7 Strategies for social media advertising during the pandemic

The COVID-19 (coronavirus) outbreak is having a significant impact on daily business and consumer behaviour, and as a result, these are times when small business owners and advertisers need to find opportunities that will help them build personalized and lasting relationships with their audiences from a safe distance. Here are 7 strategies that you can adopt during these trying times.

• Host an online event or webinar; If you had an event that was affected by the outbreak, that doesn’t mean you can’t get people together and still deliver the value they were looking forward to. Even if you weren’t planning an in-person event, hosting an online webinar or interactive workshop can prove to be extremely helpful and beneficial for your audience in tough times like these.
• Build brand awareness with your online audience; With more consumers at home, we’ll likely see more consumers browsing online to pass the time. If you’re able to, plan out your ads in advance—this is the time when people will be looking for content to consume. Content should revolve around the value your product or service provides, and how it will benefit them when they’re ready to purchase and/or want to plan for the future.
• Find new leads and build your email marketing list; If your business is a service-based, online, and/or local based business, chances are you send emails to keep your audiences engaged and up to date via newsletters. If your business is slow or closed right now, this could be a great time to shift your strategy to collecting new leads and emails in place of promoting sales.
• Optimize your website content for users and search engines; Because buying behaviours have been forced to change, the way people are searching for things online may also have changed. Ensure you’re staying up to speed on the most highly searched keywords relevant to your product or service and brainstorm ways that you can tweak your website content to align.
• Create content pieces around what’s happening; In addition to optimizing your current content, it’s important that you also create unique pieces around newly targeted search queries. In a time like this, consumers are looking to learn as much as they can about how coronavirus might be affecting their everyday routines and business plans.
• Focus on remarketing campaigns; According to Barilliance, over 75% of shoppers will abandon your site without completing their purchase. With increased browsing, now is a good time to re-engage with previous website visitors and get them back to your site with an incentive like ‘free shipping,’ and special promos.
  Test new ad creative and audiences; Have you been wanting to test new ad creative to see if your audience engages better with specific imagery and messaging? If your business has slowed down or closed, now might be the time to test out a new creative on a variety of audiences to gather information that will make your future campaigns more effective.

What are some strategies you are using are planning to use that we didn’t mention? Let us know in the comments.

Remember, wash your hands, social distance and stay safe!