Winter 2020 is shaping up to be a huge test for many companies, especially small ones. The good news is that there’s still time to get your marketing in shape to pass it. Here’s what you need to know.
Paper-based marketing is out
Print marketing has long been a great option for promoting local businesses. There are lots of good reasons for this.
Sadly, however, COVID19 has effectively outweighed them all. This means that, for the time being at least, even small businesses need to adapt to digital marketing.
It’s vital to have an effective strategy
One of the harsh truths of digital marketing is that it’s very easy to spend a lot of time and effort getting nowhere.
This tends to be because companies try a bit of this and try a bit of that in an attempt to discover what works for them and what doesn’t.
Realistically, it is often more cost-effective just to get help from a reputable digital agency in the first place.
Think “winter” rather than “Christmas”
The usual Christmas season semi-officially opens on Black Friday. It builds up slowly to peak just before Christmas and remains high until the end of the January sales. Then it nosedives until Valentine’s Day.
This year, however, statistics indicate that people have started their Christmas shopping particularly early.
It, therefore, seems very possible that there will be slow but steady progress towards Christmas. The mid-/late-December peak will probably still be there but will be much lower than usual.
That may sound like terrible news, but it could be an opportunity. If shoppers are starting early, then they are under less time pressure.
This means that they might be more willing to engage with businesses and develop a deeper connection with them.
For this to work, however, businesses would need to be able to keep up their marketing over the whole winter and beyond.
Stay in your lane
One of the worst mistakes small businesses can make is to try to target higher-volume keywords over the Christmas period.
If you want those keywords, then the chances are a bigger business wants them too.
That bigger business will probably have a stronger brand and a larger budget and will therefore outgun you in both organic and pay-per-click results.
Instead, stay in your niche and put all your efforts into crushing it. If your niche is local, then stick to local SEO.
If your niche is your business area, then stick to your core expertise. In either case, see if you can niche down even further than usual so that you dominate one particular market segment. Keep expansion plans for another time of year.
Be realistic about social media
These days, social media is at least as competitive as regular SEO, maybe even more.
Building an organic following there takes time and effort. Channeling that organic following to your own website takes even more effort and generally some money as well.
This is because social media platforms are unlikely to provide organic promotion to posts with outbound links. You therefore either have to rely on your own community following or pay for them to be boosted.
- DISCLOSURE – This post has been written by an outside source
