How to adapt your social media and SEO positively during the Covid-19 outbreak.

For all businesses, no matter their size or product/service the current climate is an unpredictable one.  We are all facing uncertain times, and there is no doubt that the road we face will have a lot of challenges.  However, as we have said in our title - hard times won’t last, and that’s why we have put together a helpful guide as to how you can use your social media, marketing and SEO in a positive way during this temporary change in lifestyle.

Maintain visibility in your marketplace

An obvious choice for most businesses to make is to cut your digital marketing budget, but a cut in marketing activity is a short term fix that can have long term consequences. Instead, you need to ensure visibility in your market, which will be essential for long term profits. Remember, even though customers are tightening their belts, they are still spending and want to buy from reliable companies they trust.

Keep in touch with your existing customers and keep social!

You need to work smart to retain your existing customer base. It's always cheaper to retain an existing customer than acquire a new one. Out of sight means out of mind so do not risk losing these customers.  Here are some key and effective ways of doing this:

Send personalised, contextualised, targeted messages to existing customers who want to hear your news.

Write and share more blog posts about the current climate and how you are approaching it as a business

Produce valuable content to share with your customers through all the relative social channels. Promote good news stories and tips for your customers during this time.  Also, show them the innovations that you are currently making that differentiates your offering from your competitors.

Get more social! Engage more with your customers.  Listen to your customers, hear what they’re talking about, learn more about your market. Remember, however, it isn’t about advertising – your contributions to the conversation needs to be valuable and appropriate

Consider live streaming. We are facing a time where a large proportion of the public will be spending more time at home for an unknown period of time.  Help them by considering what you can live stream to boost spirits. This may be social streaming of important local events or announcements about the facts from your local area.  You can help by posting health and fitness tips or binge-able boxset lists on Netflix for example.  There are lots of positive ways to interact with your audience and boost moral.

NB. A site you maybe interested in: www.boost-social.net

Focus on driving conversions with key SEO techniques

A low cost, high impact SEO technique to focus on is conversion rate optimisation. Small incremental changes will turn more of your website visitors into customers.

Create positive stories about your business and take the time to weave this content throughout your website. Share directly from your site onto your social media channels.

Invest in your website now, remembering small changes on your website now will have an overall positive impact on your longterm results.  Customer experience is king. Make sure you are providing a fast and personalised experience.

Do a mini Audit of the content of your website.  If you are experiencing a slowing down of productivity at the moment, use this period to conduct a mini audit of your content with a view to analyse and improve! Create a new excel or google sheet if you have not already created one, and split your content into sections such as:

Webpages
Emails.
Blog posts.
Ebooks.
Presentations.
Videos.
Infographics.
Articles you’ve published externally.
Other

Now critique each section.  Which sections got the most backlinks, traffic or shares on social channels? Can they be re-posted elsewhere? Can you update any poor performing sections with fresh content and added keywords?

Create some new videos!  Videos are great SEO tools on their own.  They can help you target long-tail keywords, trigger featured snippets and appear in relevant YouTube searches. You can then share on your socials and create more traffic.

Hopefully, this guide has provided you with some positive calls to action at this time. We need to bear in mind that in this ongoing public health crises, social media is at the front lines of so many things including emergency communications, official announcements, grassroots reports and, of course, rampant misinformation.  It is our responsibility to take a step back and evaluate how our work can best contribute to public safety, health and well-being as well as keeping our businesses as efficient as possible. 

Good luck, and above all stay safe!