Online life really took off during lockdown, and continues to boom. To ensure you can flourish in this fast-changing environment you need to have the right digital marketing skills and knowledge to reach your customers.
1. Be customer centric
It’s crucial to prioritise your customers and their needs, so they continue to feel valued. In the digital world this might mean opening up new channels of communication, making use of social media tools such as direct messaging and auto response to allow easier conversation for your customers. Whichever you use, make sure it remains genuine – too much automation can feel impersonal and out of touch.
2. Keep talking
Focus on outward communication. It’s important, however you are running your business, you communicate it well. Use everything at your disposal – this includes your website, social pages and email database. Provide clear messaging on your website explaining what you are offering and how it can help your customers.
On your social channels, highlight the most important messages, and direct them to your own site. This is because you have control over content there.
3. Reassess your digital strategy
While it’s tempting to put all your energies and digital marketing budget into the higher yielding campaigns that focus on conversion, think about going back to the top of the funnel. Consider awareness and engagement campaigns.
These are not only cheaper to run but also avoid the hard sell. The purchase may be a little slower here but likelihood is that by providing meaningful content now you will build better brand loyalty and future sales.
It’s also important to assess your creative. Forward thinking advertisers have shifted their tone of voice, evaluated their use of imagery and evaluated their calls to action. Messaging should all be reviewed constantly to ensure it all feels relevant.
4. Don’t rely on the same old data
Over the last two years more and more people have moved to home working, sharing devices with family members and logging into business networks remotely. You may also see a shift in device use as homeworkers feel more comfortable using the mac or pc to shop during the day, rather than quick searches on the mobile while sitting on the train or at the desk.
This not only changes patterns in data but renders things like IP filters almost useless, so it pays to understand the analytics and adapt accordingly.