LinkedIn recently published an incredibly helpful guide for the marketing industry. It aims to help businesses create growth in this challenging time and prove their ROI from marketing spend. There are six key areas in the guide, and each area contains strategies, tips, and information that could help your business get on track post-COVID-19. This post will focus on the first three areas, so be sure to subscribe to our blog so you don’t miss part 2.
LinkedIn’s key steps to showing the impact of your marketing activities: Part 1
1. Understand the role of marketing in the organisation
Marketing covers a range of aspects within the organisation. As a business owner, you need to be well versed in the role that marketing plays and the impact it can make in building the brand, creating a strategic plan, and managing change in the organisation, as well as the media and message planning that needs to be undertaken in the business.
The LinkedIn guide has a run-down of each of these aspects that were just mentioned. If you want to learn more about activities you should be paying attention to (such as creating human connections through your brand) and potential pitfalls you need to be aware of (such as restructuring without losing key employees in your department), it would be a good exercise to work through the guide. It will help you to understand how to use data for brand building and strategic planning. There are actionable tips for the immediate changes you can implement to protect your business, and explain how to apply the latest media findings to tailor your media strategy for the current circumstances.
Understanding the current market situation (through the findings mentioned in the guide) can help you to pivot your digital strategy to be more effective, especially if you have been neglecting your strategy recently.
2. Assess your business position
If you’re creating a strategy for the way forward, you need to be fully informed about the current state of the business before heading off in a specific direction. Whether your budget has been eliminated, reduced, or maintained, there are steps you should be taking to move your marketing activities forward as best as possible.
The guide has recommendations based on each of these scenarios (eliminated, reduced, or maintained budgets) that will help you to aim your post-COVID-19 planning in the right direction for your organisation. The recommendations are aimed at understanding how to strengthen your organic strategy by posting organic content consistently; how to follow best practices for paid campaigns (especially in lead-building,) and how to effectively create new brand campaigns if your budget has not shrunk over the last few months.
Implementing drastic changes may not even be necessary, but it is important to understand the data from your operations and to use this information to make accurate decisions that are suited to your current business position. Being flexible and proactive is key in surviving the COVID-19 era in business and learning from previous recessions may help business owners to prepare for the possible financial hardships that could be down the road.
3. Assess your customer base
As business owners who want to connect with our target audiences and grow our brands online, we believe in studying your customers continuously. If you have neglected this, you need to find out what your customers want and how the market has changed. Shifting priorities might provide you with new opportunities to serve your market, but you need to understand any new tendencies and assess if there are viable opportunities to pursue.
Check out the eBook now to start refocusing your digital strategy, and remember to keep an eye out for part two of this post, where we will unpack more of LinkedIn’s marketing strategy for post-COVID-19 recovery.
If you need help with your marketing, digital marketing strategy, or LinkedIn content, contact WSI OMS for assistance during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.