6 Ways to Level Up Your Marketing During Your Downtime

The last few months have had us shifting the way we work and our business priorities. Some of you are likely making the switch back to your regular routine or are planning to very soon. To make sure you’ve got your marketing in check before your business takes on its new normal, check out these tips to help you get back up and running: 

Conduct Some Research

Right now is a perfect time to do some research on your brand. There are times when we start the process for focus groups, surveys, or interviews, and people are too busy to take the time to participate. With more free time and sitting around at home, users may be more likely to conduct a thirty-minute phone interview or take an online survey. Why not take advantage of this opportunity to be proactive, get some feedback, understand your audience, and have information at your fingertips to make smart marketing decisions when you are ready to re-launch your marketing and sales efforts? 

How to Get Started
Think about conducting a short survey or phone interview over the next couple of weeks. You can simply ask for feedback on customer services or experiences or dive deeper and ask questions about the perception of your brand. If you are considering a rebrand or a website redevelopment in the future, this would be a good time to ask questions about those efforts too. 

Ask probing questions that are thought-provoking and push past the surface of marketing. What do clients and prospective clients think about your current brand identity? How does your brand make them feel when they interact with it? What words or phrases first come to mind when they think of your brand? Or, for websites, what features do your customers want to have in a website? What content is most important to them? What is currently missing from your current online presence? These are just a few questions to get you started, and there are many more to ask, depending on what information you are trying to collect. 

If you don’t have the tools or resources to conduct in-house research yourself, the consultants at UNANIMOUS can help build and conduct surveys, phone interviews, and in-person focus groups. Contact Jamie at Jamie@BeUNANIMOUS.com for more information on the research process at UNANIMOUS. 

Explore PPC Advertising 

One of the best things about paid online advertising, or pay-per-click (PPC) ads, is that it is an ultra-targeted and cost-effective effort. If you’re looking to conserve marketing budget dollars, you don’t exactly want to pay to put your ads in front of people who aren’t ready to buy right now. 

PPC is one of the best ways to reach your customers because you can customize each campaign based on the specific audience you’d like to target and the action you’d like them to take. It’s an incredibly powerful tool for advertising your business, especially right now, when a lot of us are working behind the screen more than usual. The clicks, calls, and leads generated from PPC eliminate the need for cold calling, networking, or other forms of push advertising. You’ll find more qualified and interested prospective clients using this approach. And we bet that’s exactly what you are after right now. 

How to Get Started
To get started, you need to understand your goals when it comes to online advertising. Is it phone calls, lead form submissions, or just simply brand awareness? Knowing what goal you have in mind allows you to pick the campaign that’s best going to meet your needs. If you're interested in this kind of promotion, you can check out our blog on PPC and learn the breakdown of the different strategies we recommend. We have four Google search and display certified marketers on our team at UNANIMOUS, and any of these strategists would be happy to help launch your first campaign. 

Batch Your Content

Batching content is one of the best ways to create a sustainable social media and blog presence. It allows you to create months of content upfront and schedule it out on your preferred platforms. Right now is the perfect time to sit down and start producing relevant, useful content for your audience. 

How to Get Started
When we batch content at UNANIMOUS, we start by categorizing posts into content types. Let’s say one category is products, one category is education, and one category is events. You can begin with one content type and start writing. Focusing on one topic at a time allows you not to get distracted or off-track writing about several things at once. Write out a few product-focused social media posts for your calendar and a series of blog posts promoting your products. If you take a few hours to sit down and do this, you’ll have months of content at your fingertips when things start to pick back up. 

Once you finish with one content type, move on to the next, and so forth. It’s important that the content you batch is evergreen, so you can schedule it out and let it run its course. Then you can focus your efforts over the next few months only on writing about current topics, like specific promotions and other time-sensitive items. 

If you have no interest in writing your content or have no idea where to start, our consultants specialize in batching content for our clients. We offer discounted content creation blocks, so contact Jamie at Jamie@BeUNANIMOUS.com if you’d like to have months of content on hand when you need it. 

Optimize or Refresh Your Website 

Optimizing your website is often a task that gets pushed to the side, but taking time to spruce up your content can enhance your searchability.  

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of ranking higher in an organic Google search. This also plays a role when users are searching for exactly what you offer similar to PPC, but allows you to rank higher in the results without paying. It’s important to have both intact to make the most out of your paid online strategies. 

How to Get Started
Start with a website audit and ask yourself these questions:

• When was the last time you updated your content? 
• What is your website speed?
• Is your website mobile responsive?
• How long do visitors interact on your website? 
• Are visitors converting? 
• Has your keyword strategy changed?
• Is your website ADA compliant?

These are just a few questions to get you started. Having an informative, engaging, and easy-to-navigate website is a non-negotiable in business when that’s the primary outlet for customers to find and learn more about you. 

If you’ve recently redeveloped your website, you may still have a good foundation, and all it needs are a few small tweaks to enhance it. If your website is severely outdated, especially if it’s not mobile responsive, you’ll likely need a new website for it to become a resource that your audience will use and appreciate. Whether you are looking to optimize or a complete overhaul, we can help with anything and everything in between. 

Sharpen Your Messaging  

Your verbal brand identity is a critical part of your brand's success. What you say,  how you say it, and whom you say it to can greatly affect how you are perceived and how you differentiate yourself from the competition. 

Perhaps your organization struggles to communicate the value of your products and services clearly and consistently. When someone asks, “What do you do?” do you have a pitch in your back pocket that your entire team can clearly articulate? Your messages are your chance to use language to create meaningful connections with your audience. 

How to Get Started
Every organization can brag about great service and experience, but what is it about your organization that makes customers pick you out of all other choices? Take some time right now to do some real digging about your brand. How can you craft a cohesive identity of messaging, personality, and positioning that paints a picture people can resonate with? And again, if you don’t have the answers, that’s okay. Go back to suggestion number one and do your research. 

If you’re stuck on how to hone your messaging and don’t know where to get started, we have an opportunity for you. We offer customized JUMPSTART workshops that allow us to dive in and uncover the essence of your organization and communicate it in a meaningful and unique way. If you are looking for a way to get started, contact us today to schedule your own discovery session and create messages that will make customers want to listen. 

Get Integrated 

It’s time for some serious marketing communications. We are close to getting back into their routines and going back to making appointments, shopping in-store, scheduling services, and more. It’s going to take some time, and multiple channels, to get your message front and center again. People have gone without a service for a while now, so maybe it's time they consider switching providers. 

With integrated marketing campaigns, you can reinforce a single concept in person, on social media, through print advertisements, via music streaming stations, and more. Sharing consistent messages in a variety of places will help your audience retain the content that you are sharing and keep you top of mind. 

In addition, if your sales cycle is long, been slower than usual, or your business isn’t as simple as “add to cart, check out”, canvassing your brand across channels can help. It will help your company be the first name to come to mind when a prospect is ready to purchase a product or service you offer. 

How to Get Started
Start by understanding what your customer really wants. What are the pain points of your industry, and how do you solve them? (Hint: If you don’t know– research!) Create a succinct message that communicates just that. A campaign concept must be short, to the point, and memorable. The key here is to reiterate the same message on multiple platforms so people remember. 

Once you have your message, you’ll need some compelling creative to match. The designs should be complementary to the messaging and something that will catch your audience’s eye. When the messaging and creative are ready, it’s time to execute. Distribute the messaging on all channels your customers interact with. In-store, on-screen, on the radio, or on streaming services. People should see and hear your message several times. 

If you don’t have an in-house team of marketers to plan and facilitate your campaign, the consultants and graphic designers at UNANIMOUS can be your extended team. From strategy and planning, copywriting, graphic design, and implementation, we can help in any part of the process. 

These are just a few tips that you can work on to enhance your marketing efforts during your downtime. If you don’t have time or the capacity to make these updates, our team can help. We can create paid advertising campaigns, social media content calendars and ads, optimize your website, and develop and implement marketing campaigns from start to finish.