Marketing After COVID-19: Main Strategies to Follow

The year’s events have impacted consumer search behavior and PPC performance. Many businesses have paused or reduced their advertising in the last few weeks. Conversely, others have set responses in place to react to the changes in consumer searches.

Though it may seem counterintuitive, now is the time to hold steady to ensure a strong come back within your marketing after COVID-19. As businesses withdraw themselves, great opportunities will surface if your business can maintain a long-term marketing strategy.

To make your digital marketing efforts effective, your team should begin to plan adjustments in response to the shift in searches, competitors, and market share.  In other words, your past PPC set-up before and during this crisis will likely no longer apply to your marketing after COVID-19.

Adjusting your Digital Marketing Strategy

Bidding Strategies

The competitor market has changed. As we mentioned earlier, many businesses are responding to these changes in drastic ways, some by cutting their PPC marketing budgets altogether.

Though it may not make sense right away, holding marketing budgets is the recommended move. That said, sticking to the same automated bidding strategy and targets will not make sense for your marketing after COVID-19.

We recommend reviewing & adjusting both manual and automated bidding strategies. Also, you should monitor your campaigns’ marketing strategy given the volatile market. Remember, conditions will continue to shift. Therefore, if you don’t just set and forget, you may be able to go along with the changes.

Keywords

As you may know, keywords are a powerful resource for markets. Hence, you can use Google Trends, which is a great digital marketing tool, to understand how people are searching online.

Great marketing strategies are all about adaptation and monitoring search trends. Weekly digital marketing tasks should include reviewing search term reports and search queries on Google Analytics. Primarily to understand what queries people are using to find your business and strategize your marketing after COVID-19.

Device Strategy

Daily routines will go from working from a laptop at home to desktops to going back to mobile use during commutes again. In other words, mobile traffic may have decreased, but you will want to adjust your PPC campaigns for mobile traffic after the quarantine. Indeed, you should review your marketing campaign device settings. When the time comes, make your brand highly visible on mobile again.

Ad Copy & Extensions

Review the messages in your pipeline to remove anything that seems insensitive. Not all ad copy will hold relevance for your marketing after COVID-19.

Similarly, you will want to keep tabs on which competitors are advertising. Some questions to consider:  (1) What is their message? (2) Are they pushing promotions? If so, what are they?

Tip: “Shop local” has been one of the popular search trends. Use this and variations of it in your ad copy marketing strategy to help vendors and shops in your community.

Quality Score

If you haven’t done this already, focus on your quality scores. You can do this in a few easy steps. First, pull a list of all your current keyword quality scores. Second, brainstorm to create new content for your PPC ad copy. Finally, do the same for your landing page. Together, these will improve your quality score.

Remarketing

If you stuck to the plan and continued marketing through the outbreak, we’ve got good news. You’ve probably built up a substantial audience that you can now remarket to as part of your Marketing After COVID-19 Plan.

Conclusion

When the dust settles there will be a number of things to shift back to like updating any of your business operations on your website, Google My Business & Bing Places. Whatever adjustments (business hours and phone number) you made during the quarantine, make sure to shift back.

It will take time to find the new norm for marketing after COVID-19, but each of the points above will prepare your marketing strategy efforts for shifts that are expected. If you’d like to stay up to date with the industry and our recommendations on strategies for your business, subscribe to our blog to receive insights directly to your inbox!