Marketing During Covid-19: 5 Strategies to Use Right Now

Part of our Moving Business from Survive to Thrive series … this week I’m giving you five specific strategies you can and should be using in your marketing right now (plus a huge tip at the end about how you can pivot to selling online).

Pivot Your Messaging

Marketing during COVID-19 means you need to consider your messaging during COVID-19. This pandemic has impacted people on a very personal level, even if they haven’t contracted the virus. That stress can be at an unconscious / subconscious level, which means that messages may be having a different impact now – and it’s a good time to pivot your messaging.

Some things you will want to consider is if you need to make your message more serious, or perhaps make it more lighthearted if it has been too serious.

You will likely want to focus more on positivity and hope versus some of the familiar fear tactics that a lot of marketers tout. This may include FOMO messaging, which means you will want to check your calls-to-action.

You’ll also want to give your copy a review for words that may feel insensitive right now, such as “viral” or “killer” or anything health-related.

Consider Adding PPC Ads

It may seem counter-intuitive at a time when businesses are worrying about expenses, but now is actually a GREAT time to do some advertising on Facebook.

Right now, the CPC and cost per impression on Facebook is the lowest I’ve seen for most of my clients. This also means that any budget you put towards the platform will also go much further. Web traffic is up, and the number of advertisers is down, which means that ads are actually cheaper.

You still need to follow all of the best practices, such as good copy and highly targeting your audience, and you will continue to see great results.

If you aren’t sure how to target an audience on Facebook, I’ll be going live in our private group on Facebook with the exact steps that I use to fine-tune an audience on Facebook. Head to Facebook and request to join the group Brilliance Bar Marketing Mastermind now, since after we share that video next week, it will only be available for a limited time before moving back to our paid training course platform.

Focus on Content

A lot of people are stuck indoors right now, and many of them aren’t working. If they are lucky enough to work from home, their daily commute time has been cut out, meaning they still have more free time than usual. Plus they’re not leaving to participate in other forms of entertainment.

What this means is that more and more people are turning to online content during COVID-19.

Between emails, videos, social media, and anything on your own website, podcasts, plus tons of other platforms to choose from, it can be overwhelming to figure out what type of content to do. Just choose one – picking just one helps limit overwhelm and confusion when figure out a new content strategy.

You could also try using a fun, emerging way to connect with your audience, such as a 360 degree video, virtual reality, shoppable posts and pins, quizzes and polls.

Or, you can take a look at exactly how I do my own content to take one topic (like this one), and have it pushed out to my website (which you’re reading now), social media platforms, live videos on Facebook, YouTube, audio podcast, and syndicated to somewhere around 30 other sites throughout the web. That’s my 1-Hour Content Curation strategy. Use the promo code PODCAST and you can access that for 90% off right now, which is my way to help other entrepreneurs while still supporting the cost of hosting and related items.

Pivot to Video

Again, this goes back to the fact that people are consuming more content.

When I’ve done live videos on social media, I’m noticing a much larger number of viewers, and much larger number of people even reached, than in the past few years. I’m seeing the same thing for my clients.

And even non-live videos are getting much better traction.

Think beyond social media. One of the best places you can put your video is on YouTube (or better yet, on both Facebook and YouTube, which I teach you in my 1-Hour Content Curation course).

YouTube is still the second largest search engine, only after Google, which makes it a really important place for your business to have a presence.

Don’t worry if you don’t know what to talk about … I have a simple method to walk you through creating topics for 12 or more videos that you can quickly record. I’ll put all of these links down in the description.

Enhanced SEO

Another piece you will want to focus on is Enhanced SEO. This program includes some of the newest emerging SEO best practices, and you can find some of those if you search on our website or check some of our earlier podcasts.

One place where you can really benefit from adding some optimization for search engines also happens to be YouTube. We’ve developed a simple 8-step YouTube SEO process that we follow which is proven to get our clients better results. It centers around optimizing your videos in several spots, similar to how you should be optimizing content on your website.

Since YouTube is the second largest search engine, and you’re already considering doing more videos, it makes sense that you tap into the power of YouTube as a search platform so that your message can be more easily found.

We have several articles about this on our website, and also have a step-by-step training to walk you through exactly how we do it in our YouTube Guru-ization course. And like all of our training courses right now, you can get a 90% discount by using the promo code PODCAST. That’s our gift to entrepreneurs out there who are trying to not only survive but thrive during the economic downturn that has been a byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bonus Tip

We’ve completely updated our 5 Days from Create to Sell program based upon feedback from when we had it live and free in our Brilliance Bar Marketing Mastermind.

The current session sold out, but you can be put on the list for the NEXT session that is opening in APRIL.

Just request to be put on the waitlist using the form below, so that you will be notified as soon as it re-opens. Like all programs we are discussing right now, it will be offered at a huge discount to help our fellow entrepreneurs!

Vicky Wu

Vicky is the CEO and Chief Creative Strategist of Vicky Wu Marketing. She draws from 30 years of experience at the CMO level, the CEO level, marketing for Fortune 500 companies and multi-million and multi-billion-dollar organizations, PLUS strategies learned helping startups and nonprofits with limited budgets … now focusing on providing SMBs with effective and efficient marketing strategies – giving them access to the same level of expertise as the really big guys with deep pockets, that they may not otherwise be able to access.