Ron Goldblatt • May 8, 2020
3 Effective Marketing Tactics To Keep Your Small Business Connected During Coronavirus
Communication needs to be immediate and personal to your customers
In times like this, you need a way to talk to your customers fast. Especially when everything is closing up and everyone is trying to stay healthy, people want to know what your business is doing to work around the chaos and adapt.
And while there are certainly several marketing tactics
that can highlight your brand and create a large impact over time, there are a few strategies that we find are most useful when we want to communicate to customers fast and efficiently.
At NorthShore Loyalty, we have found the following tactics to be most successful in providing immediate, personal communication to your customers:
Text Message and Loyalty Marketing
Text message marketing gives you the power to reach customers where they already are – on their phones, texting.
Not only does it create an instant announcement to those who have shopped with you or signed up for the service, it creates a one-on-one connection with your customer. Additionally, text marketing
offers several benefits.
Benefits for a business:
- It has a very high rate of people opening it. With a 98 percent open rate, we can almost guarantee customers will see your message. This is the highest open rate out of all other marketing tactics.
- It is targeted and personal. As mentioned, this tactic is targeted to those who have either shopped with you or signed up for updates. Therefore, the likeliness of the customer reading it and engaging is far more likely than if the message was served to a general audience.
- It is immediate. Given the global pandemic we are facing, we don’t have time to delay messages to our customers and wait for a result. We need to deliver announcements fast, and let folks in our area know that we are still open and offering curbside pickup services, for example. That’s why we recommend text message updates. It gets the word out quickly and efficiently.
- It is cost efficient. One of the ultimate benefits of this strategy? It doesn’t cost a lot to send a personal text to your customer. To learn more about our services and rates, visit NorthShoreLoyalty.com and book a free consultation.
What to watch out for:
- Your message has to fit in a character limit. These messages are not meant to be a long-form announcement-save that for an email. Texts should be short, sweet and to the point, with potentially a link to your website to learn more.
- Your customers might get worn out by multiple messages. Just because they are short and sweet does not mean you should be sending multiple updates and promotions a day. At NorthShore Loyalty, we recommend sending around 1-2 messages per month to prevent consumer wear out.
- You need your customer’s phone numbers, so you have to figure out a way to get them. This may make you realize you need to grow your customer list. At NorthShore Loyalty, we suggest offering incentives to get this information. For example, on social media, you could offer a coupon for a 50 percent off deal, which customers have to enter their phone number for in order to receive the coupon via text.
At NorthShore Loyalty, we follow the strict FCC and TCPA guidelines for connecting with customers and acquiring new ones. We understand how to maximize content in 160 characters, know how often to send messages and how to encourage customers to join a text program. To learn more on how to build your text program and address these issues with text messaging, contact us for a free consultation.
Social Media
If you are at all familiar with social media, you know how impactful it can be when promoting a brand or business. Food for thought: 73 percent of marketers
believe social media marketing has been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for their business.
Why do so many people depend on social? Simply put: because it works. And especially right now, people are using social media
more than ever.
Not only does social media create an instant update to a broad audience, it can help to amplify brand awareness and increase conversions. See additional benefits below.
If you are at all familiar with social media, you know how impactful it can be when promoting a brand or business. Food for thought: 73 percent of marketers believe social media marketing has been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for their business.
Why do so many people depend on social? Simply put: because it works. And especially right now, people are using social media more than ever.
Not only does social media create an instant update to a broad audience, it can help to amplify brand awareness and increase conversions. See additional benefits below.
Benefits for a business:
- It has high conversion rates. Many users have reported they have discovered a brand or business via social media ads. No surprise there, as social media advertising is typically crafted for a highly targeted audience that is in the market for your product or service. If you are receiving an ad or follow a brand you like on social media, your chances of visiting their website and converting are high.
- It has high reach and traffic. Social is unique in that it serves a broader audience, and potentially those who have never heard of your business. Because of this, it can attract new customers and create brand awareness, which means more eyeballs on your content, and more traffic to your website. This is why social media works well with both text and email marketing, to get the most reach as possible.
- It humanizes your brand. This is a great opportunity for your brand to have a conversation with your audience. You have the power to make the content what you want, which can be both entertaining and informational. The better the content, the higher probability of users becoming interested in learning more about your brand.
What to watch out for:
- It can impact feedback and tarnish online reviews. Every time you post on social, users have the option to comment what they think or share any experiences they had with a product you are selling, which can potentially tarnish your brand reputation. On the upside, it could be beneficial – it just depends what people have to say.
- It can be time consuming. It’s not one of those things you can click one button and be done. Coming up with original content to post, measuring results, and managing your profile can be very time consuming. That’s why NorthShore Loyalty is here to make that content for you and manage your social pages.
- Your brand needs to consistently be engaging. Since customers have the option to comment and like your content, you need to be talking back! This can be a golden opportunity to talk to your customers, but it again takes a lot of time and constant monitoring.
- It only works for select target audiences. Not everyone knows their way around Facebook or Instagram. There are a few key generations that might fall in your target audience for this platform, but if your audience is an older generation, social media might not be where you want to get their attention.
The social media issues require careful monitoring of all posts, and content sharing management. NorthShore Loyalty suggests hiring a social media manager or connecting with a social media expert who we can recommend.
Email Marketing
There’s a reason that most small businesses use email marketing to keep their customers coming back. Most people use their email daily and can check their inbox anywhere, from their desktop, mobile phone, or tablet.
Email marketing presents an additional opening for your brand to communicate quickly, and also strengthens the relationship between your business
and the consumer. In addition, it offers several advantages.
Benefits for a business:
- It increases website traffic. Emails create a nice space to link to your website and get customers to engage with your content. For example, you could offer a coupon that links to your website, or an intro to a blog or article with a “read more” option that leads to your site blog. You could additionally include options of sharing out email content via social media.
- It reaches another audience. All of these tactics work together. If your customer does not receive text messages and does not look at social media, they are likely more available to reach via email. Depending on the generation your brand targets to, email might be the best place to reach those who want to hear from you.
- It reaches people on any device. As mentioned, the great thing about email is that people can check it on their phones, desktop, tablet, etc., so it’s not limited to a certain group of people. Again, depending on whom you are targeting, your audience might operate most on a desktop rather than a phone or tablet. This tactic allows you to get the attention of those customers, in addition to those who use their phones most frequently.
What to watch out for:
- Your message could potentially be marked as spam. Not everyone is going to see your email. People might automatically mark your email as spam without even opening it, or they might do so after you have sent email blasts out too frequently.
- Emails can take a lot of time to create. Emails can be what you make them, but the more effective emails have original content and solid information. This can be a time consuming project, when you have a business to run. That’s why NorthShore Loyalty is here to help make that content for you and manage your email send outs.
- Everyone else also does email marketing. One of the reasons your email might be marked as spam is because the consumer is overwhelmed by the amount of emails they are getting from other places. Yours is just one of hundreds in their inbox. That’s why it’s important to make your content unique. Additionally, this is another reason to leverage text and social platforms, so you can differentiate yourself and still reach those who unsubscribe from emails.
Much like text and social media, you need a dedicated person to help manage your email communication. NorthShore Loyalty strongly recommends using one of our many online services and having a continuous weekly or monthly plan for email communication.
Each of these communication tools can be effective, and we encourage any small business to use one or all three of these marketing tools. At NorthShore Loyalty, we believe in using text as your core marketing communication tool as the best approach. Compared to email and social media, text offers better open rates, a higher click through rate, more redemptions and is easily trackable to measure the results.
And now, more than ever, your customers need to know you are still there for them. To learn more about how you can utilize these services, visit NorthShoreLoyalty.com today and book your free consultation.
About us
NorthShore Loyalty is a community-focused company that has provided a variety of digital marketing services to local businesses for over five years. NorthShore Loyalty has created original content for local businesses in order to drive awareness, bring in new customers, and encourage current ones to keep coming back. Ultimately, our business purpose is to drive revenue for our clients. Our social purpose is to expand and strengthen their client’s community involvement. To learn more about NorthShore Loyalty and its digital marketing services, click here.
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