Times may be tough, but that doesn’t mean the world has stopped. While COVID-19 has surely slowed things down in almost all areas of business, the day will soon come where companies are no longer battling the coronavirus, and life will continue on normally. Whether this happens five days or five months from now is irrelevant; the point is, you need to be prepared for the day when businesses – particularly small businesses – are able to open their doors once again.
Many marketing agencies are expecting companies to resume normal operating hours sometime this summer, and when the time comes, you would be wise to prepare accordingly. Even if COVID-19’s influence on the world isn’t a thing of the past until fall or winter, it’s better to be prepared just in case. For this reason, your company should be working in a business-as-usual manner, strategizing ways that will help your business soar. From a marketing and SEO perspective, that means right now – even in the midst of spring and the coronavirus – is the perfect time to start advertising summer sales and events.
Staying Ahead of the Marketing Curve
Marketing 101: You never want to start advertising and marketing for something the day or week before an event or product needs to sell. In fact, you need to get that information out there way before the anticipated launch date, and not just because you want to put the idea in people’s minds.
“From an SEO perspective, there is a good reason to be about six weeks ahead of any promotion,” says Joe Mann, Compulse Integrated Marketing’s senior search analyst. “Google and the other search engines have many databases in play. The one that catches new content is the fastest. Depending on your website’s page rank [the site’s importance in the overall scheme of the internet], it will find the new pages or text sometime between the same day and up to two weeks later.”
This means that while social media and email marketing campaigns will yield immediate results when a business runs a big promotion, information posted on a company’s website will not. This is especially true for new pages – which includes blog posts and other marketing materials. Joe tells us that “if the material is on a new page – it will have no page rank until other databases analyze and recompute page rank scores for the site, so even if it is placed on your site in a way that should yield, for example, page rank two, it will usually take 1-4 weeks for Google to complete all the crawls and recalculations necessary to make that adjustment.”
What Does This Mean for Businesses?
It means that if you start posting web content related to summer sales and events when summer starts, the information may not actually have a real impact on new customers until late July or early August. Instead, companies should focus on getting the information they want out there for the start of summer now, even if you’ll eventually have to cancel or delay due to unforeseen hiccups, like the coronavirus. Again, social media and email marketing yield instantaneous results, so you can always let customers know that sales and or other company-related promotions will be delayed or extended on those platforms.
COVID-19 has put countless small businesses in a serious bind. Spend these hours away from the office formulating a plan for when you get back so that you are not scrambling for solutions upon your return. Doing so will put you ahead of your competition and in a position to thrive once the immediate threat surrounding this virus is through.
For more specific information regarding suggested marketing timelines, or for assistance utilizing delivery platforms and implementing SEO keywords and content, contact Compulse Integrated Marketing today at 844-821-2154.