Now that you have put the foundation and some quick wins in place (Parts 1 and 2 of Emergency Marketing Tips To Help Your Business Survive A Crisis), you are ready to assess other options that generally take longer and require more time and/or investment.
But, these options can produce continued, long-term results.
We organized the tips in Part 3: What Should You Do Next? in a particular order that makes sense for many businesses, but give them and read to determine what works best for you.
Have questions?
Send a comment to our team by visiting the Contact page for help.
Get Found On Google (SEO)
First on our list is to get your website ranked well by Google—ideally page one, because over 90% of clicks go to page one listings.
However, this takes time, investment, and patience.
There are no guarantees in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In fact, you need to be aware that the changes you make to rank better with Google can hurt your rankings, sometimes permanently.
So, other than the basics that we cover in Part 3 of the guide, SEO should be done by an experienced professional.
Looking to get started with SEO?
The SEO service from our team is one of the very few that offers a guarantee, where you pay nothing until the first of the keywords makes it onto page one of Google.
We recommend this service as a low-risk way to wade into the waters of SEO and see results.
Contact us by visiting the Contact page if you want to discuss our SEO service.
Website Next Steps To Capture More Leads and Sales
Let’s say that you have implemented several of our tips, and analytics shows that you have a lot more visitors than you had in the past; yet your situation (leads, orders) has not changed much.
This is entirely possible, and why we recommended the initial Website Essentials tips in Part 1 of our guide.
The tips in part 1 were just the beginning.
There is much more to review and do to increase how many visitors to your site reach out and engage with your business.
Part 3 of our Emergency Tips guide covers several things for you to consider, including:
Build an Email List of Leads and Customers and Email Them Regularly
If all your website has is an invitation to “sign up for our newsletter”, and you are not regularly sending quality emails to your leads and customers, then you are likely missing out on an enormous opportunity.
Remember that a potential customer needs to see your brand/message/product 7 times on average before they make a purchase.
Part 2 discussed using retargeting/remarketing to help with this. Another powerful approach is to offer an interesting and valuable “lead magnet” in exchange for the visitor’s email address.
And then following up with several emails of interesting and valuable information. Do this in addition to retargeting/remarketing.
And be very careful that you are complying with the anti-spam laws in your country, or you could be faced with crippling penalties.
You should also consider using an “Email Blast” service that sends an interesting email and offer to a highly targeted audience, sending them to your lead magnet page on your website.
There are many providers to choose from.
For example, using our service you could reach 25,000 leads that match the criteria you want to reach (up to 150 options, including age, gender, income, location, education, interests) for $750-$1000, including email design.
If 5% respond and opt in to get your lead magnet, you can now email those 1,250 leads several times to nurture them towards a sale.
Amplify Your Online Presence and Business Information Consistently
This is a fast, easy and inexpensive tip. Remember in Part 1, we recommended that you list your business in the directories that appear on page 1 of Google when searching for your product/service?
This tip takes the next step by listing in a lot more (quality) directories.
However doing this manually can easily become a big time suck, especially considering that you need to update each regularly with things like your holiday hours.
And it is super important that the information in each is 100% consistent with what is on your website.
Fortunately, there are services that take care of all of this for you – you just enter and update your information in one place, and they publish it to all the directories.
The service we offer does this for $50 per month.
Quick Visibility with Facebook, Youtube and Google “Display” Advertising
If you have followed our recommendation in Part 2 of the Emergency Tips guide and are running Google and Bing “search” ads, now is a good time to test Facebook, Youtube and Google “GDN” (Google Display Network) advertising.
You need to be aware of how different these ads are to the search ads where people are seeing relevant ads related to what they are searching for.
With Facebook, Youtube and GDN ads, you are showing your ads to audiences who are looking at other things, and hopefully interrupting them with an ad that is compelling enough for them to click and learn more.
As with search ads, there is an enormous learning curve and many risks, so this is best handled by professionals with established track records.
Your Cashback Offer On Top Websites – Only Pay When Someone Purchases In Your Store
If you have a brick and mortar store in the U.S., your cashback offer could be showing up very quickly on top websites such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Virgin Airlines, Hilton Honors, Yelp and hundreds more – for free; you only pay when you get sales in your store.
Part 3 of our Emergency Tips guide explains how these Card Linked Offers (CLO) work.
Automate Rating and Reviews Using 3rd Party Service
In Part 1 of this guide, we described how important it is to have a rating (eg. 4-5 stars) and good reviews that are at least as good as your competition (otherwise why would someone click on your listing?), and an easy and free way to get started.
Because this is something that you need to be doing all the time, it can take up a lot of time, and easily fall by the wayside with the endless other things you need to be taking care of.
There are excellent “online reputation management” services that automate this work, and can even include related services such as online chat that refers problems to your team so that someone can instantly try to resolve an unhappy customer situation.
Looking for Advice or Help?
Help and advice are available. We encourage you to add comments and questions below, and you can reach out to our team by visiting the Contact page.
Our thoughts and prayers are with our fellow business owners as we all look for ways to get through the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.