Managing a digital marketing project during the time of COVID can be immeasurably challenging. The coordination of a team is difficult with social distancing and safety measures. Meanwhile, getting seen in the competitive landscape of busier digital marketplaces means a more focused approach is necessary.
Digital marketing has a lot of moving parts. Understanding and managing these components makes for a better digital campaign. Luckily, there are a series of best practices that can help any project manager guide their team to marketing success.
For project managers, managing a successful marketing strategy in the COVID economy means prioritizing and implementing a series of practices designed to help you thrive. Here’s what you should know.
1. Prioritize Clear Communication
Clear communication is vital, and not just for the sake of your marketing. Team effectiveness and data analysis require communication that forms a narrative around your marketing approach. Forming this narrative clearly is a skill every project manager needs, allowing you to expand your team’s:
- Technical knowledge
- Strategic thinking
- Resource management
- Risk management
- International experience
The better you can express the needs and challenges of your business model, the better your team can address problems and create an ideal digital marketing experience for customers.
Clear communication is a challenge, however. Here are a few tips for ensuring a working approach:
- Define all goals and expectations of your team.
- Ensure messaging to your customers meets your standards.
- Pick the right platform to deliver each message.
- Check in consistently with your team.
- Be empathetic and willing to listen.
Through a consistent practice of clear communication, your marketing can grow through customer and team member input. A willingness to listen is key in clear communication, ensuring that the flow of ideas goes two ways.
2. Implement Security Features
For any digital marketing strategy, keeping a safe and secure system is fundamental. This means cybersecurity as well as safety provisions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Your customers as well as your employees will thrive with the right security provisions, growing your brand reputation as a result.
When it comes to digital safety, e-commerce should maintain the highest standards to keep user information secure. This means:
- Using an HTTPS system
- Using secured digital payment options
- Offering customers third-party payment methods like PayPal
- Creating security checklists for policies like e-signatures
- Reducing pop-ups and intrusive ads
Measures like these enable a safe digital platform for commerce. Your marketing will not be as successful as possible if users do not feel they can interact with your content safely.
Additionally, the productivity of your marketing team depends on safety measures to protect against the pandemic. Institute remote working where possible and follow CDC guidelines for reopening a physical office.
3. Be Empathetic
Managing an effective team means meeting them where they are. In the wake of COVID, this increasingly means a digital environment. Challenges abound in setting up a remote marketing team, but by maintaining empathy and an open-door (so to speak) policy, you can succeed.
Empathy requires that you hear your team’s challenges and adjust as much as possible. With the pandemic, tensions are rising. Loneliness and anxiety propagate amidst a blending of personal and work time. To help your teammates manage this stress, ensure you allow them to reach out.
Setting up digital communication platforms in which to frequently assemble the team is a great way to manage this. Tools like Zoom or Google Hangouts make a tech approach to communication and empathy easy. Be available to hear the concerns of your team and facilitate collaboration for marketing innovations.
Then, apply the same empathetic strategies towards your customers. What do they need? What are their concerns? Thinking about and addressing these factors in your marketing approach can be a great way to boost sales.
4. Explore All Possibilities
There is no one right way to build a digital marketing strategy. Every product and service could potentially benefit from different approaches. So your job is to find the strategy that works best.
That means creating a space open to innovation. Setting a standard for clear communication and team collaboration, this entails opening up the door for team and customer feedback. You never know when one message or data point will help spark the idea for a marketing strategy that reaches an entirely new audience.
Exploration is necessary for cultivating the right digital marketing approach. Without it, you may never know where the problem with your current focus is.
Take this example of an SEO team working on a client’s case. When the usual strategies wouldn’t work to improve the client’s Google rankings, the team explored all the possibilities of what might be happening. As a result, they discovered a negative SEO attack had been launched against the client by a competitor.
Why might your digital marketing strategy not be as effective as possible? Analyzing your data and exploring the possibilities helps you improve.
5. Study Your Audience
One of the most vital best practices you can implement for a digital marketing project is to integrate data in every part of the process. Big data allows you to study and understand an audience to better target and produce content for them. This lets your personalize your marketing content for the best effect.
Gathering information like customer demographics, shopping behaviors, geographic locations, and more helps you know where to reach your audience. This in turn lets you target that audience for greater results.
Use audience data to:
- Find interested customers
- Craft personalized content
- Better customer relationships by solving their problems
- Increase the cost-effectiveness of your marketing
- Be more competitive in your niche
The usefulness of data is invaluable in a marketing strategy. Customers are looking for a personalized experience, and data lets you craft that for them. Study your audience through the data they generate, then apply that information to your marketing strategy.
Creating a Culture of Best Practices
For any digital marketing project manager, the uncertain economic situation and competitive digital landscape might give you pause. However, this time also represents an opportunity. A shift in business processes means you can focus on implementing best practices that can all but ensure marketing success.
Maintain clear communication, increase security, be empathetic, explore your options, and use your customer data to build a near-perfect marketing strategy for a COVID world. While there’s no guarantee for marketing success, these five best practices will ensure you remove obstacles in your path to achieving that success.