How To Pivot Your Advertising & Offers For Coronavirus

Want to know how to pivot your advertising & offers to work during the coronavirus?

Right now, the majority of people are working from home and staying inside. As a business owner, you must tweak and adjust to meet these new consumer demands.

In this article, I am going to show you some creative ways to change your offer to retain, attract, and help your business survive if not thrive!

Understanding Your Audience & Their Needs

Before I go into examples of offers, I want to break down a way of thinking about who your audience is and how to find their needs.

Audience Building

When we build PPC campaigns for clients, we spend a lot of time understanding the audience and the competitive landscape before constructing an offer.

Understanding your audience is EVERYTHING!

It will determine how you speak to them, the content you create, the copy you write, the design you make, the types of offers, the price points…. everything!

These are questions that you should be asking yourself as well:

Who is your ideal customer?
What do they care about?
What is their current situation?
What is the motivating event that happens before they come to you?
What type of goals are they looking to achieve?

Truly understanding your audience is the first step.

Understand What People Want Right Now

With this current situation, the same messages that were important just a few weeks or months ago will not land the same way:

“10X Your Business” – People aren’t thinking about growth, they are focused on surviving
“Travel The World!” – The whole world is in lockdown.
“Join 10,000 people at this conference” – We want to stay AWAY from people.

These messages just aren’t going to work right now, because the situation is totally different. Everyone is at home and they don’t care about that anymore.

Instead, the world is shifting and people want:

Safety – How can you ensure that your products are safe?
Security – How can you give people security?
Free or Low-Cost Alternatives – How can you help people save money or eliminate costs?
Diversity – Can you help your customers diversify?
Education – People are at home and want to learn, can you give them free or paid training?
Do-it-yourself or at home – How can people re-create what you do at home?
Delivery – Can you send things to their houses vs having them come in?
Distraction – Can you give them something entertaining to distract them from this?

How can you incorporate & emphasize these themes in your offers and advertising?

Remember, you have to communicate these things!

If you’re open – TELL ‘EM
If you’re delivering – TELL ‘EM
If you’re focusing on cleaning & safety – Show them what you’re doing

Let’s talk about tweaking our offers to fit these current circumstances

Tweaking Your Offers For Your Audience

In this next section, I put together a list of typical offers and how you can get creative with them during a time like now.

Attention

BIG DISCLAIMER: I’m not so naive to think that changing is easy, or that just tweaking your offer will magically explode your business. My job in this article is to get your creative juices flowing and show you how to be strategic given the current circumstances – ultimately the market will tell you if your idea is good or not. I realize that some of these may not be possible based on the current state of affairs or your local regulations. But if you focus on what you want and go after it, crazy things can happen.

Industry	Typical Scenario	Creative Solutions
Coaching/Consulting	Coaching is done in person	Go virtual. Don’t focus on “business as usual” – clients will cancel if you’re seen as an extra expense. Develop a PLAN on what they should change / adapt.
Marketing Services	Meetings in person or remote	Help clients find ways to survive in this time and tweak their offerings. Launch low-cost alternatives. Help people for free now to develop relationships.
Home Services	Free Inspections or Estimates	Have the home owner take a photo, video, or facetime of the problem area. Once you’re there to fix the problem, have a plan in place to keep social distance. Advertise your saftey precautions.
Restaurant	Dining In	Offer takeout or delivery. Offer frozen meals that people can stuff in their freezer. Offer recipes that clients can make at home. Sell ingredients & unused supplies.
Beauty/Salon	In-person	Offer mobile haircuts in client’s homes. Offer to walk your clients step-by-step cutting their hair virtually via skype. Double down on your cleanliness & promote it. Create videos on cutting your own hair that clients can buy.
Fitness	In A Gym	Go virtual Create plans that clients can do at their home. Offer virtual training or sessions. Offer recipes that they can make at home to stay on track of nutrition. Focus on “immune system boosting” nutrition & exercise. Post at-home workouts or have a paid membership to do 1 on 1 training. Let paying clients take home gym equipment like dumbells / kettlebells etc.
Real Estate	In-person house showing	Offer virtual showings over facetime, Google hangouts, Zoom, etc. Focus on showing clients opporutunities to save in a down economy Focus on low interest rates and why now is the time to buy.
Health Services	In person	Go mobile and go to individuals homes. Offer virtual consults over Facetime.
Transportation	Driving someone from one location to another	Make sure you’re cleaning your vehicles often and marketing that to your clients.
Automotive/Vehicle Repair	At a shop	Go mobile with your services – repair cars in the owner’s home. Offer to pick up your customer’s cars for them.
Bars	In The Bar	Create to-go cocktails packs. Sell mix-at-home packs.
E-commerce	Online	Make sure people know what’s in stock, delivery times, and if it’s made in the USA promote that!

These examples only touch a tiny fraction of the market, but hopefully gives some examples to get your creative juices flowing. There is always a way to be creative for your particular business.

Creating Something Totally Different

You may find yourself in a situation where “tweaking” your offer simply won’t work.

In that case, you might be able to shift your entire product to something different or more relevant.

For example – Elon Musk of Tesla offered to manufacture ventilators even if they couldn’t manufacture their cars.

This cosmetics company shifted their offering to start producing hand sanitizer.

If you can’t sell what you normally do, how can you use your resources to create a new, more relevant offer?

Alternative: Using This Time To Help

Right now there is also a massive opportunity to simply HELP people.

Everyone is online right now looking for help and opportunities – so now is a great time to shift to this if you are in a position to.

Focus on giving away things for free. Create tons of content. Open up what used to cost money, and use this time to build an audience that loves you, even if they aren’t buying… (yet!).

The market will come back and people will remember what you did.

Deploying Your New Offer

To deploy the new offer, we need to hit our audience in any way we can to make sure we’re gaining market share.

Step #1 – Landing Page

Use a landing page to deploy your new offer.

On your landing page, you will want to showcase the offer, the benefits, and an opt-in form, and a way for them to call you.

Here is a great example of a landing page we built for a client locally. We’re helping them get more business through take-out.

Step #2 – Connect With Your Audience

In a time like this, we need to focus on areas where we will be able to get the quickest traction possible but also have a solid chance of reaching our audience we outlined above.

Solution A: Your Organic Following

If you have a responsive social media following that would be the “I can deploy this today” method.

I would not recommend just doing a social media post though. Your audience’s news feed is currently smothered in news, new offers, and kittens.

It will be very hard to break past the noise.

To almost get a guaranteed set of new eyes on your offer you need to put some fuel in the tank.

Solution B: Paid Advertising

If you want people to see your offer ASAP then you need to advertise.

And right now is a great time, because advertising is temporarily cheaper than normal. There are more people online, which means more ad inventory!

With Google Ads, you can reach thousands in your area looking for your offer.

You bid on keywords or terms for your ads to be shown for, or you can even geo-target users specific areas.

Want to reach past visitors? You can do that too through retargeting!

When it comes to paid advertising, you’re not hoping that someone will like, comment, or share your post.

You’re literally injecting your business and offer with new views every day.

Once again, the demand is there for these offers and your business is now supplying this demand.

When someone types in the search term “discount delivery food” you will see some of the major brands are already adjusting their offers to meet demand.