to higher quality traffic for you.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO includes the two elements above, but it goes much further. SEO also considers your website page speed, your site’s backend code, along with other A.I and algorithms that the likes of Google use to rank websites. SEO is a very broad term that aims to improve your website’s visibility on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

While it will take time to set up and establish growth with SEO, it can be bring you impressive ROI in the long-run. Look at it like a low-cost investment in the future of your business.

#3 Digital Strategies

Success in the digital economy doesn’t just come from having a website, some paid ads, and a bit of content on your social channels. Your entire marketing operation needs to have a clear, distinctive purpose. This includes things like:

1. A clear brand strategy
2. A website set up in a way that is easy for your audience to understand problems you can solve for them, and even easier for them to contact or purchase from you.
3. If you’re selling products, it is vital to set up your e-commerce site in a way that is maximized to drive purchase conversions, as well as having products that will keep your customers coming back for more.

Brand Strategy

Having a logo and a website does not mean you have a brand strategy. Here are some of the items you need to consider when crafting your brand strategy:

• Competitor Research & Analysis – to understand what your best-performing competitors or brands with similar audiences to you are doing in terms of their online marketing. Understand what type of content is working for them, what channels are working for them. When you analyze their strengths and weaknesses, you can avoid their mistakes and put your own unique spin on their strengths.
• Channel Analysis – you need to understand what online channels to use, what are the content requirements for each channel (dimensions of visual posts etc), and most importantly, only invest in the channels where your audience’s attention is.
• Brand Tone & Voice – this is where you establish the voice & tone of your brand, so you can be consistent across your online presence. Does your brand express itself as fun & playful like the Lego brand, or authoritative and serious like most banks?
• Moodboards enable you to focus on your brand design process. Before launching into the design of any content or any brand assets, you need to have clearly defined color palettes, typography, photo & illustration styles. Your design team needs to know the types of textures, shapes, graphic styles to use across all of your online presence. This gives you a consistent, professional baseline to use in all your online marketing, and gives your audience a clear understanding of who you are. If you don’t have this, your brand won’t be memorable to your audience.
• Content Production Plan – you need to have a plan for how you create content, whether it’s for your blog, your social channels, or your paid ads. This will bring you clarity on why it is being created, how it’s being created, and when/where it’s being published.
• Goals/KPIs – as with any endeavor, you need to set specific goals for your brand, for your content, for your ads. If you don’t know where you’re going, then you’ll be left guessing, wasting time, energy, and eventually just frustrating everyone on your team, and your audiences.
• Target Audience – you need to define specific audiences, the people you serve, so that you can share this across your company. They must be based on demographics & psychographics, so everyone on your team knows who they’re serving, and how to create experiences and content that match what your audiences love.
• Personas – if you have different audiences, you need to create individual personas under each audience. This enables you to do further research into the behaviour, interests, and preferences of your audience personas, so you can craft contextual ads and content that resonates with their values, and drives more conversions.
• Content Pillars – based on each persona’s interests, you can define the content pillars you’ll use. This removes the guesswork out of what type of content to create for things like promotions, lifestyle content, educational content, product descriptions, testimonials, and directs you where to put each content at each step of your marketing funnel.

Your Website or Ecommerce Store

Do you have an up to date, fast loading website?

In this day and age, there’s no need for us to explain why having a professional website is so vital. The most important thing, besides having a great website, is to ensure your website is optimized to convert visitors into leads, and leads into customers. This is called Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

In its simplest form, conversion rate optimization is the process of increasing the number of website visitors who convert. Here are our top 4 tips to optimize your website for conversions:

1. Survey Your Audience: Ask your audience to complete surveys or polls. Keep the questions brief so you get more responses. Avoid boring questions. You’re looking for insights into your target customers’ specific wants and needs about your website & your offerings.
2. Analyze data: Track everything. You can use conversion rate optimization tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and Hotjar to understand how people are using your site. Use the data to inform decisions about updates to your website and your offerings.
3. A/B Testing: A/B test everything you can. This is how you incrementally improve your business online. It is the process of comparing two versions of a web page, an advertisement, or any other marketing asset with just one variation between the two, to see which works better. Test your ads or website headlines, the copy of your blogs, the hero images on your website, CTA text, CTA button color, font size, font color. All of this adds up to impact your success online, positively or negatively.
4.  Make It Easy To Become a Customer: Remove any elements from your site that causes any friction to become a customer. For example, if you don’t need a video on a webpage, or extra step or question in your contact form, delete it. Always be thinking “how can I make this easier and more enjoyable for people”.

Wrapping It All Up

Digital marketing has evolved so much and continues to evolve every day. So much so, that what worked a week ago, might not work for you today. Staying on top of it all is a job that no person can do alone. It takes a focused, skilled team with proven systems to make it in this highly competitive, ever-changing environment. If you choose any or all of the above strategies to help your company succeed, we have just one request:
Don’t wing it.

Don’t waste your time, your effort, and your money on marketing if you don’t have proven people and proven processes to get you where you want to go. Also, it’s important to know that not all of the elements we shared above will work for you. You need to do the work to understand what the highest impact channel will be for your business, and then focus there. Once you achieve success on that channel, then use the profit from that channel to experiment with other channels. This way you save your capital, minimize risk and increase your chances for success.

If you liked what you read here, and need help setting your business up for success online, we’d be delighted to chat with you and see if we’re a good fit for your goals.

Frequently Asked Questions On Digital Marketing