Why Now Is the Time to Rethink Your Internet Marketing Strategy

The first half of 2020 is proving to be challenging for almost everyone. For small business owners and entrepreneurs, the halt in economic activity and uncertainty around the depth and duration of the anticipated recession are sources of persistent anxiety and apprehension.

It's not an exaggeration to suggest that the decisions you make navigating these unsettling circumstances can make or break your already impacted business.

Understandably, your initial impulse in response to community-wide shelter-in-place and social distancing orders may be to suspend marketing activities to align your expenditures to evaporating revenue.

However, just as some of the most significant historical stock market and real estate gains are birthed in the depths of market downturns, a similar opportunity could exist for your business in today's economic pull-back. Therefore, it's prudent to consider your options as you make cost-cutting decisions.

As always, begin with a strategy. Do you have clarity on your ideal customer? If so, how are their needs evolving in the new environment? How are their priorities and behaviours changing? And what about your competitors? How are they transforming? Finally, how should you reposition your business in response?

The companies considering these strategic questions today, alongside cost-cutting tactics, are likely to be the enterprises that don't just survive today's turmoil but thrive in tomorrow's new world.

So how do you go about answering these fundamental questions for your business? Of course, you know your business better than anyone. So your instinct, informed assumptions and educated guesses are core to getting the answers right. And, given the nature of the unchartered waters we're traversing, incorporating additional, data-driven perspective can ensure you reach correct conclusions at a time when there's little room for missteps.

An internet marketing consultant can bring proven tools and approach for data collection, research, analysis and interpretation to develop needed insights about your customers, their behaviours, how to reach them, and how best to engage them when economic activity resumes.

If you were unprepared for the downturn associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, don't repeat that mistake for the upturn that will eventually follow. Make the tough call to invest a small fraction of your budget into a new marketing strategy today so that you're ready to capitalize when the opportunity arises.