If you’re struggling to pivot your marketing, you’re not alone. Dollars are limited, and thousands of companies — not just in Texas but across the nation and world — are struggling to determine how best to use their marketing budget. While we at Integrate don’t have the means or purpose to change the entire U.S. (at least not yet), we have a duty to help local businesses in our community determine the best ways to spend their marketing budget — whether that’s a little or a lot — to weather this storm of a pandemic.
In our second Pivot Don’t Pause webinar, we’ve brought in Tara, Integrate’s Head of Digital who’s an expert on all things digital marketing and advertising and leads our team of digital marketing and data analysts. In the webinar, she goes over an array of tactics you can be implementing right now, from Google Ads Smart Campaigns to Connected TV Advertising, Google My Business and more.
We’ve included a brief recap of the most important points below! And, we definitely recommend watching the video, since the audience asked so many thoughtful questions throughout (we left out some of the other important tips to keep the recap brief!).
Compared to traditional marketing tactics like billboards and in-person walk-ins, digital marketing is working so much more effectively for our clients right now. Speaking from experience we’ve witnessed:
Outside of “using this time to build a website,” you’re probably wondering what else you should be focusing on digitally speaking. Here are three things you should implement next:
Google Ads Smart Campaigns make PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, easier for the novice digital marketer looking to get their brand name out there or attract more leads. It’s a great tool for businesses with a small marketing budget or those who lack the technical experience of creating an ad campaign from scratch.
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This year, Google announced that Google Shopping Ads are now FREE for merchants. They typically fall into the category of display, meaning you can include an image, item price and company name.
In addition to Shopping Ads, Google also announced the FREE new beta tool, Google Video Builder. It’s specifically designed for smaller businesses that don’t have resources to create videos from scratch. With these, you can use Google’s creative assets to create YouTube video ads ranging from 6 to 15 seconds. You can learn how to sign up here .
Trends have changed significantly and are still changing. So, if you’ve set these campaigns up pre-pandemic, you almost have to revisit everything. Here’s what we recommend you do first:
When we say connected TV, we’re referring to the commercials served over a streaming device, such as Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, etc. Connected TV is the shiny new toy you get as a child on your birthday. And it’s continuing to inherit scale, especially right now when everyone’s home, according to industry experts:
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In terms of budget, it depends on who you want to reach and how often you want to reach them. Are you targeting a few suburbs? The city of Houston? Or the state of Texas? You also have to think about how often you want to serve your ad. Do you want to serve three times a day or twice a week?
Ultimately, let the data dictate your decisions. Depending on your goals, you can start with a few thousand dollars and make a difference in some targeted markets. But the main cost will be readying a stream-worthy ad that meets the specs of Hulu, YouTube, etc. The cost in connected TV is mostly upfront with developing the ad itself.
Even if everything is seemingly going digital, people may still need to physically go to your local operating location or contact you via phone. According to Google , four out of five consumers are using search engines to find information such as addresses, contact details and updated business hours in light of the pandemic.
If you haven’t already, we recommend going through Google My Business and completing the following:
We’ve gone over a lot, but one thing you must not forget in all of this digital and online world we live in: we’re all human . People can see through brands that capitalize on social issues as a marketing ploy, according to Edelman’s 2019 Trust Barometer . Your customers are real people, and you have to be sincere in your efforts. You’ve got to be aware of the current environment and respond appropriately.
On top of that, and with respect to everything that’s going on, always keep your customers’ needs top of mind. Do they need delivery options? Do they need in-store or curbside pickup? Think about what they really need from you as a business, and that will inform what marketing decisions you make now and, well, forever.
It’s time to pivot.
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