Marketing after the pandemic – is yours working? Learn 5 post-pandemic marketing strategies to survive & thrive in our new normal. Find out how to do better!
The pandemic has shaken the world. Much of life has shifted online, and even with vaccine rollouts, much of it is likely to stay online. In many ways it seems that the future of business has been rewritten. So, what does this mean for your marketing? Will those strategies that worked before, still work going forward?
Both the B2C and B2B landscape has changed. Successful marketing is relying more and more on a human-to-human approach. The core element is customer trust. To get this right demands that your online customer experience levels up. Embracing this new normal in our marketing strategy is how our businesses will survive and thrive.
But how?
Here Are 5 Strategies For Marketing After The Pandemic
1. Define Your Target Audience (again)
If there was ever a time to identify your ideal customers, it is now. Customers aren’t the same anymore. The pandemic dealt a big blow to the economy, changing consumer spending. People are now more selective on how they spend money. This means that your marketing has to be (re)targeted to get their attention.
The key to gaining a competitive advantage is understanding who is most likely to purchase your product or service. Understanding your target market is crucial to determining where and how to market your business to generate leads and make sales.
Some tips to help you with this:
-Check out your competitors: it’ll make it easier to see who to target. It might even reveal an opportunity. Who are they overlooking: is this a gap in the market?
-Consider demographic factors such as age, gender, and income level: who will find value in your product or service?
-Determine the psychographics of your target audience. Insight into their values, attitudes, interests, lifestyles, and opinions will tell you where and how to market your products or services.
2. Invest In Online Ads
Lockdown restrictions imposed during the pandemic drove the marketing world online. But, what are the benefits of a digital post-pandemic marketing strategy?
Here are 2 of them:
-You get to target a highly specific audience. This means that your marketing will be highly focused on the most likely candidates and where they are in their customer journey.
-It’s more cost-effective than traditional forms of marketing. For example, a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign means that, no matter how many people have seen your ad, you only pay when a user clicks on it. Contrast this to a billboard, where you are paying whether you generate leads or not.
3. Optimize Your Content (SEO)
A budget-friendly digital marketing tactic that has seen small businesses effectively compete with large companies is search engine optimization (SEO). There are 2 aspects to this strategy, and they all work together to get you onto the first search results page. And that’s where you have to be if you’re going to get any traffic: the first 5 results get 70% of the clicks.
On-page SEO (for example, the quality of your content and the keywords it contains) plus off-page SEO (for example, backlinks and social media) will strengthen your organic (unpaid) franchise marketing.
4. Focus On Customer Experience
Brand perception, customer acquisition, customer retention and loyalty, and increasing revenue are all dependent on a good user experience… Here are some characteristics of a bad user experience – avoid them at all costs!
-Slow loading: Websites that load slowly lead to a $2.6 billion loss in revenue annually.
-Lack of social interaction: Consider using social media plugins like share buttons and integrating a blog with your site to trigger personal interactions.
-Confusing: If the journey from the landing page to the checkout page is full of hurdles, such as the lack of a navigation menu, users will quickly abandon your site.
5. Send The Right Message
Your post-pandemic marketing strategy should put human emotion at the forefront. This is no time to be fake: customers spot give-to-get from a mile away. If your marketing is sales-oriented, you’ll send the wrong message to your prospects and customers.
Post-pandemic customers are looking for the heart behind the product or service: what does your business stand for? Do you care about what they care about? Of course, this comes right back to knowing your customer.
Change Is a Great Opportunity to Do Something New
It’s clear: the pandemic has accelerated the uptake of online shopping in every industry. So, no matter what franchise you own or are selling, online marketing is essential. Businesses that change their marketing tactics are the ones that will thrive in the post-pandemic world.
Need help crafting a franchise marketing plan to address today’s audience? Feel free to reach out for a complimentary consultation.
