Knowing how to create content during a pandemic is a fine art. Your content needs to strike the right balance between realising the current situation and all its implications whilst still trying to achieve your business goals.
What shouldn’t happen is to let your marketing efforts grind to a halt. By all means, budgets need to be cut. That’s understandable. But to stop marketing completely means you’re missing out on opportunities to expand and grow your business.
Read on to find out what these opportunities are!
Make sure your content is consistent
One of the key ideas to remember here is to be consistent. If you are reducing your social posts down to 3 a week, that’s fine. But make sure 3 a week are being posted. If you’re vlogging, make sure to do it consistently and make your branding consistent too.
Why? Consistency is a big part of content success. With every post, you’re gaining traction so to take your foot off the pedal would undo some of your hard work. Google is always on the look out for fresh content so why not make that yours?
Why continue continuing content during COVID-19
People spend basically all their time on their phones these days anyway. Throw lockdown, furlough, changes in daily routine and other COVID-19 related factors and what do you get? An audience who are on their digital devices A LOT.
These people may not be in a position to buy anything at the moment. But this is an excellent opportunity to engage with them and get your brand seen by them.
During a pandemic, people want distraction. We’re often bogged down by news reports and dealing with the knock-on effects of Coronavirus. Be that welcome distraction they’re looking for.
How can my content help people?
- If you’re in the health and fitness industry, post about how people can take care of themselves in lockdown.
- If you sell cleaning products, write a blog on handy tips to keep your home clean during lockdown.
- If you are a HR company, post about employee well-being and the importance of communication
- There are many ways to diversify your content to help people and provide distractions.
- Get some more great ideas here
How to make sure your content resonates
Hitting the mark with your content is an uphill battle regardless of a pandemic or not. So, during COVID-19 times, making your content resonate is more important than ever. Get it wrong and it can damage your brand but don’t let that put you off. To create content during a pandemic is an excellent opportunity for you to get creative, diversify, rethink your tone of voice and approach.
TOP TIP
Our tip would be to take note of reality. Be wary of what people are going through and be sensitive to their situations. Aggressively selling a holiday during a global pandemic is both fruitless and insensitive. Change your tact so that you’re produce quality, helpful content that is in line with your brand and marketing strategy.
Research your Competitors Posts
Keeping your eye on your competitors has always been good practice. To see what else is being posted in your industry helps you keep a finger on the pulse. Obviously, copying their content is a big no-no but it can help your own content. See what they’re doing, look what you’re doing and make sure you’re standing out. By edging past them and offering what they’re not you’ll catch the eye of online audiences.
Save Money, Look Good
Perhaps you were spending hours using technical software to design your social media posts, blog image designs and so on. Using free tools such as Canva is a cost-effective and easy method of speeding your marketing up. It is a slick tool which allows you to create polished graphics to compliment your content. You can also now include videos and animation.
All About the 80/20
This approach should also apply to your non-pandemic marketing. Your aim is to educate and inform your audiences with engaging content at a ratio of 80/20. If you make it too ‘salesy,’ people will be put off, and get their questions answered elsewhere.
Blogging is a good example of that. Let’s look at ours. In the last 9 blogs we have written, not one of them has been a sales article. Our approach is slightly different to 80/20 in that we include a call to action (CTA) in every blog. But when you weigh up the 99% engaging content and 1% CTA, it makes for quite a good ratio!
Improve Existing Content
Creating content can be quite time consuming and once there is the initial flourish of interest when it’s uploaded and posted, your hard work can be forgotten about. Reworking old content is a great way of generating fresh traffic to your site. It also gives you material to post about on social media. It also helps to continue educating and informing your audience, as we mentioned above. Work systematically through your content and update H2’s and H3’s, update images, reword a little… It all makes a difference!
TOP TIP
Once you have refreshed old content, make sure it’s indexed. In Google Search Console, use the URL Inspection to submit an index request. You shouldn’t do this for multiple articles but it’s worth doing once or twice. This puts your improved content right in front of Google and helps your chance of ranking well.
To Conclude on How to Create Content during a Pandemic
To create content during a pandemic is to recognise the changes your audiences are facing. As a person, you will also have been affected by COVID, one way or another, as we all have. Use your own knowledge of the situation and put it into practice with your content. Try to remember to help where possible, be engaging and less salesy!
If you would like some input on creating content during COVID then get in touch with the team!
