In our current state of flux, all businesses are badly impacted. However, many business owners may still be pre-occupied with the day-to-day operations, implementing changes to their business and may not have the mind space to think about how to manage their digital marketing efforts.

This is a crucial time for businesses. Yes, the struggle is very real, jobs are lost, revenues are falling, foot traffic is low and it has become imperative to also look at how much runway funds/ emergency funds are available to tide through the next few months.

But we should not stay still and let this happen to us. Should we not take action to adapt our business operations, processes, engagements in this current climate, businesses may risk having their brands forgotten, while other brands who have taken the initiative to actively adapt their business will continue to stay in the minds of consumers. We should take this time to position ourselves into strength, so that we have a better chance of suriving through this and come out stronger once the fog is all cleared.

I hope that this sharing will help business owners alike better manage their digital marketing campaigns despite this difficult time.

->Please help by taking some time to share and forward this to your friends who are business owners and who can benefit from this. Thanks!

1) Create new ways to increase engagement with your customers

· Follow-up calls for businesses with longer sales cycles

· Facebook Live and Instagram Live for featuring hero products and getting your promotions to your customers

· Increase social media organic posts frequency to maintain top of mind brand awareness

· Take your engagements from offline to online: implement e-consultations/ e-appointments/ virtual tours/ seminars

· Conduct businesses as how you normally would, digitally (more for service industries) digitalise your usual sales collaterals/ documents/ booklets and send it for their reference

2) Clear communications with customers (For physical stores)

· Assure customers that entire premises are cleaned and sanitised regularly

· Update new operating timings in website, social media and Google My Business Listings

· Inform customers of new ways to make purchases from your business such as online stores, food delivery and online shopping apps like Shopee

3) Focus on what you can. Build for the long term.

· Work on a social media calendar to keep top of mind and brand engagement up

· Produce creative assets through photography/ videography that you can use and adapt to current and future campaigns

· Build standard processes for marketing campaigns e.g. 1 for uploading social media post, 1 for running an advertisement

4) Adjust Advertising Budgets

Unlike what many advertisers are advocating for of a higher advertising budget, I believe that it depends on your current capacity to advertise

a) Reduce budgets when — your business revenues are being impacted on a wide scale such as across products and markets

· During this time, stay resilient, do your best to keep your campaigns running but at a reduced budget

· Keep calm and analyse — work with your advertiser to find out which are the best performing campaigns or ad groups. Go lean. Pause those campaigns, keywords or ad variations which are not performing.

· Shift some of those budgets from the paused campaigns into performing campaigns

By reducing slack which could be earlier be meant for higher cost market expansion, your campaigns have now become more efficient and more profitable.

b) Increase budgets when — your revenue levels are stable, you have the capacity to increase budgets and are intending to grow, especially where your business nature allows you to scale from customers who are now staying home

· Deploy your new budgets incrementally each time, e.g. by 20% and another 20%

· Analyse — work with your advertiser to find out which are the best performing campaigns or ad groups, then double down on those sweet spots

· Experiment with a small portion of your budget for expansion strategies such as Lookalike Audiences, expanded audience selections, A/B testing with highly targeted creatives

· Keep those new strategies that performed, and swap out those experimental campaigns that didn’t, reiterate.

By increasing your budgets prudently, you can potentially increase your revenues despite the climate and gain long-term market share.

Conclusion

Should you like to learn more about any of the above steps or tips, feel free to send me a DM on Instagram @bryan_methodb or simply email me at Bryan@methodb.co (not .com) and I will be happy to share more practical strategies with you.

Let’s look forward, adapt our approach and stay in the game.

We can tide through this.

About Bryan Ong

Bryan is the founder of Method B, a digital advertising agency which has served clients such as Google, WeWork, Greendot among many others. Bryan is known for his strong work ethics, sincerity and a 360 view of customer acquisition growth, which has led to strong client recommendations and a rapidly growing client base.

As a pure digital advertising marketer, throughout his career, Bryan has directly managed millions of dollars of advertising spend across multiple industry verticals in APAC and has developed systems that has consistently allowed him to perform above industry benchmarks. His expertise includes strong experience in APAC markets, launching new brands and targeting premium customer segments.

In his earlier career, Bryan was also a TEDx speaker, a motivational speaker whose books sold in Kinokuniya and Popular bookstores and a SPRING Singapore (currently known as Enterprise Singapore) Executive Development Scholar. He was featured on The Straits Times, Channel U, Capital958 FM, Lianhe Zaobao, RollingStone, e27 and other publications.

Enquiries and collaborations? Email him at bryan@methodb.co (not .com)