Digital resilience to overcome the COVID-19 business crisis
Viruses know no borders, and the impacts of coronavirus on business will continue to spread worldwide.
Whether you’re a startup or an established brand, there’s no doubt this global pandemic is forcing you to overhaul your entire digital ecosystem as the traditional business has stopped: shops are closed, trade shows are postponed or canceled, travel to meet clients isn’t possible, professional missions, forums and conferences are also not permitted, and all that until further notice.
If you were working in this type of traditional business, you have to shift to online business.
But, given the confusion around web-marketing, the risk of you investing in online actions that are not aiming at the same business targets is very high.
Let’s take the example of how the web can replace trade shows.
Why do companies participate in trade shows?
Because they want to meet new potential distributors, resellers, and buyers, i.e. to prospect.
This, therefore, is also what online actions should aim for. And, to achieve that, digital prospection via qualified lead generation campaigns is the best thing to do because it can reach the people that need that business.
But SMEs often struggle with the difference between such lead generation campaigns and other web-marketing projects, like, for instance, brand awareness campaigns. The latter consist of specific content published on blogs, social media, ads, etc. to make a brand more known, which is different from the objective of participating in trade shows.
So, how do you prospect through a “lead generation” campaign?
The first thing is to use a landing page adapted to the market you want to reach. Here again, SMEs struggle to understand what a landing page is and why they should use one instead of their own website. Using the website is a frequent mistake and produces bad results: the content of a website is less direct than the content on a landing page, and it distracts Internet users, who leave the website without getting what they wanted.
Once the landing page is ready, you need qualified prospects to land on it, and, for that, a promotional campaign on LinkedIn or Google can be very effective, as long as your keywords are consistent with the people to reach and with your landing page.
It takes a few days to launch and run an operation like this in the home market or across borders.
It is a relatively simple and cheap solution that allows you to keep an open spirit for creating new commercial opportunities without a trade show.
Digital helps you be more resilient!
Digital can help you be more resilient during these difficult times and even after if the traditional business is not available anymore, but you must understand which online actions to invest in, in priority.
To help you with that, I’m preparing seven e-books explaining how to use all the digital solutions for starting and growing online business at home or internationally.
I hope you all are doing well & keeping your spirits up.