Has Covid-19 Closed Your Marketing Channels?

If your favorite marketing techniques all involve touching or seeing your clients in spaces less than 6 feet wide, it's time to take another look at your digital marketing efforts.

David Victor

June 20, 2020

If your sales and marketing practices have been negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, you may need to re-examine the job your website is doing to help grow your business.

Recently I had an opportunity to meet with a prospective client who’s business has been marketed to date using nearly 100% traditional tactics: email, phone (interruptive techniques), a bit of LinkedIn farming, and a whole lot of trade-show/convention booth marketing.

Unsurprisingly, the novel coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has defeated his ability to generate new business with conventional, eye-to-eye, sales and marketing strategies.

His company’s website has largely been ignored.

When I asked him if he knew anything about the visitors that come to his website, he answered:

“I never check; I just assume that no one is looking at it.”

The Importance of Your Website

Here are a couple of eye-opening factoids about digital marketing and your website:

70% of a buyer’s decision is made before they ever contact anyone in your sales department. How do you think they arrive at their decision? They do research on the internet, often searching for businesses that provide the products and services that you provide.
Over 95% of visitors to your website are not ready to buy today. That does not mean those visits should be ignored! These are your opportunity to begin relationship and rapport-building, looking ahead to the time when they are ready to buy.

The truth is, there’s is no one perfect way to market. Anyone who tells you they have a “silver bullet” that will provide you with all the leads you’ll ever need is clearly unaware of all the possibilities.

Clearly the strategies that emphasize the human, handshake, eyeball-to-eyeball methods are not working at this moment in history.

Conventions and trade-shows, industry gatherings of all kinds — these are all not happening.

Interesting side-effect: people are somewhat trapped at home in front of their desktop computer. It’s true: desktop searches have surged during this global health crisis.

That’s why your business website and the digital marketing strategies that give your business visibility are so vital to the growth and health of your company.