COVID-19 has had a significant impact on businesses around the world. As a Digital Marketing agency with clients from all industries and sizes, we have seen first-hand the impact of COVID-19 on different companies. Many of our clients in e-commerce are reporting the highest sales ever (beating even holiday sales), but others (like restaurants, gyms, event companies, and other service-based businesses) haven’t been as lucky.
No matter where the business is located, one thing remains the same: We’ve had no choice but to abandon our marketing strategies from before COVID and adapt to the “new normal.” This blog post will show you how the marketing landscape has changed in recent months and how to adjust your strategies. Let’s get started!
The Search Landscape Has Changed Through The Pandemic
COVID-19 is affecting consumers in their everyday lives. People are now working from home and spending more time with hobbies. They also want to improve their overall health. This has led to a significant shift in the landscape of search, with new product trends and information being sought.
People have started doing online workouts because of gym closures. According to Honorcho, search queries for various types of workouts have increased by as much as 45%. In the early months, stay-at-home orders led to an increase in time spent at home and movie streaming. The 73% increase in searches for streaming services is evidence.
Aligning strategy with trends
COVID, as you can see, has affected areas of daily life and the things that people search for. To take advantage of this changing climate, you need to be flexible with your content and optimize it accordingly. It’s important to optimize your content or create new content in order to adapt.
Possible Finance is a great example of a company that aligns strategy with search trends. Possible Finance provides alternatives to payday loans in order to promote financial equity for everyone. Financial-related searches increased in popularity as a result of COVID-19 affecting over 100,000,000 people. Google, for example, reported a nearly 100% increase in searches related to “loan” compared to the previous months. Possible Finance capitalized on this surge in interest by creating COVID blogs about financial support. Between March and April, their two blogs on this topic attracted 107,974 new sessions and 98.526 users to the website.
How to identify & utilize search trends
There are many ways to identify search trends and keep up with them when creating new content. These are the most common ones.
Google Trends
Google is a great resource for identifying trends in search. Google Trends allows you to view daily trends in search, search trends that are happening right now, or even enter a topic and change the timeline. Check out our guide to learn how to make the most of Google Trends for better marketing and SEO.
Reddit: A Deep Dive
It’s a good idea to dig into Reddit and see what questions people are asking. A general topic search, followed by a search of the subreddits, is a great way to find out what’s trending. These sub-forums may reveal relevant content ideas for your brand to use in its content strategy.
Exploding Topics: Trending Topics You Should Know
This tool will allow you to segment topics by industry or period. Exploding issues can help you identify unique problems gaining traction in the face of a changing climate.
You can see, for example, how the topic “mask” has become popular in the beauty industry in recent months. Beauty brands can capitalize on this topic by creating relevant content, like a blog about How To Combat Maskne.
You can’t just do keyword research. You can stay ahead of the curve and make necessary adjustments to your content strategy by staying on top of current trends.
Pivots during COVID
Landing Pages
Digital campaigns are favored for their ability to track ROI and pivot quickly. These items are now more important than ever. Launching a landing page that focuses on the fears, concerns, and purchasing considerations of today’s customers is one way to catalyze your marketing funnel. Sunday Fears CBD is one brand that has done a fantastic job with this. They highlighted the following items:
- No need to go to the store; we will deliver directly to your home
- Turning isolation into inspiration
- Self-care is important
- Calming down your mind in uncertain times
It has always been best practice when it comes to writing sales copy to speak to your customers’ inner dialogue and their vision of the outcome. The recommendations of today are no exception. You must acknowledge where your audience is and show them a future with a brighter outlook. You’ll need to emphasize the results, ease, and accountability of your program if your audience has trouble getting started with home workouts. You can also help them overcome any obstacles they are facing (ex. Loss of motivation because of uncertain times, snacking in the home, lack of proper equipment, etc. You can increase your return on investment and conversion rate by quickly pivoting to a landing site that resonates with the audience.
Enhance Existing Content
Most content marketing strategies focus on publishing new content regularly. What is often overlooked, however, is the potential that your blog’s existing inventory offers. There are often hidden gems that can be discovered. If they’re optimized properly, this can lead to a flood of new traffic.
Blending SEO best practices with high-quality editorial standards is key to optimizing existing content. To maintain a dominating position in relevant search queries, you need to create content that is engaging, practical, and useful. As most marketers are painfully aware, organic traffic is lost quickly to competitors who have published new content based on the same keywords or themes as yours. To combat these constant threats, a steady cadence is the most effective way to do so. Here are a few solutions that you can incorporate into your content strategy.
Focus on keywords in ‘Striking Distance.
A keyword-building strategy that is often overlooked is identifying keywords within striking distance.
It is easy to understand:
- Find your page 2 rankings for an existing blog. SEO software such as Ahrefs or SEMRush can be used to consolidate your findings easily. Consider, for instance, a keyword with 20,000 searches per month that is currently on Page 2. Optimizing around this term to move it up the SERPs would result in a significant increase in traffic. After you have identified the keywords you want to target, it’s time to move on to the next step.
- Create Relevant Content Around a Targeted Topic. It is important to have the ability to create timely, relevant information about a specific theme. To execute this step successfully, you must focus on creating content that is centered around the topic rather than the keyword.
- Spread Link Equity Through Your Existing Content Using the keyword ‘striking distance (or a natural sounding variation) as anchor text, you can easily implement this strategy by interweaving internal hyperlinks throughout your blog articles. Spend 30 minutes or less to go through all your articles to identify a half dozen or more opportunities to link internally to your target keyword.
