How To Adapt Your Marketing Strategy For The New Normal

A brand without a marketing strategy is like a shark without a hunting strategy: it can keep swimming along, but the lack of visitors to its waters might leave it somewhat peckish. 

This was always the case, but the art of promotion has become even more complicated since lockdown restrictions made it necessary for so many businesses to embrace online operation.

After all, you can’t take advantage of prime positioning or local buzz when you’re occupying a virtual office or store. Your polished company sign won’t catch nearby eyes and provide the passive exposure that’s always been so effective for the biggest businesses. Unmoored in the vast expanse of the online world, a lack of activity will leave you essentially invisible.

If your business has been going for a while, you’ll surely have a marketing strategy that worked at least moderately well in the halcyon days before 2020 — but maybe it hasn’t been paying off to the same extent since then. 

In this post, we’re going to offer some tips for updating your marketing strategy to suit this new world. Let’s get started.

Forget about offline advertising

Even after years of the ecommerce industry going through incredible growth, there was still significant value in using offline marketing methods. Banners, posters, pop-up shops: high streets weren’t anywhere near as busy as they had been, but they still had more than enough people to make them useful areas for promotion. And with so many businesses moving all their advertising online, dabbling in old-fashioned techniques allowed you to stand out somewhat.

Today, though, there’s really no way to justify spending any notable amount of money on offline advertising. Brick-and-mortar retail is dying and people spending time outside aren’t going to be too focused on checking out ads. 

If you’re still paying for banners and the like, stop it immediately and put the money into online advertising. It’s a shame, but it’s necessary.

Invest heavily in regular blogging for SEO

By regular here, I don’t mean conventional. I mean frequent and consistent. Blogging should be a hugely-potent arrow in your promotional quiver, so you’re not approaching it correctly if it isn’t a major source of visits and revenue for your business. 

Remember this: when it comes to being noticed online, so much comes down to the almighty Google search engine, and running a good blog is one of the most effective ways to stand out in the SERPs.

When you produce blog content that includes hyper-relevant keywords that tend to spark action in your niche, Google’s spiders will pick it up and become more likely to suggest it to searchers. 

Additionally, great blog content that’s promoted well through social media and outreach will attract backlinks from sites with strong domains — and those links (with the right anchor text) will tell Google that your site is worthwhile, leading to further improvements in your rankings.

Devise a lengthy retargeting funnel

Retargeting is the process of using digital ads to reach people who’ve previously encountered your brand. Most commonly, retargeters will set ads to target those who’ve visited their websites, or those who’ve already been shown some of their paid ads. The great thing about this is that it allows you to provide more complex reasons why people should care about you.

You might not have the lowest prices, for instance, but maybe a core goal of your company is to support some worthy causes. If so, you can steadily explain that over the course of several ads, starting by introducing the problem then slowly segueing into possible solutions. The more contact points people have with your brand, the more likely they’ll be to support it.

Why is this so important these days? Because people are doing almost all their buying online, and there’s so much competition that it’s really tough to win someone over with a single ad. Retargeting affords you the opportunity to do something really creative with your marketing, so take full advantage of it and keep honing it as you go.

Put more time into after-sales support

If you’re largely marketing to people who’ve never bought from you before, you’re making a big mistake. 

As previously mentioned, online business is extremely competitive, and you’ll always have a tough time convincing people that your brand in particular deserves their attention — so if you’ve already managed to convince some people, why not market to them?

Customer loyalty is the lifeblood of businesses. If you can build up a base of customers who stick with you time and time again, you can use hyper-focused marketing that targets their specific needs and feel confident that it’ll actually prove effective. 

So instead of obsessing over new prospects, put a lot of effort into keeping existing customers happy. It’ll pay off.

Life has changed over the last year, and digital marketing strategies need to be adapted to this new normal. Follow the points above, and you won’t go far wrong.