It’s no secret that the pandemic has changed a lot in everyone’s lives–from your personal experiences to your professional life, there may be things you cannot do freely for now. Companies that can survive through remote work setups have closed their office doors temporarily, with employees working in their individual home offices. These are the lucky ones.
For many starting businesses, those doors may have to be shuttered permanently if things don’t get better. Or, at least, until you figure out how to pivot your business processes to survive in the digisphere. With a pandemic in the backdrop, online search trends have shifted, and your floundering business can either sink or swim depending on what you do next.
Check the Trends that Have Shifted
This is a time of great gains or great losses, and for your business, keeping up with the trends can spell the difference between getting new clients or losing the old ones. The name of the game is brand recall, and you can achieve this by joining webinars, creating relevant ads, provider to get your brand out there. In the Philippines, in particular, where social media use is extremely high, companies compete for the attention of everyone with a screen and internet connection.
What used to be popular trends pre-pandemic could be suffering, however. This means your usual targets may need to be changed. Now, some of the relevant trends are about home cooking, home offices, mental health while at home, and new forms of entertainment. It’s now your job to decide whether these pandemic trends have the potential to carry your brand forward after everyone has settled back to their old habits.
Forge Your Core Services
A tourism company cannot abandon tourism just because the industry is slow at the moment. However, you can use this time to identify and strengthen your weaknesses, so that when people start traveling again, your presence will be much stronger. Start by focusing on keywords with a high search volume but low competition, and optimize your existing content. You will not see results overnight, but over time, you will climb up the ranks for keywords you weren’t ranking for in the past.
All of this should come with relevant and timely content, of course. As economies are slowly bouncing back, it’s time to push content about virtual tours and cheap flights months into the future. Take cues from your local airlines. See where they are exerting effort, and do the same.
Avoid Cluttered Content
When you see viral stories related to the pandemic, it’s easy to think you should be doing the same. This is everyone’s mindset at the height of the pandemic panic, when webinar consumption saw a huge spike. Suddenly, every company you know has a webinar.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s heavily edited or held live; people were consuming this kind of content as soon as they were out. But even now, there is so much clutter and people are being more selective in the webinars they choose. The same is true for other kinds of content. It’s no longer worth the time, effort, and money to produce them for a fraction of the traffic they used to get.
The moral: virality is good, but unless that is the core of your business, it should not be your main aim. It’s still better to produce consistent content that is in line with your business, rather than waste resources on a few good pieces of content that will not have a long shelf life.
Repurpose Content
Search trends have changed, for sure. However, this doesn’t mean you’re back to square one in terms of content production. Some of the content you already have may be repurposed and made relevant again with a few tweaks and additions. Content about spring cleaning, which used to be seasonal, may now see a revival, and your existing content can benefit from that. Reimagine your traveling articles to make them more conscious about the new normal, and voila! You have new posts. Compile everything into a PDF, or create a video out of them. Revive that YouTube channel. Post the links on social media. Marketing existing content is almost free, but you can get your brand out there if your content is good enough.
New trends have emerged during the pandemic, but they don’t necessarily have to change your business. In fact, now more than ever, it’s important that you stay true to what matters to your brand.
