According to US Small Business Administration, if your turnover is between one to five million pounds per year you should be spending 7-8% of that on marketing. (I’ve always said 6-8% in the UK so this tallies well).
It is critical that you maintain at least this level of marketing investment throughout the Coronavirus pandemic but you might have to move around where you spend this. It makes sense to cut back on advertising to attract visitors to a store, however SEO and inbound marketing are a long game. You have the opportunity to push ahead and come out on top.
This is the time to tackle all of those potentially impactful SEO and marketing tasks you’ve had on your back burner. Whether you’re working with an agency or handling marketing in-house, below are 14 tasks you or your team can be working on while they self-isolate and work remotely.
13 SEO & Marketing Tasks to Do NOW for a Faster Coronavirus Recovery
- Interview clients and employees
Use Zoom or Google Hangouts to host and record video calls. Interview your clients, customers and staff about their unique experiences with and knowledge of your products, services, and culture. Use https://otter.ai basic to transcribe the audio. These transcripts and videos will be a rich source of insider info for your blog posts, social content, media releases, and more.
- Do a Mini-Audit of Your Content Assets
If you haven’t kept an inventory of your content assets to date, this is a great time to get started.
- Web pages
- Emails
- Blog posts.
- White papers
- Ebooks
- Presentations
- Videos
- Infographics
- Articles you’ve published externally.
- Possibly articles others have published about your business, too?
Evaluate each piece:
- Which high-quality pieces and images can you repurpose for other channels?
- Which pieces got the most social shares? The most backlinks?
- Which ones get the most traffic on-site?
These give opportunities for:
- Updating with fresh content.
- Optimising with new CTAs and keywords.
- Adding internal links to new products/services.
- Re-promoting when business picks up again.
- Webinars
Want to answer frequently asked questions, introduce new team members, products, or features to your customer base, inspire more creative use of your products or services?
This is a great time to try out webinars.91% of professionals say webinars are their favourite content format for learning. See The Ultimate Guide to Webinars: 37 Tips for Successful Webinars and The 24 Best Webinar Platforms to help you get started.
- Clean up Your Administrative Jobs
- Clean up files, delete things not needed anymore and sort out filling on and off line.
- Website: write some posts I’ve been meaning to get to that have evergreen advice, and do a long overdue SEO clean up.
- Webinars and Podcasts: research some that I can work on and look at some ideas for the future.
- Take Aim at Different Types of SERPS
If you’re like a lot of marketers, you haven’t had time to even think about getting any more sophisticated than having a presence in search and maybe trying to balance your organic and PPC efforts for good coverage, really manage your Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Now that you may have a bit of time and space to dig deeper, you can plan better and action. See how with 10 Ways to Get Multiple Organic Page 1 Google Rankings.
- Complete Videos
Videos are great for SEO and they can also be the basis for all types of other content, too.
Embed the video in a blog post and include the transcript using https://www.veed.io or https://otter.ai.
Take screenshots and use them as images in social.
Take 5-10 quotes from the video transcript and use them alongside images on Instagram in the coming months.
Reuse those quotes in media releases and upcoming blog posts.
- Work on Your Online Reviews Strategy
Answer your online reviews. This is a good time to make sure your more recent reviews have a thoughtful response.
Create a reviews policy and, if you have a good candidate, train an employee now to manage your online reviews going forward.
Write some template responses and go over your brand messaging with them.
Coach them on responding to negative reviews and escalating legitimate customer service issues to the right person.
Give them the tools they need to monitor reviews and get alerts.
Show them what you expect as far as measuring the value of reviews and monthly reporting.
- Get Behind Digital in a Big Way
Ensure you have senior management buy in by delivering measurable results. Take time on reporting KPIs and find out what those new and emerging KPIs are.
- Update Your Google My Business (GMB) Profile for Local Customers
Google wants local businesses to use the tools available within the GMB dashboard to let customers know what’s changed.
Are you operating on special hours? Taking any special measures to avoid the spread of COVID-19?
Update your hours and business description, share Google Posts with updates and offers, and make sure your contact information is correct in case people are trying to reach you.
- Show Your Website Some Love
You know your web site isn’t perfect, spend some making it as perfect as it can be.
- Sniff out Unnatural Links
Seek and destroy unnatural backlinks.Unnatural links are dangerous. They’re not all intentional, they happen.
For example, a site received a manual Google penalty but achieved a top 3 positioning within weeks of removing a disavow file and removing over 1,900 unnatural links. In another, a site lost 82% of its traffic after building thousands of unnatural links. An unscrupulous SEO here, a shady competitor there and suddenly you can’t figure out why your SEO efforts aren’t paying off.
Help is here: How to Find Unnatural Links to Your Site & What to Do About Them, 11 types of unnatural links to watch for and a step-by-step process for finding them.
- Consider whether an Outreach Strategy is OK
Reaching out to your clients and customers during a pandemic may or may not be appropriate. It depends on your type of business, your existing relationship with customers, and the purpose of the communication.
If customers are used to hearing from you regularly by email, SMS messaging or social media don’t let that relationship drop off. Stay away from tacky disaster-related promotions.
What you can do is get creative and think of how you can offer reassurance, social connection, or tangible assistance during COVID-19. For example:
- Could you host an online video space once a week for people to check-in, have a light discussion on trends in your industry?
- Can you be a local leader in distributing reputable information to your community about COVID-19 supports? Include a disclaimer that you are not giving medical advice, and always link back to the original source of the information so people can verify it.
- Let customers know how your business is changing or adapting to protect them and your employees. Encourage conversation and be forthcoming in answering questions or concerns they may have.
- Get to Know Customers Better
Go through your analytics and sales/lead data. What do you know about your customers? What do you know about prospects that didn’t pick you? What is in the analytics data that you have missed in the past? Compare offline and online trends and determine what could you fix today that you have never had time to do.
14. And Remember, Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First…
Supply chain interruptions, the need for social distancing, and impending economic uncertainty are all serious stresses.
You have responsibilities to employees, customers, and other stakeholders to take care of yourself so you’re in shape to take care of those others, first.
The WHO has released a document entitled Mental Health Considerations During COVID-19 Outbreak that I recommend you read.
Focusing on the future and what we can do to prepare for recovery matters.
Share your tips for others too. Contact us here and I will post on LinkedIn.