Due to the impact of the pandemic, your business and its content marketing action plan has most likely suffered from its detrimental impact. There are certain industries (restaurants, hospitality, real estate, transportation, travel) that have been hit the hardest by the pandemic. From the perspective of content marketing, there aren’t really that many people showing interest in these areas. This means the content that is being put out isn’t attracting qualified leads. So what can your business do? We suggest modifying your content marketing action plan and view it through a COVID-19 lens. It’s important to remember most of your audience is still anxious and facing a host of challenges, so why not help them find answers. We’re going to go over five content marketing strategies you can do to stay mindful of the needs of your audience.
Before you start making changes, you have to analyze what’s working and what’s not. For instance, if you’re heavily investing in Facebook ads, are those ads getting the results you actually want, or are they costing you more than you can afford? Depending on what industry you’re in, it’s either plausible or not to be increasing your social media budget.
Blogs are an integral part of content strategies, so if you’re not blogging, you’re doing your brand a huge disservice. Blogging will give you an opportunity to offer researched information to your target audience, but remember your topics should be relevant to your business. You want to keep your blog active and relevant, and while you don’t necessarily need to discuss your products/services, you can still come across as a brand that cares about its potential customers.
Though email marketing might seem like a bombarding way to reach your audience, if done right, you can achieve great results. Your emails should be an ideal mix of “sales and marketing” and “how are you doing” emails. The latter is important, because your brand shouldn’t come off as insensitive. It’s imperative that you show empathy and genuine concern for your target audience, this should be evident from your email copy. Now’s not the time to pitch products/services in emails, as they should be about showing your concern.
One of the critical actions you can take is to use some of the free time you have at your disposal to create value-driven content assets. You might not have added such assets to your content marketing efforts because your time was in short supply. But, now is the time to create assets such as actionable guides that will bring in visitors to your site. Yes, life is limping back to normal, but people are still looking for meaningful material to read, so capitalize and deliver on their requirements and expectations. You can gate this content, which helps you build an opt-in email list that can enable you to run a targeted email marketing campaign. Such content will also help you build authority in your niche, at a time when it is difficult to do so.
In these times, your content marketing action plan must be empathetic to the needs of your target audience. Strive to reach your audience in such a way that they won’t criticize it to ensure your message is being delivered correctly.