Many businesses haven’t digitized themselves and it is not too late! It makes us realize how important it is to sustain a business. But what must you do to counter this situation and be better prepared in future?

Let’s use Digital Marketing to counter coronavirus! In this hyper-connected world, digital marketing is considered an essential for any business and you have to get into the game and become effective at using it for business development.

1. Local Listing Marketing

The very first step to let your customer know and find you is to promote using local listing marketing. Considerably 75% of people online are shopping for products or services through their mobile phone and the majority will just “Google It”.

How do you do that? 

• Set up a responsive website (mobile friendly) and ensure it is added to search engines.
• Add your business website and business descriptions to local business directories or listings.
• Set up Google My Business account.
• Create relevant social media pages (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter). 
• Create a brand persona for your business

2. Content Marketing (CM)

The next step is content marketing. 

Educating your customer is a must these days as the companies that educate the most sell the most. To leverage content marketing, you need to create problem-solving and high value content and distribute to your target audience through different marketing channels

Examples of content can be: 

• Articles
• Podcast
• Infographic
• Videos & LIVE
• Industries Reports and News 
• eBooks 
• Webinars

3. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Everyone is using social media these days, agree? It has become a powerful force in our daily lives and even radio and TV stations are leveraging social media platforms to increase their reach and exposure of their programs. 

The time spent on social media has increased tremendously due to the virus outbreak. Start leveraging social media for your business, bring all your products and services online and promote through social media! You can start sharing to relevant groups (especially in Facebook & LinkedIn) and use relevant #hashtags in Instagram.

4. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) 

Okay, whenever you want to find something you “Google It” and everything you just “Google It”. So you mustn’t ignore search engines in your digital marketing strategy. There are also other well known search engines like Yahoo, Bing and Ask that people will go when they are looking for information regarding their needs, problems and wants. 

Little do you know that local listing marketing puts you on search engines, but it is SEO (search engine optimization) that keeps you ranking high on search engines. To rank higher in search engines, you must start writing blogs and optimizing it to see the results on SERP (search engine result page). Also, making sure that your website has a better and trusted web hosting can allow your customers or audience to have a better user experience using your website.

5. Mobile Marketing

Majority of online users these days are online through their mobile devices so you don’t want to skip mobile marketing. With the increase of mobile phone users worldwide, you must find a way to leverage it to promote your business.

Many have thought of Apps when it comes to mobile marketing but there’s also other platforms and the best example to use mobile marketing is instant messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat. To get in the game, you must develop strategies to reach out and create engagement with your customer through these messaging apps.

6. Email Marketing 

Despite being known as “old school”, email marketing is in fact a part of digital marketing. Many people using the internet today have an email and they check their email from time to time and if you’re in a corporate then it’ll be more frequent in checking those emails. You can explore more into automated emails to create a marketing campaign to increase your customer pool, re-targeting, etc. 

But be careful with email marketing and prevent spamming people. Always get their permission before adding them into your mailing list. Tips for you, be educative and not pushy with your marketing promotions (hard selling). 

At this time of crisis, I believe that everyone must come together to encounter this epidemic. Whether you are an employer or an employee, we are depending on each other. Work together to bring out the best of your business through digital marketing during period will help you to sustain your business.