Individual people and businesses are facing a lot of challenges due to COVID-19. Business operations have been negatively affected due to breakdowns in communications and supply chains. People are also worried about their job security and the return of COVID-19 in a second wave is a serious issue. in this pandemic time people making Content marketing strategies in blogging to improve their visitors to the blog.
Under these circumstances, businesses have two choices. They can either cross their fingers and keep doing what they were doing previously, hoping for the best.
Many businesses have chosen the second option. They are switching operations to virtual meetings and remote working conditions for employees. More importantly, they are innovating the ways in which they interact with their clients and customers to improve service quality.
In this blog, we look at several content marketing strategies that can be useful for businesses during the pandemic.
Show Your Audience that You Are Open for Business
Many businesses had to shut down their operations during the worst phase of the pandemic. Take the example of dining restaurants, movie theatres, and sports avenues. It simply wasn’t possible for them to provide services to clients due to a lack of social distancing measures.
If your business provides a similar service, you need to change the business operations and adapt to follow SOPs. More importantly, you need to let your potential customers know that your business is still operating as usual.
Show them the changes you have made to the business in videos, images, and social posts. Display your business premises with customers having a good time. This can ease their concerns and they will be more likely to purchase your products and services.
Build a Positive Brand Image
To build a positive image, your brand must show customers that you care about their well-being and not just try to make money off their problems. Try to avoid publishing overly sales-focused content. Instead, offer your readers genuine help that can be useful for them in trying times.
Here are three main factors to keep in mind.
Don’t Try to Capitalize on Fear
Don’t try to take advantage of the situation and don’t play on people’s fears or concerns.
For example, suppose you sell personal protective equipment to protect against the virus. Create content on how your equipment can improve safety and protect against the virus. But don’t tell people that they must buy your equipment or they will contract the virus.
Don’t try to profit from fear.
Be Empathetic
People are going through a lot right now. Some of them may be anxious, angry, and frustrated when they contact your service.
While it is good practice to have empathy as the core pillar of your customer service, it is even more important in a time like now.
People will always remember how you made them feel when the world was upside down. Any goodwill you create now will last you a long time.
What is the best way to position your brand during COVID-19? Think humans first, profit second.
Be Supportive and Helpful
No matter what content strategy you create, always think about how you can support and help others right now. Think especially of the people who are not your direct customers right now.
Help can be offered in many ways. You can make direct contributions to hospitals and research efforts, collaborate on operations and even provide education to others.
Some businesses offered discounted and even free products and services Landlords, for instance, agreed to deferred payments and corporations extended interest-free credit for people struggling with finances.
You can do something similar to improve your brand image.
Enhance Your Blogging Efforts
Blogs are one of the most popular forms of content marketing media right now. They are easy to distribute and consume across a range of platforms and devices. People have more time and many have taken up active reading.
If you are not using blogs to market your brand, you are doing your business a huge disservice.
Consistently posting new blogs will help you offer highly researched information to your target audience. You also get a low of options with blogs. You can pretty much right in any way you want, as long as the topic is relevant to your business.
Blogs will help you build a personal touch with customers by directly talking to them. You can also encourage them to post feedback which will help understand what your readers are thinking as well.
If you find it difficult to write consistently, consider hiring a content writing service that can consistently create blogs for you.
Create Video Content
YouTube boasts of having the second biggest search engine online after Google. TikTok has become a sensation in the last six months and gained immense popularity. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have all launched dedicated video services integrated with their platform.
Video marketing content is powerful and it works. If you are not making videos to sell your products and services, you are definitely missing out.
Businesses have a very good opportunity to create videos that show how much they care for their existing and potential customers. There are many ways you can use videos.
If you are in the food business, like a restaurant or a grocery seller, you can create food preparation videos and share them with viewers. You can use branded products that you sell in these videos or market your restaurant’s food preparation methods.
If you are a financial services provider or educational service you can create videos offering free tips that can help clients in these tough times.
Experiment with Webinars and Live Events
A lot of brands quickly adapted to Covid 19 protocols by switching to live-streaming videos. This helped them keep their businesses operational when the government banned social gatherings.
From a purely content marketing point, webinars offer a lot of advantages over venue-based events. People can easily connect and join such events from any location. Files, documents, and emails can be shared easily within seconds.
Before you adopt webinars, think about how are going to mix up the format when communicating with customers. Differentiating your video or webinar content from other brands is going to become a big challenge as more and more companies start doing it.
Be creative in how you differentiate.
You can add custom animations to live feeds or use a whiteboard to explain ideas more effectively. Not everyone is doing that right now and a few small changes can make your business stand out in the crowd.
Improve Existing Content for SEO
If the new content you produce gets buried under news coverage then don’t fret. You can re-optimize it and publish it again to get better visibility.
It is a common marketing tactic for content writers to re-optimize their blogs, articles, and landing pages to make them more suitable for search engine algorithms. Refining existing content to drive traffic to your site is one of the best ways to achieve high content marketing ROI.
If your business is experiencing a slowdown in sales due to COVID-19, then it could be the ideal time to audit your content and get started on a complete re-optimization project.
Conclusion
In this blog, we covered some new content marketing strategies that can be useful for businesses during the pandemic.
COVID-19 presents both opportunities and challenges for businesses. Your high street operations may have been affected, but you can make up for them by focusing more on your digital marketing strategy.
The world was already heading in that direction. The pandemic has only made the switch to digital marketing faster. It should be taken as a wake-up call by many businesses that were dragging their feet earlier in switching to an online sales approach.
Great blog, truly valuable and helpful strategy. Thanks for sharing.