The businesses and startups will see the positive transition once the economy will get back to the new normal in lockdown 4.0. As businesses are striving to restore their operations and get back their consumers, it is obvious that they will look towards digital strategies to regain the potential consumer base in different ways. We all know that we are currently in a constraint state where things are quite different than the usual life, but sooner or later getting back to the normal will become a competitive trend for businesses. In order to offer the businesses with competitive strategies as we shift to a different era, here is a perfectly balanced digital marketing plan for the businesses.

Why Digital: Offline to Online Trend is a Shift to Consumer Behavior

The coronavirus situations have given opportunities to businesses in the digital world. As people are now restraining from going out in public, they now prefer digital methods to meet their needs. For example, the e-commerce sector has seen the enormous demand because people are buying essential items and groceries through these platforms as they offer safe and secure options to get their order delivered without any worries. 

Another example is about how food chains are ensuring no contact delivery to ensure that the food is delivered safely while following the right set of measures. This shift in consumer behavior will last for quite long seeing the situation, but the interesting fact to know here is digital marketing helped in communicating well with the consumers through social media, influencer marketing, paid advertising, etc.

Digital Marketing Plan for Lockdown 4.0

1. Make Your Business Ready for Digital Transformation in Lockdown 4.0

The secret key to growth in uncertain times is digital transformation. While it is quite tough to operate in the offline segment due to limited consumer turnout, the businesses which are ready with the digital platforms tend to survive quite efficiently in the current situation. If your business is totally offline and is not equipped with the digital trends, its a recommendation to bring your business digital to grab that opportunistic advantage to survive the wave of uncertainty.

2. Planning for Budgets in the Crisis Scenario, don’t cut-off your digital strategy expenses

It’s usual that every business will cut off their budgets to meet their demands and survive anyhow, but cutting budgets for the marketing strategy will make the conditions quite severe and uncompetitive in this tough time. Spending on digital strategies like- SEO, SMO, Paid Advertising, Influencer Marketing, will take your business closer to your consumers and will give you a competitive edge over the others in the market.

3. Search Engine Optimisation

We all know that search engine marketing takes efforts and time to rank your website on the top pages, but you definitely get the edge over others if your search engine optimization activities are intact amidst the crisis. During this time, as most of the operations are down, opting for a viable search engine optimization strategy will prepare for a post-lockdown world where there are chances of getting more leads and more traffic to your brand pages once the conditions get favorable. There can be the possibility of matching the competitive pace with the other existing players of your niche or field in the market.

4. Regain the Trust, Communicate Positively through Social Media Platforms

It is quite crucial to understand your consumers during the time of crisis. The social media platforms can help you to communicate your safe practices during the COVID era to get back the trust of your consumers to opt for your brand. As everyone wants to ensure safety, it is quite important to remind the world about how safe and ready you are. This can be targeted well by following a COVID communication strategy on social media platforms by inculcating images, videos, precautions, etc. in your social media calendar.

5. Content Strategy is the Key to Positive Brand Image

In digital marketing, we keep on listening to this phrase that “content is the king.” It is quite true in fact as content bridges the gap between your brand and consumers. Be it Press Releases, Blogs, Videos, or Social Media Content, it really attracts the consumers and creates a positive brand image in their mind. The smarter the content, the better the communication. In lockdown 4.0, you can plan ahead content marketing strategy for your brand to get heard loud in the market.

6. Discounts and Memberships to Retain Your Consumers

Empathizing helps in the retention of consumers. You can plan to roll out some membership-only discounts or benefits to your consumers so that it can give a boost to your business. If you are not retaining consumers, it might come as an opportunity cost for your business.

7. Paid Advertisements

The pricing of paid advertising methods has severely gone down in some of the sectors, but this can give you the advantage to reach out to the consumers in a very low budget. Be it social media marketing on Instagram and Facebook or search engine marketing in bing or google, the paid sphere still offers a good advantage to get leads.

8. Follow Potential Consumers through Omni-Channel Strategy

The omni-channel strategy can help you to follow your consumers in a much better way. Integrating SMS, e-mail, push notifications, automated calls, re-marketing strategies can help you to reach out to your potential consumers in a better way. You can also choose to cross-sell some of your services and products to your old customers as per the defined ticket size to drive some cash.

Author Bio

Ankit Kumar Sharma is a Growth Marketing strategist at HIcentrik. He is skilled in E-commerce, Communication, Strategy, Growth Hacking, Digital Marketing, and E-commerce SEO.

Gravatar ID – shmrankit@gmail.com