From Google Ads to SEO – COVID-19 Marketing

There is no doubt COVID-19 is changing business – for some, it’s even closing business altogether.  There are two responses: 1) businesses can choose to try something different – that is,  sustain (and possibly gain) market share or 2) suspend their marketing – that is, potentially forfeit their business’s share of voice, customer base and the market.

Here is our view on the marketing situation.

The appointments and service requests are coming into a business as a result of multiple marketing processes.

This is what keeps and has kept your business busy all this time. If you are thinking that suspending everything and then simply reopening, then I’ve got bad news for you – many clients won’t return. The only way to get more sales is to continue your marketing. This has to change quickly.

If you were relying on Google Ads and Facebook to produce immediate service requests, now is the time to channel these leads into the top of your sales funnel.

Change your strategy by offering your leads the option to:

There is always the question about Google Ads vs SEO.

To put it simply, Google Ads is an immediate form of marketing, while SEO takes time to kick in.

Google Ads disappear once your budget is depleted while SEO is there to stay (as long as basic processes are followed). Playing the long term and the short term is the safest bet. That’s why we recommend businesses do both if they want to get the absolute maximum from search engine marketing.

Establishing Search Engine Optimisation is something that many businesses completely ignore. The main reason being that they’ve tried it before and it didn’t work.  For a lot of businesses, they fail to achieve results because they are using unrealistic major keywords or keywords derived from the black-hat approach (unfortunately we find that many companies offer this).

However, for most, well-established businesses, over 50% of conversions usually come from their organic traffic (i.e. SEO). So if you are not currently achieving this or if your business cannot be easily found in Google, then Local SEO is something well worth looking into – especially in times such as these.

Local SEO is a combination of Google Business listings and organic results rankings. Local SEO is a somewhat complicated process that works on several fronts. To quickly summarise how it works:

Firstly, it involves improving the content of your website to make it relevant to your target market.

Secondly, it utilises several processes that aim to speed up your website, improve the structure and create backlinks.

The whole process is fairly fragile and changes quite frequently. Before you make any changes to your website we highly recommend you should understand what you are doing. We have been offering SEO services for over 5 years now and would be happy to discuss this with you in a free consultation.

If you haven’t started sending emails to your contact list and particularly past clients, you are missing out. This is the fastest way to keep your established target market up to date. We’ve put together a blog post to help you with this: The Six Most Important Steps of Email Marketing Campaigns.

For some clients, we turn email marketing into a strategy by building audiences across Google and Facebook to target similar markets across different touchpoints.

If you are looking to turn this into a strategy, let us know. There is so much potential and alternative strategies you can leverage with your email marketing.

Once things return to normal (or the new normal) we are going to see a lot of new advertisers who jump onto Google Ads to market their businesses. With Google Ads being an immediate form of marketing, expect the number of competitors to increase significantly. This will increase your costs per click (CPC) and conversion. To avoid clashing with the competition, the best thing you can do now is looking into ways to diversify your marketing. We know that Local SEO is one tactic that works well. With Local SEO you can take advantage of your Google Map listings by meeting your target markets’ organic results for search terms within your geographical area.

This is the million-dollar question at the moment. With many business owners presently uncertain, one thing I can promise you is that the world won’t be the same after COVID-19.

Many online processes and systems created for COVID-19 will remain, even after things settle down. This is because this situation will prove the cost-efficiency and scalability of these processes. You will be winning if your business can adapt or onboard online processes to create revenue streams (e.g. e-commerce) or offer systems to help clients with cash flow (e.g. payment systems).

The main thing for business owners to understand right now is that usual business processes may not return and if they do, prepare for them not to work as they used to. Your marketing and sales processes will most definitely be impacted.

We strongly believe that helping businesses future-proof their marketing is the start to successful business future. If there is any way we can help, please feel free to reach out to us.