We have assembled our team of experts to help businesses large and small navigate a shifting business landscape. Explore our guide for tactics you can implement today to start positioning your business for unprecedented success this year.
Seize the opportunity to stay ahead of your competitors by positioning your business and your team for the road ahead in 2022. Building and strengthening your brand through this period is one of the best ways to reduce risk and drive profitability.
Before we dive into the nitty-gritty of the tactics you can engage in during this time, take a step back and think about your situation strategically.
Here’s how to start:
Think Calmly and Strategically
While fast, informed decision-making is key, ensure you are using data and strategic thinking to map out your course ahead.
Take a look at your business plan to tighten and adapt it to the changing landscape. Have an open, honest look at your three-year projections and financial expenditures. It’s also a great time to perform digital and content audits of your existing online resources to see how they can be optimized and adapted for the current situation.
This is a good time to bring in your most trusted employees and strategic thinkers for a meeting about how they anticipate how markets are changing.
Be Creative About Revenue
Examine your current product lines and look for gaps and opportunities. What job is your product filling for your customers? What other jobs do those same customers need filling right now? It’s also a good time to look into ways to monetize your thought leadership and expertise.
Invest in What (and Who) Matters
What happens when your customers stop hearing from you?
They forget about you.
Step up your sales efforts and reach out to existing customers and potential buyers to form deeper, more meaningful relationships with them. Clients and customers will share positive experiences with others. Word of mouth will be more important than ever. Invest in strategic, low-cost outreach via personalized video, lead nurturing and content creation that provides value and demonstrates knowledge leadership in your area of expertise.
Be open, transparent, and speak honestly and kindly, and your employees and customers will respond and remember.
More people today are spending time online trying to get the goods and services they need. If you haven’t yet explored e-commerce options for your business, or if you want to grow and enhance your existing offerings, here are some tips to help you get started:
Find the right platform. Select an e-commerce platform that allows you to reach your customers where they are. Platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce can integrate with your current website and are used by large companies and small business owners. Most importantly, choose a platform with excellent customer service. You will appreciate it later!
Keep it simple. If this is the first time you’re dipping a toe into the e-commerce world, start small and simple. Add a few core products with clear headlines and great imagery. Three to five benefit-focused bullets per product are plenty! You can always beef up the store’s offerings over time.
Brand it to match your business.It might seem obvious, but the design, color palette, and logo of your online store should match the look and feel of all of your other business collateral. Invest the time in making the experience of shopping from you consistent and recognizable.
Optimize the platform for your audience. Seek out plugins or add-ons that will enhance the buying experience for your particular audiences, such as foreign language/foreign shipping support, SEO optimization, mobile support or remarketing capabilities.
Tell the world! It’s no use having an online store if no one knows about it. Promote your new venture to your existing mailing list, on your Google Business Profile, on your website, and in your social channels. It may even be worth investing in a direct mail piece to spread the word to existing customers. Wherever your audience lives - that’s where you should reach out to them.
Plan now for the future. Think strategically about the future of your e-commerce business. As your business grows, prepare to add additional promotion and product listing features. Get creative about how you cross-sell and upsell to existing customers. Explore live chat options and the creation of product videos, as well as email campaigns to nurture potential buyers.
Watch Now: 5 Reasons to Adopt an eCommerce Solution for Your Business
When was the last time you updated your online presence? With how rapidly things change today, even a website that was updated a year ago may be woefully out of date.
Now is the time to invest in strengthening your brand - so you can hit the ground running. Start shifting time and resources to get all those things done that kept getting pushed to the back burner.
Some examples of “quick wins” you can achieve starting today:
Complete a Digital Marketing Audit
A digital marketing audit is a great way to see what’s working - and what’s not - in your digital sales and marketing ecosystem. This can be done internally with your current team or can be outsourced to an agency partner, which may give you a more objective view.
At a minimum in an audit you or your agency partner should:
Optimize Your Website for Mobile
Mobile traffic has been increasing rapidly across the web. According to the World Advertising Research Center (WARC), nearly 75% of people will be accessing the web via mobile devices by 2025. If your website has not been built as a mobile-first website, now is the time to make that investment. A mobile-first website will:
» (Related Read) How Much Should I Budget for a Website Design or Redesign?
Improve Conversion Rates of Existing Assets
Do you need to rebuild your website or just renovate it a little? Tweaking poorly performing landing pages or offers on your website is a quick and easy way to see immediate results.
Here are some things you can do to improve conversion rates on your existing site:
Supercharge Your Social Channels
Examine how you are using your social channels. Now more than ever, people feel the need to share and connect with one another online.
» (eBook) 10 Steps to Grow Your Business Using Social Media
Improve SEO
If you chose to complete a full digital marketing audit, you most likely discovered that there are places where your website could be better optimized for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There’s no shame in this! Google updates its algorithm consistently, which means that your website needs continual SEO maintenance to keep up with these changes and ensure your website shows up in search results for potential customers and buyers.
Those new to the SEO world can start with these simple steps:
» (Checklist) How Much to Budget for SEO Services
If you are looking to quickly cut costs or reallocate your spending, it can be tempting to pull back on your online ad spend. But now is your chance to get a better market share and a better price on your PPC spend. So before cutting your budget, take a deep dive into what’s working (and what’s not) with your current online ad spend.
Here are some tips on how to audit and reallocate your current spend.
Set Goals
How have your goals changed? Different goals require different strategic approaches. Is this the time to increase brand awareness? Are you seeking to generate more revenue through upselling to existing customers? Do you want to generate qualified sales leads? By setting your goals upfront, you will be able to chart your digital strategy in the most effective way.
Analyze Past Performance
It might seem obvious, but whenever you are preparing a new digital ad strategy, it’s vital to examine past performance. Just as importantly, understand that your audience’s buying behavior may have changed during a crisis or downturn. Analyze your data to determine which channels, messages and keywords gave you the results you wanted. Strategize ways that you can improve upon those methods or create A/B tests to start optimizing results.
Invest in Success, Not Cost
It can be tempting to analyze ad spend and simply cut the ads that cost the most. But it’s far more important to look at the ROI of the ad spend. Invest in the keywords that are bringing in the most qualified leads or the traffic performing the action you have stated in your goals. Similarly, if your social media channels are bringing in more qualified leads than PPC ads, start allocating more spend to social.
Strategize Content
The success of many online businesses is driven by content. Great content answers questions that your target audience is looking for and provides them with value. It positions you as a thought leader in your space and - if done well and regularly - can even enhance how your website ranks in search results. Also, be sure to think outside text-only ads and postings. Many ads today leverage video, GIFs, infographics and more to supercharge results.
Measure and Adjust
Your audience’s preferences and behaviors are changing all the time - and so should your digital ad spend. New ad types on a variety of different digital platforms are being enabled all the time, and younger audiences, in particular, are quick to shift their attention from platform to platform. Keep up with where your audience is spending its time, and what types of content are performing best there.
» (Expert Article) How to Maximize Paid Media as a Small Business on a Small Budget
Most sales teams rely on in-person meetings, trade shows and handselling opportunities to bring in new leads and close deals. How has your team adapted to sell in the absence or reduction of these face-to-face interactions?
If you haven’t yet, start training your sales team on how to use personalized video, webinars, email and LinkedIn to jumpstart their selling opportunities. Invest the time they used to spend doing meetings, events and tradeshows into teaching them how to optimize their LinkedIn profiles and leverage video and other virtual prospecting and engagement tools.
First, Identify Which Social Channels Your Customers Prefer
To help with your prospecting efforts, start by identifying your target buyer and building a buyer persona that your sales team can use.
You can develop these personas by taking a close look at your current clients. What job titles do they have? What are their common pain points? How do they research before they buy? Most important, which social media channel do they use the most? If you’re not sure, ask!
Optimize Company Pages and Personal Sales Team Pages
Next, optimize your company page and personal sales team pages on the targeted social media channel(s) so that they are complete, up-to-date and deliver answers that your target buyer is looking for.
LinkedIn is an especially effective channel for many B2B businesses. It’s vital that personal sales pages on LinkedIn include professional, updated profile photos and have all fields complete. Many buyers are wary of engaging with sales profiles that are unprofessional or incomplete.
Start Social Selling!
What is social selling? It’s all about creating relationships! Social selling helps you form relationships with current and potential buyers by engaging with them on social media.
Selling this way enables you to get to know your target buyer in greater depth and thus provide more true value and personalized service. To achieve this, your team will need to check their profile and company pages every day. Share your knowledge by posting helpful articles on your page and commenting on posts and insights from your connections.
Remember, the key to social selling is to focus on relationship building first - sales second. If you come across as too salesy, prospective customers will flee like lemmings. Only share your products or services if there is an offering or value that your audience can immediately appreciate. As with any relationships, don’t spend all your time talking about yourself! Relationships are about sharing information; about give and take.
Virtually Nurture Existing Leads
Whether you are a manufacturing company that can no longer provide a plant tour or a senior living community struggling with what to do in the absence of prospective resident tours, it’s time to take a look at ways to virtually nurture the leads you have in the pipeline now.
Here are some ways that you can virtually nurture current leads:
Additional resources for virtual prospecting and lead nurturing:
» (eBook) Uncover the Secrets of Virtual Selling
» (eBook) How to Win B2B Sales in the Digital Age
As the world changes around us, so do our behaviors. Now is the perfect time to invest in retaining your current customers by keeping tabs on their changing behavior.
We all know that it’s more expensive to get new leads than it is to upsell existing customers. So spend time looking for ways that you can surprise and delight your customers and provide additional value.
Be a hero to your customers by:
Evaluate Customer Service
Evaluate what areas of your customer service process can be improved to keep customers happy, such as creating instructional videos or other resources that offer answers to common questions (and save customers time on the phone!).
How can you be creative with your phone or onsite support? Does your automated messaging or phone tree need to be updated?
Also, consider investing this time in additional training for your customer service staff. If your customer service team is happy, they will, in turn, make your customers happy!
Adapt to New Buyer Behaviors
The last thing you want to do right now is to decrease your sales and marketing budget! While your competitors are panicking, you want to be pivoting!
Don’t be afraid to shift your strategy based on current events, but do so mindfully. Take the time to invest in surveys, focus groups and other forms of research to evaluate how your buyers’ behaviors are changing. This data will help inform how your organization can shift to better serve them.
When you have completed this deep dive, be sure to update your buyer personas to reflect this new normal!
While it can feel overwhelming to navigate in a rapidly-changing world, the truth is that the world is changing all the time. Life is change.
The good news is that you can take these steps right now and improve not only your business’s survival today - but your growth in the near future and beyond.