Marketing Archives - Ricky Ahuja

April 6, 2020

How to Execute Digital Marketing Strategies during COVID-19

With a third of the world’s population indoors, it is a tough period for businesses, schools, marketers, and people in general. Many describe the current situation by saying “The world is currently on pause.” While this is true to an extent, it is also important to note that this pandemic is a catalyst for social change. The world is going through a massive disruption.

As a digital marketer, this is the time to fine-tune your message. Your approach to business should be better than ever. This is the time to readjust.

Free from school, work, and daily routines, people are now more present online. There are more online conversations, more posts, more engagements, more content, and generally, more buzz. People are on the look for what will keep them engaged. They need that creative content. As a digital marketer, there are more demands in your market and you need to stay on top of the situation.

However, the period is very sensitive, you need to be careful about how you execute your digital marketing campaigns. Since January, Google had been “broadly blocking” ads with mentions of COVID-19 in a bid to protect users. Google intended to prevent people from capitalizing on short-term events such as natural disasters. It was recently that Google began to allow mentions of COVID-19 in ads. Still, ads are being thoroughly monitored.

Here are ways to execute your digital marketing strategies during COVID-19:

Engage With a Supportive Tone

This is a trying time for everybody. Through your email marketing or any other channel that you employ, let your audience know that your brand is with them in this. This is a time when more emails will be opened. Start off with encouragement and a show of support.

In a bid to support, you can give discounts and coupons on products. This is a period when a lot of brands are giving discounts as a show of support. Vogue has offered three months free access to all its digital titles as a means of supporting people indoors.

This may not bring high ROI now, but it holds the promise of a high ROI as you’re getting customers hooked on your brand. After the pandemic, your products will be a part of their lives they can’t just throw away.

Take Advantage of the Current Social Media Buzz

With a lot of businesses down, the costs of some social media ads have reduced. You can take advantage of this to spread your brand’s message because the internet doesn’t quarantine.

The engagement level on social is high at the moment, execute your digital marketing through these platforms. TikTok has been noted to be the social media platform of the future. It is currently experiencing a very high engagement level amongst the young demographic. You can create short and interesting videos that can pass your brand’s message across.

Utilizing interactive marketing will be useful at the moment. You can create a challenge where customers can win items by posting pictures and generating likes and comments. This will increase your social media presence while providing engagement for customers.

Create Engaging Content

The pandemic is instilling fear and boredom in people. They are looking for what will take their minds off the worries. This is an opportunity for you to plug in.

This is the time when your content has to be more interesting. Put in more work to get people hooked. Content is king at the moment. However, people are still critical of uninteresting content.

See which channels are proper for your brand and tailor your content to fit within these channels. Be consistent with the content and leverage on the lower cost of social media ads.

According to the Socialbakers’ State of Social Media Report, there is a lower demand for paid ads on Facebook and there is an increased performance of organic content. It reports that Facebook CPC has decreased. For brands overall, Facebook CPC is down to $0.089.

If you have some budget for social media, you can make use of this opportunity.

Pay Attention to Evolving Customer Behavior

Panic is a major factor at the moment. It is influencing purchase decisions and consumer choices. With a lot of factors in the minds of consumers, their behavior may not be easily predictable. This is why you need to pay attention to every trend.

Elderly persons have been noted to be more susceptible to the virus. Young people are getting out of jobs. School kids are out of school and grounded indoors. These different groups are reacting differently as their concerns are different. Pay attention to these reactions.

Knowing how your customers think will help you create campaigns that are well suited to them. It may take some effort to fine-tune the buyer persona, but you need to get this right.

Focus on Excellent Customer Service

This is when your customer service needs to be topnotch. A lot of people are on the edge and they could come off as being irritable. Your customer support staff has to understand this. It is time to develop some emotional resilience.

There shouldn’t be a reduction in your approach to customer service. Your business should move as if it is not affected. People need to know that everything is not totally down yet. Your brand may be facing some difficulties, still keep a strong resolve with your audience.

Being able to strongly navigate the troubled waters will help your brand stand out and also help you build a loyal customer base.

Don’t keep your customers on the line for long. Answer their questions in the comment sections on social media as soon as possible. Provide information to inquires with a comforting and assuring tone.

Avoid Appearing as Profiting From the situation

You need to make profits to pay your staff and keep your digital marketing campaigns on. Nevertheless, don’t make it obvious. This a period where a lot of consumers are going through financial issues. The panic of running out of essentials is everywhere. Thus, the atmosphere is highly sensitive.

A lot of digital marketing moves are being made to prevent people from profiting from the situation. Thus, any indication of profiteering may affect your campaigns negatively.

Many tech companies have rolled out new features to identify and screen content about COVID-19 and gauge the content’s level of severity. They want to ensure that the information that gets passed around is a very important one. One recently announced is that by adtech firm MediaMath.

Thus, your digital marketing strategy should be supportive and indicative of the problem your product solves.

Final words…

The world is on the internet at the moment and everyone is looking for engagement. As a digital marketer, it falls on you to provide this engagement. Brands who are strong at this point have the opportunity of building a loyal customer base they can rely upon after the pandemic.

Express your support and produce creative content. Build a strong brand voice with excellent customer service. Take advantage of the low cost of ads and run campaigns. Even if your product is one that cannot be enjoyed now, like flights or vacations, design your strategy to make consumers feel like they can start planning the future today.

March 13, 2020

Developing a Social Media Strategy

By Ricky Ahuja Marketing, Social Media

A social media strategy is arguably the most essential factor required for any business or brand that wants to take up social media marketing. Without a social media strategy, you have no way of assessing the effectiveness of your social media posts, mostly because you don’t have an idea of what exactly you want these posts to achieve. A social media strategy helps to focus your efforts and overall, increases the value of your brand’s social media presence.

So what is a social media strategy?

Put simply, a social media strategy is a layout of what you want to achieve using social media. You’re definitely going to be posting a considerable amount of content and, basically, your social media strategy answers the question “why?”.

To develop a strong social media strategy. There are a few things need to put in place.

Firstly, you have to specifically define your business objectives. Your business objectives could be to increase awareness of your brand, to attract traffic to your website, or anything else. It could be one specific objective or it could be two or three of them. It all depends on the overall goal that you want your brand’s social media presence to achieve.

Without defined business objectives, it will be difficult, if not impossible for you to precisely estimate the progress your brand is making by being on social media.

Another important thing you have to do is define your target audience. On social media, you can’t get everybody’s attention and really, you don’t need to because it’s very unlikely that everybody is going to be interested in what your brand is offering. When you know the attributes of your ideal consumer, you can avoid creating unnecessary content in a futile effort to please everyone. Your target audience will have a couple of things in common. This may be their age, location, jobs, income, etc.

Precisely defining your target audience will go a long way in determining a lot of things such as the content you post, the form your content is going to take (e.g. videos, pictures), the voice or tone of your posts (and brand), even the choice of social media platforms you are going to use should depend largely on the audience you want to reach.

Finally, constantly assess and improve your social media strategy as much as possible. This is where Social Media Analysis comes in. This involves gathering and analyzing data about your previous social media activities. It will also be helpful for you to analyze the social media data of that your competitors, especially if you are just about to begin using social media for your brand marketing. It isn’t the easiest of tasks but is crucial because it helps you to know what works, so you can focus your efforts in that direction, and what doesn’t work, so you can avoid these things. There are a lot of social media analysis tools available online and some are free so you don’t have to worry about the cost.

Implementing these things will go a long way in improving your social media strategy and by extension, your brand’s value.

March 4, 2020

Engagement as a Core Social Media Strategy

By Ricky Ahuja Marketing, Social Media

The advent of social media has presented a huge turn around in the way businesses communicate with their audience. There is a vast amount of information fighting for the attention of the average social media user today. Advertising tactics that may have been efficient with mass media (e.g. radio, television) simply won’t get you anywhere with social media.

When mass media was predominant, all a company had to do was buy time or space and they could get the attention of the public. Now, however, things have changed. Even though you can still buy space on social media, this doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get any attention at all, mainly because of all the distractions available on the internet.

So what is the way forward?

To attract the attention of your target audience on social media, engagement should be a key consideration. Your audience should feel involved. Even if you choose to go the way of interruptive advertising, make sure your adverts have value and the capacity to appeal to your target audience and also incite a response from them. For instance, on Snapchat, you want to create filters that your followers can use. By letting your audience interact with your brand, they feel involved.

It is important to note, however, that although you can start the conversation about your brand, with social media, you can’t control it. You have very limited power over the information that is generated about your brand. Most times, a large amount of the conversation going on about your brand is generated by the consumers. Feedback about your brand products/services constitutes a considerable part of these conversations. To some, this may sound like a disadvantage, but consumer-generated information can serve as a powerful tool in making your ads more effective. Research has proven beyond a doubt that people’s decisions are influenced strongly by consumer feedback. And you can in turn influence this feedback simply by listening and responding.

Listening is key to the success of any social media strategy. One mistake brands commonly make is that they talk too much. You want to get information about your brand out there; you want your audience to know why you are the preferred choice. But while all this important, it is also key that you listen to what is being said about your brand and respond appropriately. As much as possible, reply to feedback and if you feel you’re not getting enough feedback, ask for it. Let your customers know that they are important to you and that you care about their opinions. Listening gives you an idea of what works and what doesn’t and helps you fine-tune your social media strategy so you can get the most out of it. This way, you can ensure your ads elicit a more positive response from your customers who are in turn more likely to generate positive conversation around your brand which more people will respond to. This way your customers will feel involved.

February 20, 2020

Push vs. Pull Marketing Strategy: Which Is Better for Your Brand?

By Ricky Ahuja Marketing

With easy access to the internet, particularly social media, this is probably the best time to do business. Whatever it is you’re offering, whether a product or a service, there are about 4 billion people on the internet and this gives you a potentially large customer base. But there is one issue whatever your business is, there are other people out there offering products or services similar to yours.

So the question is, how can you get people to choose your product? This is where marketing comes in. The goal of marketing is to express your market position to your target audience as enticingly as possible. To do this, you need a strategy. Several different marketing strategies exist. These strategies can be broadly categorized as either Push or Pull.

What’s the difference?

A push marketing strategy is one that attempts to communicate your product value to consumers where they are. Through this strategy, the business takes the product to the consumer. Several social media platforms have features that support push marketing. For example, promoted Instagram or Facebook posts, promoted tweets, sponsored updates on LinkedIn. Also, a lot of social media platforms have algorithms that increase the effectiveness of your ads by sending them to select people whom you feel are more likely to be interested in your product. Factors such as age, location, etc. can be put into consideration when determining the ideal audience for your ads.

A pull marketing strategy is aimed at attracting the consumer to your product. Pull marketing goes beyond just talking about your product. It requires you to talk about what it is that makes your brand unique and why it is the best option for your potential customer. Since consumers are most likely to do a web search on a product they want to buy, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be a key point of focus in any good pull strategy so that you and your product are easily discoverable by interested customers.

So which of these strategies should you use for your brand? The best answer is both. The push and pull strategies are intertwined to an extent. What’s important is that you find the right balance for your brand.

If you’re just starting up, then what you need is awareness. It’s impossible for consumers to be attracted to a brand that, to them, doesn’t even exist. At this stage, push marketing should be your major focus. Get the word out there. Afterward, you should prioritize pulling customers in. Pull marketing is vital to brand building and will require a lot of patience. This is because, you don’t want to just make a sale, and you want to make sure you acquire long-term consumers. These loyal customers could do more for your brand than even advertising can.

It's not about making a buck, it's about making a difference.

ricky@rickyahuja.com

+1 571-577-7363

Category Archives: Marketing