The COVID-19 pandemic has affected many aspects of life, especially business activities. There have been many other global obstacles such as natural disasters, economic recessions, and travel bans, all of which have influenced marketing strategies this past year.
Reopening your business in the tail-end of a pandemic requires applying a full range of marketing tactics to maximize your return on investment (ROI) and ensure long-term growth. As you explore some of your offline or word-of-mouth tactics, here are five digital marketing tactics to dig into that will take your grand reopening beyond the basics.
Personalization
Personalizing products, content, and emails is a great way to position your business as you return to full operation. Many consumers don’t like being bombarded with generic advertising, instead preferring to engage with companies that “get” them.
Starbucks and EasyJet are two examples of companies who use personalization successfully. Starbucks has a gamified mobile app to enable it to get personal by gathering data about location and purchase history. Through their rewards system, the company is able to significantly increase its revenue.
EasyJet started an email campaign that uses the travel history of customers to create personalized stories and suggest travel destinations. The unique emails have had an increased click-through rate compared to non-personalized emails.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is already taking shape and is set to be the heart of businesses in the future. AI can analyze consumer behavior, identify patterns and use data from blog posts and social media platforms to enable businesses to understand how consumers look for products and services.
You can leverage AI in the areas of your business operations such as:
- Product recommendations
- General communication
- Online transactions
- Email personalization
- Content creation
Video Marketing
One of the most relevant marketing trends in a pandemic is video marketing. Consumers can share brand videos on social media platforms and enable businesses to improve conversion rates. By watching product videos, consumers can feel more confident when making purchasing decisions.
With video marketing, content reformatting is easy, and it is also possible to get it transcribed to create a text version. Other than YouTube, you can engage your audience by making video posts or starting a live broadcast on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook.
Increased Content Marketing
One good thing about content marketing is its scalability. If you want to reduce your advertising budget and increase ROI, invest more in content creation and sharing. For instance, if you normally post an article on your website once a week, increase this to two or three.
Increasing content marketing efforts in response to a crisis is important because it is cost-effective. It may be cheaper to generate new content than to place ads on third-party channels. Additionally, this pandemic has increased the regular consumption of online content – so your target audience may take more time on your content than they used to in “the Before Times.”
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising is automating ad buying through AI to target more specific audiences. For example, real-time bidding is faster and efficient, which means increased conversions and reduced costs of customer acquisition.
To leverage programmatic advertising, you may need to understand where to direct your ad spend. By bringing the programmatic buying in-house, you may heighten the campaign effectiveness by improving reach and lowering the ad spend.
What Next?
To learn more about ways you can strengthen your digital marketing plans and prepare for the future, check out our blog and contact us! Our fresh and vast knowledge of evolving marketing tactics around content development, social media, ad management, and digital transformation can help you reopen your business post-COVID.
Want more tips for your post-pandemic marketing strategy? Check out our “Preparing Your Digital Marketing for 2022” Instagram Live Q&A with Sonja and Lenaya here on our YouTube!