Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.

And these are certainly extraordinary times! As individuals and businesses make drastic changes to their day-to-day, we have all been called to adapt, make swift decisions, and in some cases, completely pivot from our typical norms.

And for some businesses, these pivots have been essential to keep operations running. Today, we’re going to talk about some observations we’ve seen over the past few weeks and three ways businesses can use these observations to their advantage to promote awareness and cash flow during these uncertain times.

Here is what we’re seeing:

1. What was once foot traffic is now web traffic. As communities across the nation are hunkering down at home, individuals are flocking to the internet for shopping, entertainment, community, and everything they once did – but now online.

2. Brick-and-mortar businesses are called to get creative. Physical businesses are seeing massive shifts in their day-to-day operations, and many are pivoting to online methods of driving sales and awareness to keep cash flowing.

3. Businesses that rely on event marketing and tradeshows must find alternative ways to drive sales and awareness. With events and tradeshows canceling world-wide, businesses who once relied on those methods to get in front of buyers and clients are now forced to find alternative ways to get in front of their market.

4. There is a growing demand for trackable marketing practices. As businesses must make tough decisions about their budgets, more companies are flocking to marketing practices that are flexible and offer ROI tracking.

5. Online ad inventory is more plentiful, reducing advertising costs in some cases. With more individuals tuning in online, and businesses pulling marketing spend, ad inventory has increased, which is driving down bid prices in some markets.

6. Even in industries where demand is high, supply may be an issue. Businesses that you might assume are doing well because of increased demand, may be struggling to fulfill orders while manufacturing has slowed across the globe.

So, what can we take from these observations, and how can businesses of all types keep revenue and awareness top of mind during this unprecedented time?

1. If you’re not already online, get online.

The entire nation, heck, the entire world is sequestered at home, on their devices. If you aren’t in front of them already, you need to be. This isn’t to say e-commerce and internet-based companies don’t have their own set of challenges during this time, but they are in the right space to stay in front of their audience.

For brick-and-mortar businesses, this means getting creative to find ways that you can bring your business online. We have seen some great examples of this already, in the form of:

• Virtual classes
• e-learning
• Coaching
• Live events
• Gift cards
• Delivery

2. Stay in front of your audience – but be mindful of messaging.

With plunging stocks and challenging times, individuals and businesses may not be willing to hear your message right now. Or perhaps, you’re a toilet paper retailer, and in that case, they definitely want to hear your message right now! Either way, it is key to stay in front of your audience – both for brick-and-mortar and online businesses.

A few ways you can do this are:

• Online advertising – Search and social advertising is a great way to stay top of mind while your customers are online. With flexible budget options, comprehensive targeting, and trackable ROI, online advertising is a great option for businesses who want to reach their audiences. And as mentioned in the observations, bid prices are very low in some industries, giving companies more of a bang for their buck.
• Serve targeted ads to email list – For an even more targeted approach, you can serve ads to your email list to get in front of past and current customers.
• Email marketing – Stay in constant communication with your clients and customers with an email marketing campaign.
• Engage in SEO – The last two tips require an email list, but what if you don’t have one? Engaging in an SEO strategy can help build traffic to your website, increase awareness, and help you build an inbound lead list. More importantly, SEO helps get your company in front of searchers when they’re actively searching for products or services like yours!
• Social media updates – Keep your customers and followers up-to-date with social media messaging. More communication keeps your brand top of mind, so they’ll be ready to pull the trigger on purchases or contracts once things blow over.
• Push notifications – Send push notifications to alert your customer-base of important updates, promotions, or messaging to also keep your brand fresh in their mind.

3. Use specials and promotions to influence purchase behavior.

People are at home looking to capitalize on discounts and promotional offers. For businesses, using promotions or specials can:

• Promote cash flow – For businesses who are hit particularly hard right now, offering promotions and specials can help boost cash during lower-volume times. If your services or products are only available physically, try ‘buy now, book later’ promotions or gift cards.
• Sell specific products – For some e-commerce brands, fulfilling orders is challenging right now. Using promotions and specials to steer purchase behavior towards products that are plentiful and away from backorder items can help give businesses some breathing room.
• Leverage the increased impressions – There are more individuals online than ever before, and if you’re in the position to do so, taking advantage of this audience can boost cash reserves and profit.

At a time when everyone has turned their eyes to the internet, both brick-and-mortar and online businesses have more access than ever to their audience. While some companies are called to be more creative than others, all types of companies and industries can use internet marketing methods to their advantage. And when the economy does rebound, you’ll have better positioned your business to be on the receiving end of sales activity.

Hello, clients and friends of Titan Growth,

These are unprecedented times for which there is no playbook. At Titan Growth, all we can do is our best to keep our team members, families, and community safe, while continuing to offer our same rockstar level of service to our clients – many of whom rely on us through this challenging time.

I wanted to personally offer some insight into what we as a team are doing to keep our workforce safe, as well as some observations on how you can continue to thrive as a business during this time.

Our Response to COVID-19 and Our Promise to You

As of March 16^th, our offices have gone entirely virtual. We are operating under three core values to keep our team and services as cohesive as possible. Those values are:

1. Increased communication

There’s nothing like a full virtual workforce to put into perspective how vital communication is. Being physically apart has not made us feel out of touch, though. (Thank goodness for virtual meetings!)

We’ve ramped up the internal touchpoints to ensure our team continues to function like a well-oiled machine. And most days, we look a little like this…

2. Increased awareness

We have an alert system and ongoing internal messaging to keep our team on top of the latest health and safety recommendations. Our main goal is to keep our workforce safe, productive, and healthy.

In addition, our team is also on high alert for your welfare. As changes in the market evolve, our team is ready to make recommendations based on what we see. That could mean increasing spend in a particular area where bid prices may be lower than typical or recommending changes to your messaging as new updates on COVID-19 roll out.

3. Increased graciousness

A large portion of our nation is working from home right now, sometimes with full households! With work-life and personal life co-existing, and people adapting their schedules during these hectic times, our team understands your background noises, pajama days, and internet connection hiccups.

We are in no way letting this get in our way of communicating with each other or with you. So, let your hair down, and video chat with us!

Marketing + Social Distancing – What We’re Seeing

In addition to what we as a team are doing during this time, I’d also like to offer a few observations and thoughts on the current state of things and how businesses can continue to thrive even amidst the current landscape.

1. What was once foot traffic is now search traffic

As businesses and individuals across the nation are following recommendations to stay home, people are flocking to the internet seeking products, community, entertainment, education… you name it.

This offers both online and brick-and-mortar businesses opportunities to get in front of their target audience online.

2. Higher than typical ad inventory could potentially lower online advertising costs

With the increase of online traffic, plus, some businesses pulling back on advertising spend, there is a surplus of advertising real estate. This allows businesses of all types to stay in front of their customers and get advertising at a lesser cost.

3. Brick-and-mortar businesses need to get creative on how to keep cash flowing

Physical businesses are seeing a massive shift in volume and are forced to re-think ways to potentially bring business and awareness online to keep their employees and community safe. I have seen some really creative ways that businesses are doing this to keep cash flow moving during this critical time:

• Doctor, dental, and therapists offering virtual appointments
• Wineries offering bottle delivery and ‘sip from home’ offers
• Restaurants and bars offering sanitary pick-up and delivery
• Event marketing companies hosting live and virtual events
• Gyms offering virtual classes and subscriptions
• Physical retail stores moving to e-commerce platforms
• Grocery stores offering sanitary pick-up and delivery

4. Trackable marketing methods are in demand

With the surge in online traffic, as well as businesses using more discretion with their marketing budgets, many businesses are more interested than ever in digital marketing. SEO, paid media, and email marketing are high ROI strategies that are easy to track – plus, they’re easy to scale.

While every industry is impacted differently, we continue to see new companies who are seeking digital marketing services, as well as current companies looking to increase spend.

We have also seen a pivot from companies who typically rely on event marketing and tradeshows, turn to digital marketing while events cannot take place.

Protecting your digital footprint has never been more vital and critical to your ongoing business livelihood. Especially once this all passes. The businesses that continued to keep their market share will see the biggest post “pop” when it comes to traffic, customers, and revenue.

5. This too shall pass

I mentioned in our article last week, that we have been through (and came out on the other side) of the 2008 Great Recession. Though the circumstances are different, there are many similarities. Right now, we as a nation are going through a massive shake-up. There is a lot of fear and uncertainty. The markets are extremely volatile. But things will stabilize.

Some businesses will see slower or quicker recoveries depending on their industry. However, at the end of the day, individuals are eager to restore their lives and habits and to continue moving forward.

Through all of this, we’re here to support you. If you have questions, concerns, or struggles, we would love to speak to you about how we can help you get through this uncertain time and come out on the other side, perhaps even stronger than ever.

In the meantime, take care of yourself and each other. Wishing the best for you and your families.

SEO is one of the most important parts of an effective online marketing strategy. Here are the top 5 SEO benefits to show you that if you’re not currently doing it – well, then maybe you should be.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or cryogenically frozen for the past twenty years, you’ve probably heard of SEO, or as its mother calls it when she’s angry, “Search Engine Optimization.” It’s kind of a huge deal now, thanks to a small startup named Google. Maybe you’ve heard of them, too.

Though the digital landscape has changed dramatically since search engine marketing became a thing (heck, it’s probably even changed since you started reading this post), SEO has remained an effective and important marketing strategy.

We’d even go so far as to say SEO is one of the most effective and important marketing strategies.

To fully appreciate why, let’s first get a little 101. What exactly is SEO marketing?

Simply put, it is the process of getting qualified users to visit your site by improving how well your site appears in search engine results.

A key importance is that SEO marketing drives organic traffic from people searching for things online as opposed to paid search traffic, which comes from running pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

If you’re not sure why any of this matters, you’ve come to the right place.

Even if you’re familiar with SEO, and you know full well the difference between a title tag and a 301 redirect, you might be wondering how much SEO you actually need. Well, we’re here to put the matter to rest.

Just like with puppies and pizza, you can never get enough SEO. Let’s see why…

Benefits of SEO for Business Growth

While there are many benefits to a good SEO strategy, we have outlined the top 5 to help you understand (or remind you!) why SEO is simply awesome.

SEO Benefit #1: Increase Quality Traffic to Your Site

They say it’s lonely at the top. But is it really?

Not when it comes to search engine marketing. Quite the contrary. There’s actually a lot of people up there.

• The top 3 Google search results get 75% of all clicks
• The top spot on mobile gets 27.7% of all clicks (The second gets 9.2%)
• On average, moving up one spot increases CTR by 30.8%
• 75% never make it past the first page of search results
• Organic search contributes 51% of site traffic

So, it’s no surprise that one of the primary goals of SEO is to push your site into the coveted top three positions in the search engine result pages (SERPs). These spots on the first page receive a majority of the impressions and clicks. Ranking in these high positions can result in significant traffic increases.

The benefit is a surge in people visiting your site, seeing your products, and being exposed to your brand.

But the benefits of SEO don’t end there.

Another primary goal of SEO focuses on creating engaging search snippets.

SEO uses informative and keyword-relevant title tags and meta descriptions to not only help drive traffic to your site but to attract the right type of people to your site ­­— the people mostly like to read what you’re writing and buy what you’re selling.

Having optimized tags and descriptions help to increase click-through rate (CTR), and qualified web traffic.

So, let SEO take you higher. The view is amazing up here.

SEO Benefit #2: Generate a Higher ROI

If knowledge is power, then SEO turns you into a freakin’ superhero.

SEO provides ridiculous amounts of trackable and quantifiable results. This goes for both e-commerce and non-e-commerce sites. All of which work toward one end — improving your return-on-investment (ROI).

One of the biggest debates that companies have over pursuing SEO is whether or not it is worth it. As in, does it improve the bottom line?

Oh boy, does it ever!

On average, companies make more money from organic search than any other traffic source. In fact, it’s been reported that 40% of business revenue comes from organic traffic.

But raking in the Benjamins isn’t the only ROI benefit from SEO.

With SEO, you can track nearly every aspect of your strategy, like increases in rankings, traffic, and conversions. You even have the ability to see demographic information and other individual engagement metrics.

For e-commerce sites, SEO analytics show which paths users take to complete a sale, right down to which keyword they used to search for you before purchasing. For non-e-commerce sites, you can attribute values to your lead conversions. For example, you can see how many conversions came from your ‘contact us’ form fill-out.

All this data is super valuable and is especially important in times of economic uncertainty.

These comprehensive analytics not only allow you to calculate the value of your SEO strategy, but they also provide insight into the best ways to grow your business in every way.

SEO Benefit #3: More Cost-Effective

SEO is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies. That’s just something else that will make your ROI skyrocket even higher. This is due in part to its inbound nature, which helps businesses save more money compared to outbound strategies.

Take cold-calling.

While cold-calling can still be an effective outbound marketing strategy, only 16% of businesses saw higher ROI from outbound marketing than they did with inbound digital marketing tactics, like SEO.

Also, no one’s going to hang up in your face. That’s what we call a win-win.

And since SEO also targets users who are actively looking for your products and services online, the traffic resulting from SEO is more qualified than many other marketing strategies. This results in even more cost-savings for companies.

The only question now is what are you going to do with all that money you’re saving with SEO?

Might we suggest buying a puppy or a pizza? We hear you can’t get enough of those.

SEO Benefit #4: Improve site usability

SEO simultaneously makes your website more navigable for both users and search engines.

One aspect of performing on-page optimization is to rearrange a site’s architecture to make pages easier to find and navigate. This not only improves the efficiency with which search engine crawlers index your site, but it also makes it easier for users to use your site.

Because, you see, SEO isn’t just about keywording and backlinking. It’s about creating a positive user experience. User experience (UX) is how people interact with your brand, products, and services. The better the experience, the better your returns.

Good SEO decreases bounce rates, increases time spent on site, optimizes conversion rates, and improves page load speed, all of which add up to one stellar user experience.

This is especially huge, given that Google uses a mobile-first indexing strategy. This means Google now ranks your site according to the mobile experience it provides.

Over 52% of web traffic comes from mobile. Yet, around 25% of the most popular sites are not mobile-friendly. That means there’s big potential to outrank a lot of sites by equipping yours with a more mobile-centric user experience.

Your users will love it. Search engines will love it. You will love it.

SEO Benefit #5: Promote Brand Awareness and Credibility

High rankings for your webpages translate to more exposure for your brand.

Being on the first page for your targeted keywords not only helps users to associate your brand with those keywords, but it instills trust since companies on the first page are generally perceived to be more credible.

And everyone knows search cred is one of the best types of cred to have.

In that regard, another benefit of SEO is that it levels the playing field.

There was a time not so long ago when it was incredibly hard for smaller businesses to compete with bigger companies because of the difference in their marketing budgets. SEO has stepped in to give everyone a shot.

If your pages rank in one of the top three SERP spots, especially for competitive keywords, it can instantly boost your reputation and convey social proof.

After all, you wouldn’t be at the top unless you were popular and credible, right? Or at least that’s how high rankings are perceived. Because in reality, popularity has nothing to do with it. You just need a really good SEO team.

So, the more your pages and content rank in high positions in search results, the more chances you have for users to see your content and associate with your brand.

All this adds up to more clicks, more conversions, and more pizza. Lots and lots of pizza.

Conclusion

So, how do you like them benefits?

Like we said at the start, there are a lot of perks to adding search engine optimization into your digital marketing strategy, such as SEO benefits for local businesses. But these top 5 SEO benefits definitely take the slice, which is why so many companies are prioritizing SEO in their inbound marketing efforts this year.

Although if you’re still on the fence about whether SEO could be beneficial to your website, or have questions about the right ways to go about implementing it, don’t hesitate to get in contact with us.

We’ll give you a free SEO consultation and fill you in on exactly what you need to take full advantage of all the benefits of SEO.

We can also help you figure out what type of puppy you should get and pizza you should order.

Hint: It’s pepperoni. And a goldendoodle. I mean, look at these guys.