What marketing rules to follow during a crisis like the Covid-19 outbreak?

Marketing rules to follow during the Covid-19 outbreak

Since lots of content is appearing on my timeline about managing your business, marketing, and content marketing during the Covid-19 outbreak, I tend to share more such content through my blog.

Forbes Billionaires has published Marketing Rules To Follow During Uncertain Economic Times.

This article lays down some rules to follow during an international crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

The suggestions made in this article are quite logical and I myself have been writing about most of them on my blog.

Whereas my writing is around content writing and copywriting, this is a general article on how to take care of your business during such a crisis.

Some of the suggestions made in the article are…

Increase your focus on your current customers and clients

Every business struggles to get new customers and clients.

I myself am constantly worried about, and working hard at, getting new assignments from new clients.

But I’m getting a constant supply of work from my existing clients.

Although, it isn’t as much as the usual business that I get, still, a big amount of my work these days is coming from clients who have either used my content writing services previously, or are currently using them.

Keep in touch with your existing customers and clients.

Inform them and send them information that can keep them safe and secure.

Do something that can improve their lives or even cheer them up.

Hard times doesn’t mean you don’t spend on marketing

The meaning of marketing changes in hard times but it doesn’t stop.

There are multiple reasons why you must go on marketing your business.

The article rightly says

When recessions hit, marketing is often among the first budget cuts. Doing so could potentially cause long-term damage to the brand and allow smaller or weaker competitors to steal market share. There are countless studies going back more than a decade showing that brands maintaining or increasing advertising during a recession gain market share over time.

What does marketing mean in contemporary times, even if you take the Covid-19 outbreak out of the picture?

It means constantly engaging with prospective and current customers and clients.

If you abandon marketing during hard times, your prospective and current customers and clients may think that you are here only to sell and when the prospect of selling vanishes, you vanish too.

Adopt new technologies and new tools and platforms

You may feel that I’m pitching my services, if you haven’t started publishing quality content on your website, this is the right time to do so.

The world of business and marketing is constantly evolving.

15-20 years ago, people depended on conventional advertising on TV, radio and newspapers.

Over the past few years, people have been sifting there focus on content marketing – let people come to your website instead of loading them into visiting your website.

Similarly, you should explore different avenues to promote your business without overtly pushing your products and services in front of people, especially when there are more concerned about their safety and livelihood.

Since hundreds of thousands of people are being forced to work from home, I have observed that many cloud-based services are promoting their business aggressively because they know that these people are going to need the new cloud-based tools to work and collaborate.

Use the time to build your brand through quality content writing and publishing

This is my own pitching, but it is quite applicable.

Just imagine how much you are saving by not having to work in an office.

You can use some of your savings to build your content presence and consequently, expand your brand presence on the Internet.

You can work on your SEO and see how you can generate more search engine traffic.

You may like to read 10 SEO content writing rules you cannot ignore

Open a spreadsheet and start making a list of all the keywords and search terms you haven’t yet covered in your content.

Then, you can either hire a content writer and start publishing your blog posts and webpages on your website, or you can do it yourself.

Be a pillar of strength to your customers and clients

You have been running a business.

You have been leading a workforce.

You have been implementing new business ideas.

You know how to turn challenges into opportunities.

Share your wisdom and experience with your customers and clients and help them in this hour of need.

How do you drive traffic to your e-commerce store with targeted content writing?

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Increasing traffic to your e-commerce store with targeted content writing

In this blog post you will learn how to use quality content writing to drive targeted traffic to your e-commerce website.

Driving traffic to your e-commerce website or e-commerce store ideally shouldn’t be a problem.

The content management systems are built in such a way that they are anyway quite search engine friendly.

If you are doing everything to make it easier for Google to crawl and index your catalog, getting targeted traffic from search engines shouldn’t be a problem.

The main problem comes from your competition.

For practically every commodity being sold on the Internet, there are hundreds of e-commerce websites offering the same thing.

If you’re looking for shoes, there are hundreds of websites selling the same variety of those shows.

Even if there are not “hundreds of websites”, searchers rarely go beyond the second page of the search results.

Hence, if your website is not featuring on the first page, there is a remote chance that people will come to your e-commerce website.

What are the main sources of targeted traffic to your e-commerce website?

Sources of inbound traffic to your e-commerce website

The main sources of targeted traffic to your e-commerce store are

Search engines
Internet advertising
PPC marketing on search engines and social media websites
In-app advertising
Direct traffic from incoming links
Email marketing

I provide content writing services for search engine optimization, for accumulating incoming links from other websites and social media and social networking websites, and of course, for email marketing.

How does quality content writing help you get targeted traffic to your e-commerce store?

There are multiple ways content writing can help you. Here are a few things that can be done.

Write highly unique titles and descriptions for your products

There must be something unique in your products that you can highlight. Something that may be very few people are searching for, but they are searching for it.

For example, many running shoes are Velcro shoes, without laces. Hence, if you have “running shoes” or, “jogging shoes” in your catalogue, maybe you can also highlight the Velcro feature and use in the title “jogging shoes with Velcro” or “running shoes with Velcro”.

The basic idea is to stand out and write something that is not being used by other e-commerce store managers.

Similarly, in the description, mention attributes that are important, attributes for which people search, but that are not being covered by other sellers.

This will immediately improve your targeted traffic.

Write and publish engaging content to build long-term traffic

Content writing for e-commerce stores doesn’t just mean writing titles and descriptions for your products.

You can write blog posts and articles talking about various aspects of the products that you are selling.

An e-commerce website selling gadgets can publish gadget reviews and can even invite customers to leave reviews.

Remember that these reviews are different from the usual reviews that appear under every category.

I’m talking about full-fledged blog posts and articles.

An e-commerce website selling garments and accessories can publish advice on how to select the right garment for the right occasion.

Many people are looking for such information.

Recently I wrote a blog post on top 10 evening wear disasters to avoid, for an apparels website.

You may wonder if big stores like Amazon aren’t publishing such blog posts and articles, why should you?

Well, they are very big websites with a very strong brand presence.

They are the preferred choice of all search engines.

These e-commerce stores have already spent years and invested millions in building their brands.

Since your brand is not well known, you have to compensate this lack of brand presence with high-quality content.

This Forbes blog post says that 90% of today’s data has been created since 2016.

This post was written in 2018 but you can easily guess how much information is being published on the Internet and how important it is to get noticed amidst this deluge of information.

Get traffic from social media through engaging content

All sort of information is constantly being shared on social media and social networking websites.

This information doesn’t always have to be informative.

But it must provide some value to those who are sharing it (look, I’m sharing this) and to those with whom the information is being shared.

You will have to decide which type of information your target customers and clients like to share on their social media timelines and then write and publish content accordingly.

But make sure that you don’t just simply create noise.

Creating noise doesn’t help your e-commerce business.

Your content must be meaningful, and people should be able to relate to it.

It should definitely represent the voice of your brand.

Doesn’t matter if it is funny.

Doesn’t matter if it is highly useful (some tips on the Covid-19 outbreak).

It doesn’t matter if it is full of tips and tricks (better ways of working from home).

Make it share worthy.

The importance of content writing for email marketing

Then comes email marketing.

This Nielson study says that 66% of online buyers buy their products from the brands they are familiar with.

Nothing nurtures familiarity better than email marketing.

You may also like to read Importance of email marketing for content marketing success

Email marketing is one of the strongest Internet marketing tools but just like any strong tool, it takes effort to build it.

It is of no use if you haven’t invested time in building your own mailing list.

Only high-quality content writing and publishing helps you build a quality mailing list – a healthy subscriber base that responds to your messages.

Remember that people subscribe to your mailing list when they expect something good out of it.

When they find glimpses of quality in your content, upon visiting your website or blog, they don’t want to miss your content and hence, they subscribe to your mailing list.

The good thing about running an e-commerce website is people already expect to hear updates about your products.

But they simply don’t want to buy.

Something must be there for them to attract them.

They want to get better bargains.

They want to receive discounts.

They want to be notified of lucrative offers.

They are also looking for information they can use for making better buying decisions.

I suggest maintaining a balance of 60-40: if you’re an e-commerce store, make 60% of your email campaigns helpful (useful information) and 40% about different product offers people would like to miss.

The main benefits of writing and publishing quality content for your e-commerce website

Before you talk about benefits, here is an interesting quote by Bruce Springsteen, used to clarify a point in a McKinsey article on the importance of consistently publishing high-quality content:

Sustaining an audience is hard,” Bruce Springsteen once said. “It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time.

Writing and publishing content focuses on generating and maintaining an audience that pays attention to you.

Hence, I constantly say on my blog that don’t create noise, develop a voice.

If your audience cannot distinguish you from other websites and blogs, it’s no use publishing content.

Even if they want to do business with you, since they cannot distinguish you from the others, it becomes difficult for them to buy from you.

If you go and publishing the same sort of stuff being published on other websites, your content won’t deliver and then you will think content writing and content marketing are useless.

The problem is with the approach, not with this type of marketing.

With this out of the way, here are the main benefits of writing and publishing quality content for your e-commerce website to generate targeted traffic:

1. You build audience retention

Why is audience retention important?

You want people to remember you, right?

With most people wanting to buy from brands they are familiar with, it is very important that people can immediately recall in what business you are when they come across your name.

2. More social media sharing

People share your content if they find it useful.

When they share it, you get traffic from social media and social networking websites.

3. Quality content writing builds trust

Trust is very important on the Internet.

Although e-commerce has gone mainstream, a lot depends on how much people trust your website when they decide to buy.

When you regularly publish quality content that people like, they begin to trust you and your judgement and consequently, your business proposition.

4. You improve your search engine rankings

The SEO mechanism works in a very convoluted manner.

To make Google crawl your website regularly, you need to offer something worth crawling regularly.

If your content writing and publishing frequency is very low, Google learns that you are not a frequent publisher and hence, stops visiting your website or blog regularly.

It leaves everything on randomness.

On the other hand, if there is a pattern and you publish content with greater frequency, it begins to crawl and index your website regularly.

Once I experienced that one of my technology blogs was indexed within seconds when I published new content.

Back then, I was publishing six updates every day.

Even the way you readers react to your content has a direct impact on your SEO.

Hence, it is very important you write and publish engaging content that solves real problems for your readers so that Google can pick positive indicators and further improve your rankings.

You may like to read 5 content writing tips to improve SEO

In conclusion, if you want to experience the power of high-quality content, just look at an average newspaper or magazine.

Even if you don’t trust journalism nowadays, try to remember those days when you trusted the newspaper that you got in the morning.

Whether it was New York Times or Washington Post or the Times of India, you trusted the editors and columnists and based your political and ideological opinions based on their opinions.

These publications had built their platforms, their presence, among our lives.

In the same manner, good quality content writing and publishing, helps us build our own platform, no matter how small it is (even if you have an audience of two people).

It makes people trust you and then buy from your e-commerce store.

What type of content to write and publish during a global crisis like Covid-19?

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Content writing and publishing during the Covid-19 crisis

It is very easy to lose track during a crisis. There is all-out chaos.

All your attention span is taken by the news of how many people are being infected or how many people are dying, or about how the outbreak is unleashing unprecedented recession.

What type of content should you write and publish during a pandemic that is affecting every individual in the world?

Just as it happens in normal times, the purpose of writing and publishing content is always to help your readers, and so should be the case when you write and publish content during a global crisis.

This blog post on Marketing Land titled Marketing during a crisis and recession rightly says that “There’s no playbook for any of this.”

Marketing in the times of a global crisis

No one among us has seen a global crisis of such scale. The things that we saw in the movies are now unfolding right in front of our eyes like a bad dream.

The good thing about writing and publishing quality content is that the fundamental intention of publishing such content doesn’t change: even when things were normal, your content was supposed to help people.

In the “normal” times, of course, the “help” meant educating your customers and clients so that they could make better purchase decisions.

But in the Covid-19 ridden world, you know that the biggest question staring in everyone’s faces how to survive the outbreak, both physically and financially.

When you want to promote your products and services, you must consider whether people can actually buy them or not.

I have a few clients whose markets have totally vanished (I provide B2B content writing services and hence all my clients have their own businesses).

For most of the clients, they’re simply trying to hold onto whatever they have got.

Fortunately, the machinery of the world is still moving.

Which means, things can be done, should be done, and this also holds true for writing and publishing quality content to maintain your search engine rankings, to maintain your visibility, and even to reach markets that you haven’t yet reached.

For example, I’m getting content writing assignments from countries I had never previously gotten work from. Hence, I’m thinking of expanding my presence in these countries.

Here is a nice “Whiteboard Friday” video and the treat is that Rand Fishkin is making the presentation almost after a year:

People are naturally holding themselves back when it comes to spending money on marketing, especially content marketing because they believe that the demand is crashing, but Rand in the video makes a very good point: things are going to bounce back, and when they do, will you be ready to leverage?

Don’t hold yourself back simply because everyone else is. If you can afford, do invest in content marketing and building quality content because as the world gets back on track, there will be a sudden surge. At that time, if you have improved your visibility you will be better off compared to your competitors who have gone into a huddle and are ignoring their marketing.

Rand says that one thing we can be certain of is that people are paying more attention online now that they are confined to their homes.

Whatever you are publishing, they’re paying attention. They are less distracted. They may not be travelling. They may not be sitting in coffee shops. They may not be chatting with their colleagues or a group of friends while checking out your blog post. They’re not as distracted as they normally were during pre-Covid-19 times.

Although the above-mentioned blog post from Marketing Land gives a broad advice to businesses and brands on how to manage their businesses in the changed scenario, since I provide content writing services, my main focus is, what sort of content can help you during the Covid-19 crisis: content that can help you survive currently, and build a strong footing for you when the machinery of the world begins to move again.

Here are a few things you can consider:

Write and publish content that will help your core audience

Even if you are a hardcore seller, aggressively promoting your products and services is not going to help you.

Even if people are not put off, they are in no position to either use your products or services (most of them) or buy them.

Take for example the advice given by the Marketing Land blog post, and even by this blog post that I’m writing. Publish advice people can use or at least get inspired from.

Of course, we are all experienced. We all know how to handle the situation. But when we read about it, when we come across blog posts and articles that talk about the same thing, it keeps us focused and helps us reorient our approach.

What if you don’t have something valuable to share with your audience?

Your genuine concern helps. People and businesses are publishing a ton of useful information on the Internet. Go through LinkedIn. Go through Twitter. Find useful articles and blog posts and then share them through your blog or your newsletter.

Consolidate your existing content on your website and blog

Since practically everyone in the civilized world is confined to home, you may get enough time to go through your website and blog and see what content you have been ignoring or didn’t have enough time to improve.

Maybe there are certain keywords and search terms you have been ignoring or you didn’t have much time to cover. Now you can cover them.

If there are certain topics you feel should have been on your website, you can publish them.

Should you publish information about the Coronavirus outbreak? Many websites are doing that.

It depends. If you have information that is not present on other websites, publish it on your website otherwise, just publish links to other, more useful information sources like newspapers or hospital websites.

Otherwise, focus on your core topic. There is no need to sell if you don’t feel like it. Just fill up your website or blog with lots of useful information that will come handy when people start buying again.

Is longform content always better compared to shorter pieces?

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Is longform content always better than short form content

I have multiple times written about the benefits of longform content.

Longform content is very long blog posts and articles comprising of at least 2500 words, or more.

Medium-sized blog posts consist of webpages and blog posts having more than 1000 words and less than or equal to 2500 words.

Various SEO plug-ins will tell you that anything less than 1000 words isn’t good for SEO.

Is it really so?

This Content Marketing Institute blog post says that not every piece of content needs to be longform content.

The author of the above post rightly says that not every topic requires 2000 words.

Suppose, I want to explain to you what is longform content; do I really need 2000 words to explain what longform content means?

I can explain it in 200 words, or even less.

How do you decide how long your blog post or web page should be?

You can decide this by considering what sort of information will be useful to your readers.

If you write something like “15 tips on creating highly effective SEO content”, then, while explaining these 15 tips, you may go beyond 2000-3000 words. This is because you will be talking about 15 topics or 15 tips.

I have seen on many blogs that they unnecessarily go on throwing around statistics from scores of blog posts and articles just to inflate the number of words.

This can be exhausting for the readers. Even I find such articles off- putting, especially when I’m looking for some quick information to use.

Best thing to do is, create a roadmap for your blog post. If possible, use a mind mapping tool. Keep on adding points till you feel that they’re going to be useful to your readers. The moment you feel that a particular section is not going to be useful, remove it. It is not going to adversely affect your SEO.

Can you grow your business during the coronavirus pandemic?

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How to grow your business during the coronavirus outbreak

I know, talking about growing your business during this crushing coronavirus outbreak may seem a bit inappropriate.

The reality is, we all need to make a living, at least those who can.

We are all looking into a long spell of economic downturn coupled with a humanitarian crisis that hasn’t been seen for at least a century.

Hence, all the more reason to keep at least some parts of the economy moving and maintaining the cash flow.

This Green Entrepreneur blog post lists 7 strategies that can help you grow a business, or rather, a new business during the coronavirus pandemic.

Every challenge brings a collection of opportunities with it, and so has the current coronavirus pandemic.

With most of the businesses coming to a halt, you have time to focus on content marketing and expand your presence on the Internet. It will help you reach out to the existing market, however much it exists, and it will also give you a headway when the world gets on its feet.

The above blog post lists the following things you can do to grow your business while you maintain social distancing and remain confined to your home.

Enhance your content marketing effort

The good thing about content marketing is that content can be produced and published digitally. You don’t have to invest in raw material. All the tools that you need to publish useful content are already there with you.

You want to publish videos? You can use your mobile phone.

You want to publish podcasts? Even these can be done using your mobile phone or a standard microphone attached to your computer or laptop.

Want to publish blog posts? You can write them yourself or you can hire a content writer or a blog writer.

Content marketing helps you in normal days and it also helps you in these testing times.

Businesses haven’t disappeared. They are just recuperating, or they are functioning in a different manner. You have to reach out to them and content marketing is the best way to do so.

Work at improving your SEO

In the regular hubbub of doing business content marketing and SEO often take a backseat. This is a good time to focus on improving your search engine rankings and increase your search visibility.

The benefits of SEO come from many factors. As mentioned above, your search visibility improves. You get more targeted traffic. Your conversion rate improves. You get more back links because a greater number of people can find your content. You get more content to share through your newsletter.

There are various tools available that can help you figure out what sort of content you should publish to improve your SEO.

Invest in social media marketing

Facebook has nearly 2.45 billion monthly active users. At the time of the Covid-19 crisis, more people are logging on to Facebook to keep up with their loved ones and even to interact with their colleagues.

The same goes with other social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter.

Millions of your customers might be there. If you have never advertised on social media and social networking platforms, perhaps, now is the right time.

Be regular with email marketing

Email marketing needs to be a bit different during a pandemic. Ideally it should be different always, in the sense that instead of continuously pushing your products and services in front of people, you must add value to their inboxes.

Keep in touch with your subscribers. Send them good information about how they can keep themselves safe. If you feel that a bit of information can help them work better during their confinement, share it with them. The key is, provide value. They are going to remember you for that.

Aside from these actions, I would also suggest you spend more time on LinkedIn if you’re providing B2B services, like I do. Almost all my content writing and online copywriting clients come from the B2B segment.