It was March 11, 2020, when COVID-19 global pandemic sent the world into something of a panic.

Since then, businesses have found ways to diminish the economic impact. Now is the time to take stock, adapt, research, and determine what will work and what needs to be changed.

It was Q3 when businesses began to shut down due to the COVID-19 virus. Those businesses with an online presence had a distinct advantage. One of the strongest-performing marketing metrics at this time was web traffic.

Site traffic grew by 16% in Australia during Q3. Traffic increased the week of March 9 and peaked in the week of April 20 and stayed strong till early May. That metric was 24% above the benchmark.

For a Look Back at How COVID-19 Impacted Businesses in Australia check out this report by HubSpot - How COVID-19 Impacted Businesses

During this time, we worked closely (but at a social distance over zoom 😉 of course) with all our clients to help do what we could do to get them through this hard time.

It was a time for some of our clients to adapt to a new way to do business, business was turning remote. Having to adapt, sparked conversations around what we can do to market and to still sell to their clients.

Listed out below are a few things we found that really helped our client grow in hard times.

1. VIDEO

One 2 One Video

The new kid on the block is "one 2 one video", The team at Digikat have been using it for the last 12 to 18 months and have found it amazing, but the secret is now out.

If you are looking for a more personal way to reach out in a social distancing world, video is your new best friend. The team at DigiKat are big fans of Vidyard an easy tool that allows us to create, one 2 one sales videos, support videos and even just videos instead of writing an email ( lazy I know, but it works).

During COVID we help to train sales staff, support staff even GM's & CEO's to help them to stay personal. 

It was all worth the extra hours and work training staff when a sales manager we helped out pulled me aside last week and said, "You helped our business get through COVID with video" 🙏.

2. ADS

Remarketing & Lookalike Audience

Currently, spending must be worth the cost. 💵  Thats the same with ad dollars. DigiKat has what we call our 30-Day Bootstrap Strategy it's where we run ads as if we were beginning a "startup" fast and often so we fail faster and grow quicker. 

It's a 30 day ad strategy where we run ads for 30-days. Then we keep the top 2 best performing ads and roll out another 30 new advertisements, rinse and repeat. It's a quick and easy way to test new content and find out what works best in the market. (Pro Tip: The market tells you what works. 🤦‍♂️)  

During COVID we ran this strategy for our clients some even did it in lots of 7, Meaning they were testing twice as much as everyone else and found their highest performing ads faster, Meaning faster ROI 📈.  

This image is an automated workflow in  HubSpot that helps us to advertise to the right people at the right time with the right content based on the customer journey. Workflows and remarketing like this help to get people back to your site and it helps you stay front of mind with your prospect.

We are able to contribute a large part of our "lead to customer" metrics to remarketing, as remarketing was the key to funnelling them back to the website to take the next step in booking a meeting or completing a form. 

3. CHAT

As businesses shifted to remote settings, the volume of chats exploded. Numerous teams used chats (Facebook Messenger, onsite chat) to enlarge their pipelines, offer customer support, enlist leads, and more. At this point, every industry has exceeded its benchmarks for chats. 

QOQ INCREASES OF (SALES) CHAT

• Manufacturing — 27 % increase
• Consumer Goods — 50 % increase
• Construction — 45% increase
• Human Resources — 25% increase

Before & During COVID we were really pushing our clients to move towards some type of Live Chat or Chatbot. As we have found chat great for helping clients along the customer journey.

Be it Pricing questions, Support questions or General information there is a chatbot or live chat for you. HubSpot offers a great free chat tool design to give you an easy to use tool that is customer focused.

4. EMAIL

Marketing Email

Sent email connections began to rise immensely during the week of March 9. Emails remained elevated throughout Q3, and the QoQ email send-increase rose 17% in Australia.

Email open rates, the percentage of the total number of subscribers who opened an email campaign, increased by 18% above levels before COVID appeared. It seems evident that marketing email is a go-to outlet for engaging prospects and clients during the pandemic.

Businesses we worked with found that email marketing was a great way to stay connected with their audience and customers. In this time we found emails that didn't reference COVID at all performed better. (We are guessing here, but it was probably due to every email having a subject line of COVID update 🤷‍♂️)

Sales Email

However, sales emails are not as lucky as marketing emails. When sales teams increased their email delivery frequency after the pandemic began, their response rates decreased during the week of March 16, and remain at 25 – 30% below the benchmark since then.

Australian salespeople are reaching out to customers with 36% more email than last quarter, but receive 19% fewer responses.

We found that if the content in the email was relevant and important to the end user it would get opens. 

Pro Tip: Salespeople, next time you reach out to someone with an email use a subject line like:

{firstname} I have done a video for you 🎬

Then insert a Vidyard video in the email at the top & make sure it is personal 😉.

5. PERSONALISED CONTENT

Facebook and Netflix do it and so should you!

Personalising the customer journey is key in this current day and age. If a site visitor clicked on an ad with a headline of Dog Food you would think they are a dog lover, right. So offer then dog related content. Don't just send them to your home page with cat and dog food make it personalised for them.

Now you know they like dogs, next time they come back display dynamic content to them based around dogs. Looking to learn more about this, HubSpot have a great blog on it Personalised experiences

We use personalised content with our clients and have found it speeds up the sales process as every time they visit the site we are able to walk them through the customer journey. 

Example:

Bill comes to the site from an ad related around getting a home loan.

Bill then downloads your ebook on the 5 tips to getting your first home loan.

Bill then gets a follow up series of emails pushing him back to the site for more resources.

When Bill comes back to the site next time the next CTA he will see is the next step in the buyers journey (which home load is right for me?)

This is how we are able to educate Bill and provide him with value along the way. Add in some Remarketing and you have yourself a sweet little marketing machine that will help your sales team close faster.

MANUFACTURING (AG SECTOR)

SETBACKS BEFORE COVID GOT HERE 🦠

DigiKat works mostly with construction and manufacturing companies. Both of these sectors have experienced continued growth during COVID. The manufacturing side of our business includes agriculture and farming.

As we all know the Ag sector has been hit hard over the last few years. Australia has been through one of the most prolonged and most severe droughts in the history of the country.  As if that were not enough, beginning in 2019 and into the start of 2020, Australia was the victim of horrendous bush fires. This has been a devastating last 12 months for our Ag based manufacturing clients, then we had COVID 😡.

Despite these difficult times, some achievements of which we have been a part of include:

• Manufacturing companies we serve have seen on average 123.10% increase in web traffic. 📈
• On average our manufacturing clients have seen a 23.56% increase in leads. 🚀
• We're delighted to share that on average our manufacturing clients  have also registered a 27.5 % increase in lead to customer. 🤯

The above results are a credit to the companies we work with and really show that Aussie battler mentality of pushing forward. 

The main driver for the results was the ability to be able to automate as much as possible and streamline the sales process as much as we could. The top 3 needle moving tools we had implemented were.

1. Remarketing  
2. One 2 one Video
3. Automation with the use of the HubSpot Platform

CONSTRUCTION

Many of our Building & Construction clients are in areas like, Tamworth, Newcastle, Armidale, Warwick, Bathurst, and in and around the Gold Coast. 

• Companies have seen on average a 120.5% rise in web traffic.
• Visits from social media have increased by 15% on average
• SEO has grown by 27.98% overall
• Leads for the companies we serve have risen by an average of 21%.
• As of July 2020, "leads to paying customers" have increased on average by a massive 71% 🤯

The key things that have helped our clients are. 

1. Automation with HubSpot 
2. Personal Content ( Based around house Size & Style)
3. Chat ( Online chat/ bots & social chat mainly Facebook)

It's now your turn!

Are you looking to get started with growing your business ? You can book an appointment right now by simply clicking on our calendar.

Mick, is waiting to get you signed up for our FREE 30-Minute Growth Strategy session that will answer all your marketing questions.

Take the first step to double your leads and sales by booking your FREE 30-Minute Growth Strategy. Get started with $1000 worth of advise for free.