July 2, 2020
It’s not business as usual right now, that’s for sure.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a time of unprecedented change (and challenges) for millions of people across the globe. For many organizations, it’s not only a shift in the way they work, but a fundamental shift in the way they market their business.
The marketing landscape changed overnight. One of the most impactful effects is the forced cancellation or postponement of large in-person events. Trade shows, conferences, festivals, sporting events, and concerts have all had to either reschedule or cancel completely.
In fact, 55% of B2B organizations spend over 21% of their marketing budgets on events, according to the 2019 Event Marketing 2019 Benchmarks and Trends Report. In the healthcare industry, we still rely heavily on trade shows and traditional marketing requiring people to be in-person. For some, it’s the largest chunk of their marketing budget.
As COVID-19 changes how we deliver care and forces our industry to go digital, the same can be said for our marketing strategies. Changing your focus doesn’t mean throwing your marketing goals out the window. Instead of reimagining your KPIs, reimagine how you spend your time and budget. The most resilient companies will shift to areas that are surging, and that means prioritizing digital.
Live events are a staple at many B2B companies. With more than $738 million spent on face-to-face events each year, digital often takes a backseat. But with widespread event cancellations, many companies are forced to dive head-first into digital.
You can’t get back those months of planning, but what you can do is pivot. With remote work now the temporary ‘new normal’ for millions of Americans, your customers and prospective clients are much more amenable to (an entrenched in) virtual events.
Revisit the overall purpose of the event. What is your end goal? How does it connect to the rest of your marketing strategy? What is your audience getting out of this? Will this add value to their day or just serve as another distraction? Is a virtual event even the right format, or can you accomplish your end goal using other digital approaches? Just because you can do a virtual event doesn’t always mean you should.
Once you’ve answered these questions, think about what functions and features you will need for your event. Do you need to host a large broadcast or something smaller? What about a Q&A feature? The answers to these questions will help you determine the best virtual platform.
Zoom, GoToWebinar and Google Meet are great for small events or one-on-one sales meetings and presentations. If your event is much larger, consider platforms like LiveStream where you can host hundreds of participants at a time.
For event promotion, consider what benefits online events bring to your audience, from saving money and time traveling to events to unlimited event capacity to health and safety. Don’t miss the chance to highlight these benefits!
Finally, if you can produce a high-production value event at home, great. If not, just do what’s practical, and work with what you’ve got. What’s most important is bringing a sense of meaning and community to your audience. That’s what they will remember most.
Online events should not just be an emergency fill-in but a key part of an integrated marketing approach. ‘Cause virtual is here to stay.
Step back and take stock of your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. How are you tracking against your goals? What keywords are bringing the most traffic to your website? Have those keywords shifted in the wake of COVID-19?
Do you even have an SEO strategy? If not, now is as good a time as ever to develop one. Ease yourself in with some basic keyword research that doesn’t require a third-party tool.
Step 1: Brainstorm a High-Level List of Keywords
Step 2: Find Adjacent Search Terms & Industry Whitespaces
Step 3: Refine Your Keywords Using Search Trend Data
Step 4: Add Keywords To Your Website Content
Content is the fuel that keeps the marketing engine running. It permeates every marketing channel. Without it, your marketing plans will sputter out.
Start with the content you already have. Maximize your content investment by optimizing and amplifying high-value content. This is most commonly known as “pillar content,” a comprehensive asset that can be broken down into many smaller supplementary marketing materials. These materials could include emails, blogs, website content and video that ladder up to and expand upon the theme of your pillar content.
For example, you may want to break down key components of your pillar content into a blog that serves to educate buyers at the top of the funnel. Or, you might serve up components of your pillar content as an email nurture sequence for those in the mid-to-bottom stages of the funnel.
The most important thing to remember is to be strategic. Every piece of content you produce should have a clear purpose and work complementary to and in concert with other elements of your marketing plan.
With adults spending an average of 3 ½ hours a day browsing the internet from their phones, marketers should already be taking a mobile-first approach to digital. In the COVID-19 era where quarantine screen time is up, mobile is more important now than ever.
Combine that with Google’s shift to a mobile-first indexing approach, the lack of a mobile-friendly experience could negatively impact site rankings and a website with a better mobile experience could potentially receive a rankings boost even for searchers on a desktop.
Prioritize any on-site fixes you’ve put off. Take steps towards increasing page speed on highly-trafficked pages. Experiment with new (or new-to-you) mobile platforms like Facebook Live and LinkedIn Live to build a much-needed sense of connection with your customers.
Think of digital advertising like the stock market. When stocks are down, it’s a great time to buy. Your investment now will pay dividends when the market inevitably rises.
Digital advertising follows a similar model. It’s a bid-based system. With companies decreasing their marketing spend, there has been a decrease in cost per click and cost per impression due to a decline in competition.
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, marketers anticipate spending 28% less on digital media in May and June. This is a golden opportunity to take advantage of the whitespace in the market.
Consumers are spending more time online and reading the news than ever before. Now is the opportunity to capture more eye-balls by advertising on popular websites, at a lower cost than the pre-coronavirus period.
To sweeten the pot, Facebook and Google are offering ad credits to small- to medium-sized businesses who regularly advertise on their platforms.
There is no doubt that these are challenging times. While you must be sensitive in your marketing approach, and those that go all-in on digital can gain a considerable advantage.
We may not have the same budgets and resources, but what we do have is time: time to reset, refresh and focus on long-term digital strategies. And when this is all over, make sure digital is a mainstay of your integrated marketing plan.
Ready for digital transformation but don’t know where to begin? Learn how our healthcare marketing experts can partner with you to build an actionable B2B digital marketing roadmap.
