It’s impossible to deny the significant impact on the business climate by the global Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. People are isolating at home, international borders are closing, and offline businesses are shutting activity. As a result, the world is facing numerous challenges happening on a massive scale.
The current pandemic provokes a shift in consumer behavior, and it is projected to have an influence even after the crisis. As more people switched from buying offline to buying online, brands have made their own adjustments. The Drum reported that 14% of businesses are moving budget from offline media.
How can businesses remain active, and which strategies work in these conditions? This poses a difficult question – every crisis exhibits unprecedented and unique characteristics. However, we can find valid patterns and apply them to marketing strategies.
What Is Consumer Behavior?
It’s a collection of behaviors consumers tend to follow when making a purchasing decision. The process involves processes like discovering a product, wanting to buy it, and concluding the transaction.
Repeat purchases fit under the umbrella of consumer behavior. It helps marketers understand the reasons for customers returning and consumers making one-time purchases and leaving.
The term consumer behavior incorporates several areas of study, such as psychology, sociology, biology, chemistry, and economics. By combining these forces, one can analyze:
- What consumers are thinking, feeling, and doing with regard to brands
- What the prevailing factors are when choosing one product or brand over another
- How a consumer’s behavior changes while researching and shopping
- What influences consumers’ perceptions in their daily lives
- The difference between consumers making purchases alone and in groups
Speaking of factors impacting consumer decisions, a multi-faceted analysis might reveal important insights. In general, let’s pinpoint the following three categories:
- Personal factors – Lifestyle, economic situation, occupation, age, personality, and self-perception
- Psychological factors – Motivation, perception, learning, and attitude or belief system
- Social factors – Reference groups, family, role, status, and social media
Why Does It Matter?
In marketing, this breakdown contributes to consumer differentiation. It helps reveal a target consumer group sharing identical or similar purchasing patterns. By analyzing their needs, marketers can tailor strategies and split them into multiple branches for a variety of groups.
It makes sense for marketers to apply consumer behavior in every business aspect. It starts with the brand logo and moves to long-term business goals. Additionally, it leads to higher retention of customers. Knowing how to convince consumers to buy the product, you possess the data to change strategies for higher efficiency.
Lastly, you can observe shifts in market trends early. Historically, savvy brands implement adjustments, like quickly becoming supportive of environmental friendliness and conscious consumption. By noticing indicators, you’ll gain a larger pool of information for decision-making processes.
Maslow Pyramid During and After Pandemic. New Maslow Pyramid
Maslow’s hierarchy helps specialists understand what drives consumer behavior. It reveals buying decisions change as consumers fulfill the underlying needs. Discovered patterns are applicable to most consumers.
Physiological and Safety Needs
Individuals realize that daily environments fluctuate, which leads to a fundamental change. Previous research shows how people tend to change behaviors, despite the resulting outcomes being uncertain.
As the first outbreak signs emerged, people ran to the stores for necessities they deemed important. Products included food, paper products, cleaning supplies, hand sanitizers, firearms, etc. Even though these actions didn’t provide safety, people were buying products that rendered comfort.
Mapping this fact to Maslow’s hierarchy, ties into physiological and safety needs. People felt worried about their basic needs. As long as they can afford to purchase products, they are happy to spend extra.
Needs of Love and Belonging
The next course of action in this pandemic was turning to social interactions. We’ve noticed a big influx of people turning to the Zoom app. While the primary reasons remained work and education, a sufficient number of people downloaded the app for other reasons. They explored additional ways to connect, host virtual happy hours and game nights, and accomplish similar activities.
Maslow’s belongingness and love stage explain this phenomenon. Another interesting trend is the increased demand for pet supplies. Possibly, pet owners feel the need to connect to their companions, which translates to bigger spending.
Esteem Needs
After the necessity for meaningful connections is fulfilled, people turn to self-care. Subsequently, they make various kinds of investments into wellbeing, including health, fitness, beauty, and cosmetic purchases.
The result of losing control in daily life during a crisis is people grasping opportunities to feel good and regain control. It grants validation and shows people act attentively to their health.
Self-Actualization
The final step in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is self-actualization, which is rather difficult to achieve in quarantine. Despite this, people still want to find outlets for their creative impulses.
Some opted for artistic avenues, like painting and crafts. Others chose a more practical approach, like cooking and fixing things around the house. This has led to increased spending on art and hobby supplies, houseware products, etc.
Consumer Behavior Shifts and Its Impact
People turned to work remotely from home. Naturally, people spend more time online – for work and for personal reasons. This presents a profitable opportunity to cash in. It leads to an increase in the ad space across many platforms.
The increase in ad inventory signifies that the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) decreases correspondingly. This applies specifically to auction-based services. It’s worth mentioning that some companies have begun scaling back on marketing spending. Ad spending decreasing contributes to lower costs in the online advertising sector.
The consumer behavior shift takes fundamentally different forms. Depending on the type of service and buying personas, businesses see distinct transformations.
The primary difference is a drastic increase in demand. The main businesses experiencing this are services that provide products door-to-door. Since people opt to self-isolate or face state requirements, delivery services companies gain an advantage. Examples include
- Amazon
- UberEats
- DoorDash
Interestingly, the crisis can have a reversed effect. The lack of disposable income induces a financial strain for other businesses. Some consumers choose to reduce their average spending and wait until the situation returns to normal.
If your target audience chose a “wait and see” approach, anticipate a sharp decline in sales. Therefore, marketers should assess what category a company’s consumer base belongs to. For the non-prospering type, online strategies need adjustments shortly after.
Getting People to Buy Your Product or Service
For a data-driven approach, process behavior shifts and determine similarities with previous crises. Clarify the customer journey map and the purchasing abilities in distinctive groups.
Periods around the crises are characterized by extreme behaviors. People can buy either cheap goods or invest in expensive products to prepare for the future. Adjust to these patterns faster than competitors. It presents an opportunity to gain a market stronger presence, even for established businesses.
Remember to address digitalization trends and the rise of online marketing. It’s worth implementing strategic instruments that support industry standards. Methods to experiment with include SWOT, CJM, Perceptual Mapping, and 4P.
Increase your business’s value from the customer’s perspective. Banks can teach us a lot about trust-based marketing for crisis situations. Which practices these establishments implemented to increase trust and loyalty?
- Provide more training materials
- Assure clients about insurance and security
- Work on customer care
- Show what happens behind the scenes to promote reliability
- Work with well-known influencer clients
- Develop their social role in their community
- Participate in participation projects with an emphasis on openness and leadership
Some of the techniques can be adapted to any niche. The bottom line is that companies need to work on building trust. Also, they need to assure their clients they will be taken care of.
Business Strategies in Recession
For some businesses, it may be the first time they have faced such an economic downturn. To help your business stay afloat, we’ve looked into the most successful recession marketing strategies. Here is a summary of what you should and shouldn’t do:
- Don’t make the mistake of arbitrarily cutting your marketing budget.
- Study your metrics now.
- Thoroughly analyze your target audience. See what their buying behaviors are during an economic downturn.
- Nurture your existing customer base.
- Learn from real-life examples and make constant tweaks to your strategies.
Core Target Markets Impacted by COVID-19
Governments around the world have made attempts to deescalate the situation. However, the ongoing impact of coronavirus is visible in a number of industries. Based on the current assessments, markets most impacted by the current pandemic are as follows:
- Airlines. The reasons include huge global grounding of air traffic, travel restrictions, and sheltering orders in many countries.
- Leisure Facilities. This is explained by the widespread closures of gaming facilities and actions to start social distancing measures.
- Car Parts & Equipment. Manufacturers are seeing a delay in purchases as well as cancellations of purchases. It makes sense due to the decreased ability to purchase goods in most parts of society.
- Oil & Gas Drilling. The demand for oil has been drastically reduced following not only traveling restrictions but also recent political events.
Tips and Ideas for Small Business
We’ve assembled some guidance for small businesses navigating COVID-19 and other remotely similar situations. These measures can help you with your customers in this rapidly changing environment.
Website Marketing
If you don’t have a website yet and you’re not represented online in other ways, now is the time to address this issue. Naturally, we recommend starting with a website.
If your budget is tight, there is the option of designing a website on your own with specialized platforms. For example, check out Wix, Squarespace, and Webflow if you need a simple website. For creating an online store, it’s worth looking into Shopify. Regardless of the platform, a website will cost you around $500 for a year of maintenance, along with a template and domain name.
Previously it was not generally recommended to use website builders. The reason for this change in policy: tough times call for tough decisions. If you hire local developers, it can cost from $3,000 and extend the process for up to three months.
Even if you find cheaper alternatives, the difference in quality will be clear. By the way, you can spend around 5-10 hours watching educational videos on Wix and achieve similar results.
The following explains why Wix is an acceptable option in this case. An undeniable factor is money savings. You might not have $3,000 to order a website design professional. Moreover, you might not have $500 for a year’s worth of maintenance. In this case, you can pay for the site monthly. It can cost you as little as $100 for setup than ~$20/monthly.
Here is why we don’t recommend choosing these services in normal circumstances. At some point, you’re bound to outgrow the capabilities of these website builders. For some businesses, this process takes very little time. In the end, you will still have to contact professional developers and start actively working on your own website.
When you make necessary arrangements with your website, you will need to evaluate it from a marketing perspective. Lasting Trend can help you develop a digital advertising strategy to get your website going strong. Get in touch to establish an effective online presence.
Info-Products
Supporting the current customer base is the most cost-effective technique one can implement at this time. In addition, it is also one of the most profitable ones. Periods of crisis and post-crisis are the time when customer-brand relationships are tested.
You can use this opportunity to transform neutral communications into friendly ones. Customers tend to remember the brands which have come to their rescue in trying times.
To cover everyone, let’s divide website owners into those who have their own customer base and those who don’t. The latter group is for those businesses where services are needed on a one-time basis. Let’s use our client, TV mounting service company, as an example. Even if your service is great, your customer base is not likely to return on a regular basis.
If you do have a customer base, you need to work with it. There are multiple directions where you can take your marketing. The best thing is that many of them bring incredible results.
Let’s take real-life examples. Many services have turned to the Internet – dance studios, sport, and fitness, general education services, language learning, etc. This is known as info-business.
At first, info-business was met with valid criticism. This new trend brought an increase of online scammers who have barely any knowledge on a given topic. Also, most of them had no professional qualifications. However, there is a new wave of info-business with actual professionals recording and sharing online lessons.
Video Streaming
Here is what one can learn from online streaming. These live videos don’t have to take place on particular platforms. Some might be better off using Zoom. If your customer base is following you on Instagram, host a stream there. If you have a well-established Facebook account, do it there.
Create easily accessible content that people can log into from the comfort of their homes. Whether it’s Facebook, Youtube, or Instagram, find a way to engage with your audience. The key is to produce good content under tight time limits. After the launch, turn webinars and live videos into evergreen content.
If you’re just starting with live broadcasts and you have never done them before, here is an important point. You need to conduct all your broadcasts and online lessons for free. The primary reason is that your first streams might not have the best quality. It would not be fair to charge viewers for unrefined material.
But the most important thing is to make your viewers stay. Going back to the previous example of a dance studio in Brooklyn (our client), let’s analyze the appeal of free and paid content.
Now that people have more time on their hands, they are ready to consume content. If they see that your competitor is sharing free content while you charge for yours, their choice is obvious. Users will always use free content over paid content, especially if it’s similar.
Moreover, there is a higher chance that potential customers will turn to your competitors after the quarantine ends. Since the competitor gave them better terms for online content, customers will show loyalty to them in the future.
Let’s imagine an impossible scenario where you don’t have competitors at all. In this case, it’s still important to make free online broadcasts. This is because you do not want the client to break their habits. It’s a common occurrence – people skip one training session and it leads to a whole sequence of missed classes. So, your goal is to help customers keep their habits going strong.
All of these attempts will only work in your favor if they properly fit into a solid marketing strategy. This is another reason to work with Lasting Trend. We make sure that any content you make supports your overall online presence and makes your business more profitable.
Connection Marketing
So, what about those who don’t have an established customer base? If you have a website that you want to optimize, there are multiple strategies that you can implement depending on the specifics of your business.
But there are some things that can be done regardless of your industry and niche. For example, you have a bike rental company. First, check if your website has a connection with your local area.
It should feature not only the keyword ‘bike rental’ but also Bike Rental in New York or Bike Rental in Manhattan. In an extreme scenario, it is something like Bike Rental Central Park. Bear in mind this isn’t always possible or justified.
Even though the Google algorithm is somewhat intelligent, it needs some help. For instance, if you write Rent a Bike on the website, you will have lots of competition, as you will be competing with thousands of rental companies across the USA.
If you write “Rent a Bike in New York”, then you compete only with companies from New York. This is already a noticeable difference in audiences.
Narrow until you become the leader of your local pack SEO and then start expanding. This type of SEO is relevant both during and after a crisis. After all, not everyone has time to update the news in listings, Google’s business card in SEO geo-search strategy. Accordingly, it leads to losing SERP positions.
There are also large companies that absorb local search through constant updates. Metaphorically, it looks like Conway’s “game of life” in the local SEO field. Cells = zip codes, filled cells = businesses, and diverse food are geo-search queries. The more relevant your business is familiar with popular questions, the better it grows in its pack.
This is a very rough explanation of Local SEO methods. Still, including your location is always very useful, especially for local businesses.
Competitive Analysis
Another thing you can do is analyze your online competitors. This is a much more complex activity. However, there can be many interesting discoveries to include in your future work. You might discover that competitors sitting at the top 10 of Google search results and your brand are completely different. It’s worth considering why.
For example, you are in the sign installation business. If you want to narrow down the search results for your local area, you can use our previous tip once again. Write “Sign Installation NYC” and other variations of that phrase.
Then, it’s time to look at your competitors. At this point, there is no reason to look at website aggregators. Suppose there were 5 aggregators and 5 real companies at the top. Check the real websites and see what they have in common and what is missing in yours. They might all have a contact page while you don’t. It means that you should add such a page to your website.
Perhaps your competitors have an interactive map and a detailed explanation of how to get to their office. Or it can be a request form on their main page and an online chat feature. There may be hundreds of differences. Your goal is to take note of all the differences and implement all the things that successful competitors have.
Also, show your customers that your site is active. Update the header, make a pop-up or a bar with updated information or your recent promotions. Some of the services you offer may have moved online – inform website visitors about them.
If you don’t know how to convey these updates properly, Lasting Trend can help you do that. We know all the methods you can use to convert viewers into customers. Trust our knowledge and experience to help your business prosper in these changing digital environments.
Competitors’ Client Lists
Even though it may sound odd, purchasing a customer database from your competitors can be a great promotional tool. In the past, we’ve been working with several service companies and used this method. Our clients have bought out competitors’ databases and either created a mailing list on them or reached out to them by calling. Here is what it looks like.
We used this approach for a water purification company in New York. The competitor was a fairly large company working in New Jersey. It decided to leave the New York market to focus on its home state.
They came to us with an offer to sell their New York customer base and pass the rights to provide services to them. Needless to say, we agreed. So, if you know that your competitor is planning to leave the region or scale back, or goes out of business, ask them to purchase their customer base. Of course, you should do it only if that makes sense for your business model.
By the way, if you want to sell a customer database for filter services for water treatment, then you know who to contact.
Also, if a competitor goes out of business, you should always ask them whether you can buy their phone number. The reason is obvious – customers might call there. The algorithm is similar when it comes to a website as well. At this point, we’re getting into the depths of the Google algorithm but in many cases, it can be very useful.
Browse Abandoned Cart Flow, Cross-Sells, and Recommendations
“Browse abandoned cart flow” is the term for when a person has come across a service offering or downloaded a lead magnet and now this service is presented to them again. The difference from abandoned cart flow is that the person didn’t add the item to their shopping cart. They were just surfing the website with no other actions.
On top of looking into abandoned cart flow, see browse abandonment emails. If they have over 50% of the average open rate and over 10% of click-through rate (CTR), it means they deliver good value for the effort spent in making them.
To gauge this metric, you will need SKUs, or Stock Keeping Units, which are unique numbers that internally track a business’ inventory. If you don’t have them or there aren’t many products available on your website, there are other ways. Make a browse abandonment flow similar to your abandoned cart flow. This sends an email that encourages your customers to purchase an item they previously saw.
As your inventory gets larger and more diverse, suggest products that are similar to the ones they looked at. This activity is called cross-selling. Whether they didn’t think of this item in the first place or they couldn’t find it, this works in both cases. You might give your potential customers a great recommendation that they end up buying.
These techniques imply making small optimizations with tangible long-term benefits. In the end, it leads to noticeable cost savings. For example, sending return letters costs almost nothing and still brings benefits.
Winback Flow
Think about what you can do to maintain a good relationship, and create a buying habit for your customers. Another way to do that is connected with them through emails and messaging apps.
Winback flow implies sending emails to customers who have been interacting with your brand but stopped for some reason. It’s a well-known fact that acquiring new customers is a relatively expensive process. If you focus on retaining existing ones, you have better chances of getting repeat orders.
Welcome Email Series
Now that we’ve talked about your existing customers, we should also look into making your new ones stay. One of the ways to greet them properly is by sending a series of welcoming emails. This will be the first touch in your close interactions. This allows you to show your value by showing what your business does.
As we’ve briefly mentioned, welcome email series are aimed to inform customers and prospects about your value. It works when they have already shown interest in your brand. These emails use initial interest and give them a broader perspective on what you can offer. Sign up for our email newsletter to check how to utilize this approach.
You are free to decide how you want to welcome new subscribers. You can describe your brand vision, talk about the founder or CEO, share relevant content, or give them an appealing sales offering.
Make sure not to overwhelm them with unnecessary content. Reduce the number of messages and emails to the minimum. Share only the most important information through customer behavior based before-the-funnel and top-of-the-funnel marketing automation. Stay at the forefront of the clients’ minds and bring value to their life. Upgrade your old marketing funnels only with services and products that are more appropriate at the time.
Socially Responsible Practices
The impact on mental health due to the quarantine and lockdown shouldn’t be overlooked. It affects every age group in different ways. Younger children are stuck at home without being able to socialize like they’re used to. Adults are dealing with anxiety about the financial situation. And according to the statistics, the elderly are the most vulnerable group, which can be true for any kind of crisis.
Therefore, businesses need to stay socially aware of the situation. As for marketers, they should find ways to engage and entertain people in a tactful manner. Then, it can foster long-lasting relationships with their customer base.
Here is a great example of business ideas that help the local community. A signage company from New York has made some adjustments following the recent outbreak. They started installing sneeze guards in local shops. This is a great way for when a company needs to give their business a social function.
These screens give decent protection from potentially infectious customers. Since it separates the seller and the customer with glass, it minimizes the majority of contact. Plus, it doesn’t interfere with the sale at all.
Discounts and Gifts
You can also launch promotions that are cumulative with other discounts. Or better yet, you can offer customers a small gift. For example, you have an online CBD store (another client of Lasting Trend). If a customer from a certain income group orders CBD oil worth $120, offer a $5 CBD bud for free. Even though it’s only $5, the gift will be appreciated.
The actual price tag on your promotion isn’t the most important thing. The main factor is the perceived value of the prize. Give them the perception that they are saving money while extending the customer lifecycle. These things can be difficult to execute internally so it’s best to delegate them to experienced marketers. Your task is to maintain demand without destroying price positioning and promos during and after COVID-19.
Product bundling is also known for its efficiency. Bundles are a few products or an entire collection that customers can mix and match to get a discount. It’s a universal term used in other fields, such as consulting and law. The point here is perceived value once again. See what your audience appreciates and add these items to the bundle.
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
ORM involves various monitoring activities and addressing different issues. First of all, gather feedback and business evidence. The simplest way is to automate emails and messages. Share tips for dealing with the virus and recession, and share any other information useful to clients. Talk about anti-virus measures, show that a percentage of your sales go to donations, or do micro-sponsoring integrations at the local level (like helping doctors).
Even if it seems counterintuitive, it has an effect. Before the crisis, during, and after, people always look at reviews and reputation. So, this will help your brand reputation.
Understanding your customer is the best practice at any time. Read your correspondence in email, live chat, listen to how sales scripts work in practice. Communicate with customers, conduct surveys to have an up-to-date understanding of the situation. This will ground your strategy while helping you make adjustments.
Tips for Larger Businesses
Now let’s move the conversation on to large companies. We’ll talk briefly about how they can reduce the marketing budget and get out of the crisis with the greatest benefit. If your specific company doesn’t fit the definition of a large company, you will still find these recommendations useful. Also, we will describe what additional opportunities can be found for those with small budgets.
Relevant Marketing Strategies
By changing your mindset, you will turn the crisis into great opportunities. The first thing to recommend is Google Ads. If you’re not using them yet, it’s about time to start. If you are, make sure to distribute your marketing budget correctly.
These days, many companies have reduced their budgets or even stopped advertising. This means that the Google advertising auction has lower starting prices, the cost per click decreases and its reach is expanding. If you have the skills, you can either get more potential customers for the same money or achieve a better reach. In other words, more people looking for your services will see your ad.
The second point on the topic of optimization is changing your targeted location. If you have a local business, consider narrowing down locations. For example, if you have an office in Manhattan, try eliminating Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island from your reach. Chances are your customers won’t be able to get to you and will choose a closer competitor instead.
The third point is staying in touch with current events. Rewrite all your advertising headlines to reflect the new reality (we did it for our client – labor law firm). Talk about special discounts in response to the coronavirus and efforts to help your customers. Or you might be an essential business. In this case, you can mention that you are still working during the quarantine in the ad headline.
Overall, be creative. The question that should guide all your changes is: “Is this campaign relevant, given the current situation in a local market?”
Smart Use of Marketing Tools
Keep track of which products are needed in the current environment. You should determine what emotion your users are feeling in your target country at a particular time. You might learn what they are likely to be interested in. Services like Google Trends and Google Alerts can help you accomplish that.
Find out the Auction Insights report for your Google Ads campaigns. This way, you can find out if your ad performance has changed compared to other ads that participated in auctions.
Use marketing automation and martech stack to create a modern and transparent business. The easiest thing is to set up google alerts for local events. Start with the same question as always: is it possible to automate?
If full automation isn’t possible, who you should hire for the job and which tools will make the most sense? Usually, high-quality marketing tools are too expensive for a small business. This is why they turn to agencies like ours.
The situation with stacks is very similar to our example of website design. It’s worth using free and shareware services only when you’re going through a lengthy crisis.
It doesn’t matter whether a product has limits on subscribers or is a completely open-source solution. A product with a limit will increase its price every 100 subscribers. And you will have to look for expensive developers to implement open-source products.
Bonus Tips
Here is what you should if you are a member of a business group. Create a situation where you can separate your business into many parts and offer partnerships. Perhaps you will not only save money but also occupy a new market niche. This will allow you to increase your profits. Independent of the crisis, joint cross-advertising might be useful.
These are various types of cross-posting in social networks. You can use joint webinars, mentions on video channels, and ethical database exchanges. Car maintenance shops can partner with tire fitting services. Dancing schools can partner with other schools and school aggregators.
In addition to other businesses, you can partner with influencers. The main thing is to make organic connections with those connected to your line of business.
Get into Google My Business and Yelp if you haven’t already done so. We’ve briefly mentioned website aggregators in a different context. You should make use of them if your company operates in several specific segments.
Such sites collect reviews from a larger pool of customers, which you can benefit from. They include construction work, cleaning, various repairs, and moving. Some of the most well-known examples are Amazon Home Services, Homeadvisor, and Thumbtack.
Predictions for Small Business
- Firstly, consumers increase spending on essentials + some non-essentials. How will their spending behaviors change afterward? Here is a take on what will happen (bear in mind that this pattern is likely to emerge in any similar situation):
- After people satisfy their basic needs, they will focus on items that distract them or keep them happy. Consumers are likely to buy brands that they had previous interaction with. Also, consumers tend to look closer at promotions sent to them by friends.
- Additional waves will be associated with an increased feeling of boredom. People will spend on toys, games, puzzles, home decor, plants, and even new pets. This will be the time for them to find new companies. As people turn to social media, many of these discoveries will come from there.
- We will see seasonal changes in purchases. As the weather changes, people are going to make wardrobe changes, even during the quarantine. Additionally, athletic wear or leisure clothing will see a rise in sales.
- The final part of the crisis involves people preparing to come back to normal lifestyles. After several months, people will once again focus on buying essentials as they get ready to leave their houses and carry on with life.
According to some retailers, current e-commerce sales can come close to periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However, online stores are not the primary place of focus. These campaigns can perform better if they reach the most active platforms. These include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Social advertising is projected to grow this year. It makes sense, considering that more people stay indoors. And it’s likely to pay off with an increase in sales in the latter part of the year.
Where Do We Go from Here?
All crisis situations have similar consequences. Whoever can learn from past circumstances, conduct analytics, and act, will be successful. If you are aiming for sustainable growth, look at SEO content that remained at the same level, or even managed to grow. If you have an online store, use this time to tackle one of these niches using Google Trends. Try to do it before this crisis hits your region.
We mainly focused on marketing during this article. However, we compiled our recommendations in a way that helps your business in any crisis. Now you know how to adapt a small business marketing strategy to the post-COVID world as well as anything even remotely similar.
Get into the habit of holding strategic sessions to refine your strategy and tactics. After the crisis, it is always useful to audit your business situation. If you are prepared, you can make some of the best marketing discoveries ever.
Gather all the tricks that have worked well in crisis and evaluate them for your post-crisis marketing strategy. After all, what is a business strategy? It’s a combination of three components:
- Assessment of market position relative to competitors;
- Finding key points of excellence (growth loops, USP) and their implementation;
- Monitoring the right metrics at the right time to surpass the competition.
At Lasting Trend, we are telling our clients the same thing we always do. A one-size-fits-all approach never works, and we are here to develop a custom strategy specifically for you. We cover short-, medium- and long-term objectives and adjust them according to the changing environments.
We apply the most effective concepts and practices that we have found over the years. We’ve helped our clients go through all kinds of critical situations. Contact us to make it through the crisis and continue prospering afterward with a solid online strategy.
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