A Digital Marketing Survival Guide For The Cost Of Living Crisis

How are you? It’s miserable out there, right? The glorious summer weather, gone. Our Queen passed away – may she rest in peace; a country in mourning. Children back to school, leaves falling off trees, heavy rainfall, and impending doom as the cost of living crisis escalates. Doesn’t everyone want to batten down the hatches and hideaway until it’s over? But as small business owners, it’s time to stand your ground to ensure survival.

“When life seems hard, the courageous do not lie down and accept defeat; instead, they are all the more determined to struggle for a better future.” ~ Queen Elizabeth II

 

Your business can move forward through tough times, and a carefully considered digital marketing plan will help!

The truth is, the doom and gloom events of recent years have been enough to send even the upbeat among us spiralling into depression. And the media has certainly played its role. Deepening the fears and damaging the mental well-being of many with its evolving reel of bad news stories. From COVID-19 lockdowns to the reality of Brexit and the Russia/Ukraine war, to travel chaos that was set to ruin our much-needed summer breaks. And now, the cost of living crisis is upon us. Energy bills set to soar, people likely to go hungry, and businesses face the possibility of fading into oblivion.

Small Business Owners Unite

As small business owners, it’s beyond worrying. But that’s why we all need to stick together and rally around to support the freelancers, start-ups and small & local businesses among us.

Having conducted research regarding previous economic crises, let us share with you some digital marketing insights. Hopefully to help you focus on driving deeper engagement across digital channels to support your small business through the current crisis.

If you’ve not started thinking about protecting your business from the impact of the cost of living crisis, now is the time to consider ways to limit upheaval to your business.

Developing the right digital marketing plan is the best way to prepare your business for the impact of this current crisis. Businesses that continued, adjusted or upped their digital marketing game during the pandemic were the businesses that hit the ground running once the world reopened. And by leveraging appropriate online marketing strategies you can help your business weather the storm of the latest economic tornado.

Digital Marketing SOS

Ready to start planning now? Follow these online marketing tips to prepare your business for the impending recession.

1. Enhance your Online Presence

All businesses should build and maintain a robust digital presence. Showing up online in all of your dazzling glory will enable your business to stand out above competitors – now and when a crisis hits.

Conduct market research, build a responsive website, and invest in SEO. Know your target audience, create targeted content, and stay in front of the right people who need to buy from you.

These days, your online presence should be a top priority. Right now, it is vital to stay on the radar of potential customers. Because people will still need your services or products. They need to be able to find you showing up consistently. So, maintain your online presence to avoid prospective customers finding the competition where you should be.

2. Limit Cuts To Your Digital Marketing Budget

It seems an obvious choice… Cut your marketing budget, reduce online campaigns, save money!

BUT… businesses that continue marketing in times of turmoil are most likely to survive. Many companies will cut back on their digital marketing spending, but that gives your business the perfect opportunity to project your business and its corporate stability.

Stopping your digital marketing campaigns will give your competitors the edge because potential customers will find them more easily. Continuing with your digital marketing efforts will keep your business present. By all means, if the need arises, scale back, but for continued success avoid ceasing your digital marketing efforts completely. Consistency will reap the rewards as the competition starts to wane, giving you a greater chance of attracting new customers and aiding survival through the economic crisis.

3. Audit Your Website

The purpose of your website is to generate leads and convert sales. If your website doesn’t seem to be working for you, speak to us here at Web Design High Wycombe. The first thing we’ll do is conduct a website audit, followed by offering recommendations on how you can make your website more optimal.

As a result of this audit, you will understand what needs to be done to improve how your website works for you. The results of the audit could advise you to:

• Freshen up your content
• Improve page speed
• Ensure your website is responsive (mobile-friendly – which is so important nowadays)
• SEO optimise your web pages
• Update your design to improve usability/navigation
• Utilise call-to-actions
• Make contact details more prominent across each page

All of which we can help you improve or rectify… it’s got to be worth a chat.

4. Adopt a Results-Driven Approach to your Internet Marketing

People will continue to shop and search online regardless of the economic conditions. By investing in a holistic online strategy, you will set your business on the right footing to capitalise when the crisis subsides and the economy recovers.

If you already have a consistent approach to your digital marketing, you’ll likely have a steady stream of traffic, that will help reduce the impact on your business when the economic slump hits.

Here are a few examples of what you could do to execute a focused marketing plan:

• Sell your products or services online by setting up an eCommerce store. (This approach kept many small businesses afloat when the COVID lockdowns prevented non-essential shops from opening. A fine example was the Risborough Basket initiative set up by Princes Risborough Town Council to help traders in and around Prince Risborough keep trading online despite not being able to open their stores to the public.)

 

• Encourage visitors to your site to sign up for your newsletter. By adding a simple email capture to your website you can produce targeted content promoting products, services, offers and support to those interested in what you have to offer.

 

• Work on your SEO to ensure you are showing up across search engines. There are many ways you can work on boosting where you rank on websites, including link-building, keyword-rich content, optimised web pages, and posting regular blog posts to name a few.

5. SEO Up Your Website

Talking of SEO – it’s important to have a strong foundation that will keep your website visible across search engines, to generate steady leads for the foreseeable future.

SEO is essential for all businesses. As consumer behaviours start to shift, so should your approach to SEO. Consider how consumers can benefit from your products or services in an economic downturn and create content that will resonate with prospective customers.

Evaluate keywords you’ve typically relied on to boost rankings. Alter the way you go about your SEO campaign to support the changing needs of the people most likely to buy from you.

Creating content and enhancing your SEO efforts will only benefit how consumers perceive your expertise and boost the chances of your website topping the ranks of Google.

For long-term benefits, SEO is a vastly better investment than paid advertising. While it takes time and effort to implement an organic SEO strategy, over time it costs less and builds domain authority that won’t be immediately lost should you stop working on it. In contrast, the value of paid advertising is almost immediately lost once you stop investing.

6. Be a Trustworthy Brand

Promoting a consistent brand image and ethos can establish your business as a trusted brand – promoting stability and strength to your target audience.

There are few among us that aren’t lacking uncertainty about the current cost of living crisis. That’s why it’s time to tune into how consumer habits are changing – specifically those of your target audience – to engage sensitively and with awareness of their concerns and changing needs.

In short – remain consistent. Stay relevant. Stay within budget. Enhance your online reputation. Get customers to share their reviews and experiences online, across search engines and social media. Be courteous and responsive. Maintain a first-class brand image.

7. Stay Social – Engage – Grow

Right now, businesses need to keep showing up. People are spending less and staying home. This means people will be whiling away their hours online, engaging with family and friends across social media. As a small business, this gives you the perfect opportunity to show up, be social, engage and develop your online presence and reputation.

Showing up online means your target audience sees you’re still around and present. You will keep your brand in the hearts and minds of potential customers looking for the products or services you offer.

If you aren’t on social media, set up your accounts now. Solidify your brand. Whether you post once a week, once a day or once an hour… a consistent approach and following the latest social media trends can get hundreds or thousands of eyes on your brand in a short space of time.

8. Video Marketing is Where It’s At

Here’s the promise – you don’t have to sing and dance (honest!). But the popularity of video marketing has risen exceptionally in recent years. And why? Because these days video marketing is affordable… now that everyone has a smartphone!

There are many ways to create video content:

• Talk directly to your followers on social media
• Ask a customer to make a video testimonial
• It can sound scary but try interacting with followers by going live across Facebook, Instagram or YouTube.
• Show a day in the life of an *insert profession*

Video is not only a great way to engage with audiences, it is proving profitable for many online businesses when done the right way.

9. Get Analytics Savvy

Here comes the dull bit, but it’s ever so essential if you’re to understand what and how to adjust your strategy. We’ll try and keep this brief.

First and foremost, Google offers a wealth of tools that provide a great way to compare how pages perform across your website. These include Google Analytics, Google Business Profile, Google Search Console and Google Trends. They allow you to see how pages perform. You can see the number of page views each page achieves the average time a user spends on any given page, the bounce rate of a page, and much more. Once you understand these metrics you can get started on optimising your web pages to help them perform better.

There are other tools with friendly interfaces that spell out any problems you face with your site. Check out Ubersuggest, SEMRush, Ahrefs and Moz Pro to see which one works best for you.

10. Budget Accordingly

People are already making cutbacks. But, people still need to feed their families, keep their businesses up and running… there are necessary purchases that just need to happen. Carrying on regardless is not futile.

But it’s a time for considered choices. For businesses, it’s vital to remain visible. So, plan your budgets, share seasonal, relevant content, show understanding and inspire your audience.

Stop second-guessing how the cost of living crisis will affect your business and start building an online marketing strategy to get you through this unsettled time. History has shown us that it’s the businesses that put effective measures in place that often achieve significant growth. Start building your plan today!

Web Design High Wycombe: Online Marketing 101

If you are serious about the success of your business, your digital marketing process should not have a start/stop option. With careful investment in digital marketing services, your business can ride the waves to yield positive long-term results for your business.

We are Web Design High Wycombe, part of Cyber Sushi Design Ltd. Across our brands, we have a wealth of experience that can benefit your digital marketing success. Avoid short-term fallout by implementing a plan designed to last.

Let’s get you started with one of our Cost Of Living Crisis SEO Packages. When you sign up for one of our SEO packages for 3 months, we are offering the 4^th month free if your page rankings haven’t improved. That’s how confident we are that we’ll get you ranking better on Google.

Here’s what one of our existing clients has to say about our efforts:

“Simon has been working on my website for a matter of months. Usually, I would wait to post a review but the results he has delivered for my business in a short period of time have been just brilliant. Our rankings for the key areas we agreed on have soared. Very happy to have invested time and money into Cyber Sushi. Simon is also easy to talk to and not too GEEKY !!”

~ Ellie Sanderson

Let’s chat! Contact us today and let us help you boost your business and weather the oncoming storm the cost of living crisis threatens to unleash.