In just a matter of a few months, COVID-19 has stopped an otherwise fast-paced world. As marketers, it’s our job to make the best out of the worst situations – even if we’re quarantined, can’t leverage the creative benefits of face-to-face collaborations, or are unable to score new work. During this sluggish period, your best bet is to focus on certain marketing tasks with long-term impacts.
With the annoying water cooler conversations, unnecessary lunch meetings, and grueling commutes out of the picture, now is a great opportunity to revisit certain marketing efforts and give them a little makeover from the comfort of your home.
Now, you might be wondering: where do I start?
So, let’s discuss a few, (possibly) quick marketing tasks that you should definitely focus on during this period to set yourself up for success in the long-run.
Let’s jump right in!
3 Marketing Tasks to Help You Stay Focused
During these hectic and uncertain times, it’s only natural to wonder where your marketing budget should go.
But it’s important to not lose sight of the immediate opportunities to work on the little things that matter.
With that in mind, here’s a small list of marketing tasks to help you get started:
1. Revamping Your Website for Improved Page Speed
In slow times such as this, it only makes sense to start by improving the speed of your website by revamping it.
Since SEO is centered on user-experience, the rate at which your web pages load (aka page speed) matters a lot (and is also a direct ranking factor).
Because let’s face it: The average user is getting impatient.
According to Nielsen Norman Group, an average web page has roughly 10 seconds to communicate its value and earn the attention of a user. Now, obviously, that’s not possible if your content takes forever to load.
With that in mind, if you’ve been noticing a rise in the average bounce-rate lately, you may need to make some tweaks to improve the page speed.
To do so, just follow these steps:
- Use Google PageSpeed Insights – start by checking where you currently stand by running a quick analysis on PageSpeed Insights. This free tool analyzes your website for possible page speed issues/culprits and scores your website on a scale of 0 to 100. It also provides suggestions on how you can improve your site’s performance. If you’ve never used it before, here’s what it looks like:
- Minify and compress your codes – remove unnecessary whitespace and characters from your HTML, CSS, and Javascript files. Once done, compress any large source files. Tools like Minifier and JSCompress can help you out with that.
- Compress media files – avoid uploading excessively large image and video files to your website. Make sure to compress them on Photoshop, using an online tool (such as TinyPNG), or a plugin (like Shortpixel Image Optimizer).
- Enable browser caching – enable visitors to store site information on browsers (so that they don’t have to load everything from scratch every time they visit your website). Since this falls outside the scope of this post, here’s an in-depth guide by GTmetrix on setting up browser caching.
Besides the above, you can also:
- Leverage responsive design to reduce redirects
- Minimize the use of render-blocking scripts
- Use content distribution networks
From time to time, keep checking the health of your website using PageSpeed Insights.
2. Brainstorm New Content Ideas
Just because the world has come to a halt, doesn’t mean that your efforts to craft, publish, and promote relevant, insightful, and entertainment content should, as well.
This brings us to the second item on our list of marketing tasks – brainstorming fresh and evergreen ideas for content.
Here’s a quick walkthrough to help you get started:
- Use the right tools – use tools such as BuzzSumo, AnswerThePublic, Google Trends, and Exploding Topics to discover trending and high-opportunity topics (that are relevant to your industry and/or the current scenario). Leverage a team collaboration/project management tool such as Asana, Slack, or Wrike where your team members can share their ideas.
- Turn to social media – expand your search and go through social networks for unique topics/angles to capitalize on. To be specific, dig around Reddit, Quora, Pinterest, and Twitter to discover amazing topics.
- Search YouTube – we often overlook YouTube when searching for content ideas. Search for relevant keywords to find videos that you can repurpose into other forms of content.
Finally, make sure to check up on what your competitors are up to from time to time.
3. Revisit Your Conversion Rate Optimization Strategy
Last, but not least, this may be a good time to revisit your conversation rate optimization strategy.
Start by tracking how effective your efforts have been throughout the past few months.
If you’ve been hitting your KPIs, you don’t necessarily have to completely revamp your existing strategy.
However, keep in mind that successful CRO is all about experimentation, which is why you should try:
- Verify your Conversions – With efforts slowing it’s even more important to verify that your campaigns are tracking properly. Business’s will need to know more then ever if there advertising dollars are working.
- Leveraging new metrics – if you already aren’t, incorporate and leverage metrics that might not be directly tied to your goals, but could still provide valuable insights about how your users behave. A few good examples include path length, behavior flow, and of course, page speed.
- Creating content your audience loves – using Google Analytics, or any other tool, find out which of your content your visitors find the most interesting. Try to figure out what made it work – the value, the substance, or the way you presented it – and double down on that.
- Improve your lead capture forms – find room for improvement in your existing lead capture forms. Leverage A/B testing to see what works.
- Improve your CTAs – see if you can improve your CTAs in any way. For instance, you may try to A/B test to determine better spots to place certain buttons, the size of CTA buttons, and most importantly, the call-to-action copy itself.
Furthermore, remember that CRO, like all other facets of digital marketing, isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it deal—but a never-ending journey.
Wrapping it Up
And that concludes our list of the top marketing tasks that you can try while you’re cooped up in your home because of the quarantine.
If you’d like some help with any of the tasks mentioned above, feel free to get in touch!