Diversifying Your Digital Marketing Strategy For Turbulent Times

With the increasing threat of the Coronavirus, businesses’ are seeing an impact to the way their organization operates. From working from home to cancellations of in-person events in order to limit crowds, a digital marketing strategy is more crucial now than ever. 

Why?

An effective strategy ensures that the value you’re gaining/providing isn’t directly coming from one single channel. In other words, if one channel starts to perform worse, you’ll have other marketing channels in place already that can still be leveraged. Whether you work in Technology, marketing, or finance, you’ll need a diversified portfolio. 

In this case, we’re not talking about a financial portfolio, but rather a portfolio of marketing tactics to be implemented into your digital marketing strategy that allows you to do all of the below items through multiple channels.

• Engage with your audience (prospects/customers)
• Generate leads
• Grow traffic 

In the case of Coronavirus, we’re looking at an extreme epidemic that is difficult to plan for. A prime example of a company that can be greatly impacted is one that heavily relies on in-person events. With more and more events/gatherings being cancelled, how would a company that solely relies on in-person events adapt?

Diversification

Beginning with diversification in mind, here are the different channels that can be used toward a digital marketing strategy:

• Video
• Podcasts
• Blog posts
• Infographics
• Flyers 
• E-books
• Website/landing pages
• In-person events

Diversification in your strategy enables you two do a couple of things:

1. Analyze what works best and continue to enhance your practices
2. Adapt as market shifts happen to best align with customers

Whether we’re talking about the Coronavirus, or simply a shift in the way users engage with your organization based on their preferences, diversification is key. 

Real-life use case

To put this into context, let’s go through a marketing channel that was heavily popular 15 years ago, but has significantly declined today.

In 2005, flyers were still a huge part of an organization’s marketing strategy; in 2020 we still see flyer mailers but they’re much less likely to convert prospects to clients when compared to the past. Preferred channels change; Websites are now much more significant than physical mailers (this is not to say that mailers no longer add value, just that the value they add now is less than before). 

Business Agility

The goal of having multiple channels is to enable your businesses’ digital marketing strategy to remain agile regardless of what’s happening in the economy, how users consume their content, or new marketing channels that are introduced. 

Part of remaining agile is by measuring how each channel performs, and improving each channel based on the analytics. What does that look like? Here are some examples below to get you thinking:

• Do emails perform better based on when they’re sent out?
• Do flyers receive more responses 
• Do in-person events drive more attendance in fall than the summer?
• Are website conversions greater during holiday promotions? 

Data Analytics

This leads us to our final point; Data analytics are a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy. Without insights into how each campaign and channel are performing, it becomes difficult to predict where you need to improve, and which channels are performing best.

You may have heard the saying, “what gets measured, gets improved”, and this holds true to not just your digital marketing strategy but your business as a whole. 

Concluding

During times of change and/or turbulence, having a diversified digital marketing strategy can help smooth out the bumps. This is not to say that you’ll come away with no impact to your business, but rather less of a negative impact because you can leverage your diversified channels to continue to reach your audience.

To those of you working from home today and reading this, leverage your online presence and keep at it!

Reach out to learn more.