The COVID-19 pandemic is changing the work dynamics of different sectors, and the overall life has become tough on a global scale. Along with economic challenges, many people are working from home now. The pandemic is causing a worse hit for many sectors by suspending their business operations for a long span.
The good news for the brands and digital marketers relying on Social Media Marketing is the drastic increase in the time spent by people on the most popular social channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. People are at home and thus have more time to get entertained and informed through social media.
Yet, as this is a global crisis, the brands need to rethink and redesign their social media strategy by hiring social media marketing experts to engage their target audience in a booming city like Austin for a longer period.
Making the most effective use of the best online video editing tools like InVideo is vital. Yet, choosing the appropriate kind of content complementing the overall situation is crucial.
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Redesigning Your Social Media Strategy Sensibly:
Sharing or posting ‘happy’ and ‘funny’ things, as usual, may not work as the audience wishes to stay updated about the scenario. Again, it may not be worthy to speak all the time about the pandemic and the related things.
So, being an established or growing brand or a digital marketer, you need to think out of the box about the correct tone to engage your audience during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here are a few significant factors and related tips to help you redesign your social media strategy:
1. Building Meaningful Long-term Relationships:
In a broader perspective, your marketing endeavors can bring better results if your approach shows emotional factors like empathy, care, willingness to extend assistance, and communication complementing what your audience feels in the exact overall situation.
You must have done extensive research on your audience through segmentation based on their gender, age, income group, interests, professions, and many other factors. Yet, it’s the correct time to recreate your understanding by emphasizing what your audience feels right now.
This exercise might seem to be laborious and time-consuming. Yet, always consider uncertainty as an unchangeable fact during the pandemic. If you could cleverly think in this direction, you can be successful in delivering what your audience would like to know currently.
This audience-centric approach helps you retain your existing audience and improves the chances of engaging new prospects like your way of communication. So, it is better to keep your content entertaining, informative, and not at all heavily-stuffed with pandemic-related issues.
Success on social media is all about mastering social media community management. At the end of the day, the brand should come across as a community manager that is addressing similar interests of a wide cross-section of consumers. Talking about the challenges, offering constructive solutions, and focussing on making your social media a forum or community can help you build meaningful long-term relationships with your consumers and target audiences.
2. Conveying the Right Sentiment:
A crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic offers you an opportunity to showcase social responsibility. The tone in your posts and the overall interaction with the audience should be appropriate. You should not always explain the panic situation. Yet, your brand voice should portray your concern.
Creating an intent-driven video using reputed online tools to encourage your audience to overcome this situation can be a great idea. You can contribute to relief and aid in possible ways to position your brand as a sensible entity during the pandemic. Check this guide to try innovative methods to let the people join your mission to overcome this scenario staying secure.
Here are a few tips to convey the perfect message on social media during COVID-19:
- It’s time to show how you are humanizing your organization. Convey how you are helping your employees, suppliers, and other connected people to survive and outlast.
- Keep educating your audience about the ‘change’ in your operations in an informative and intent-oriented manner. This initiative would help your audience interact with you at ease.
- Assure your audience about the stability of the values that your business follows.
- Let the audience know when your operations would normalize. Let them know about your eagerness to do more in their favor, complying with the government-imposed norms.
- Redesign your offering to complement the scenario.
3. Emphasizing Engagement Over Business:
As we know, this is a hard time for a large segment of the population. Some of the sectors like e-commerce portals may be gaining. Due to travel restrictions, the travel and hospitality sector, even travel bloggers face financial difficulties.
So, as a brand or a digital marketer, the focus should be on engaging the audience. Most people may not be interested in buying all sorts of products and services in this situation.
However, if you could engage them in the right manner, you can enlarge the chart of your prospects for your campaigns and drives shortly.
Here are a few creative ideas to keep your audience engaged:
- Announce a singing contest for your select audience. Offer discounts for the winners on their future trips or anything else in the context of your industry.
- Arrange a short-story competition. Distribute discount coupons on purchases of your products in the future to the winners.
- Organize a video-based dance competition. Gift sanitizer and a few masks to the winners for subscribing to your online magazine/newsletter/channel or anything that suits your business.
4. Adopting Crawl-Walk-Run Approach:
Understanding the challenges and opportunities to change your gears accordingly would be wise in the current situation. If your brand belongs to the badly-hit sectors during the pandemic, it would be better to hold your investments on paid advertisements and costly campaigns.
Yet, the crisis brings you the opportunity to innovate. If you find it difficult to sell big TV sets, you can switch to digital in-home entertainment through streaming and similar kinds of alternatives. To keep it simple, be flexible by keeping the audience first.
You can think of diversifying your offerings to cope with the pandemic. Try rendering services that are not your core business to survive. There is nothing wrong with helping others grow to gain a little.
The Takeaway:
Your social media strategy may not need a complete overhaul. Yet, we hope that if you keep in mind the crucial factors discussed in this article right here, you can succeed in standing out. Flexibility in approach and keeping your audience first are the keys to success.
