COVID-19: Building Your Customer Acquisition Online

Don’t cut digital lead acquisition; you need to feed the top of the funnel.
Under the current circumstances, it makes sense to take a look at where you’re spending money and find ways you can cut back to help your business hang on. However, one particular area you should continue to focus on with respect to customer acquisition is digital marketing.
Why shouldn’t you cut digital? Let’s first take a look at what isn’t working during the COVID-19 pandemic. Events aren’t happening now and likely won’t be happening months from now. You won’t be traveling, and you won’t be sponsoring conferences.
The phone isn’t much better. In fact, with many people working from home, it’s much more difficult to reach the right people at the right time. Similarly, print vendors probably aren’t working at full capacity, if at all right now, not to mention the fact that the materials you send are going to just pile up outside of office doors.
Any opportunity you have on the books for in-person interfacing is likely canceled for the time being. But those MQLs aren’t gone, you just have to reach them online.
That brings us back to digital, which is where your leads are going to have to come from. In fact, it’s the only thing working right now.
Partnerships with companies like UpCity that are still able to deliver active buyers can be tremendously helpful in times like these. When money is tight and spending is scrutinized on a more granular level, we can help continue to drive highly qualified leads on a consistent basis.
The same goes for a number of other digital deliveries. The stories of email marketing’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Email is thriving, and will continue to do so with the reduction of phone connections.
Paid search, paid social, and online display ads are properly positioned to be effective in a time of isolation. We’re all hammering away at our computers. There’s a captive audience searching for and doing research on businesses just like yours. Likewise, let’s be honest, there’s a tendency to scroll through one’s social channels a little bit more when you’re working from home.
Along the same lines, webinars are picking up steam as well. Again, you have an audience sitting alone, virtually begging for something to listen to and learn from that they can take back to their colleagues.
The point is, if you cut out digital right now, in a few months’ time your business will be in an even more precarious spot. Stick with what’s working and keep feeding quality leads to your sales team. People are still looking to buy, and this is far and away your best path to finding them.
About the author
Jason is focused on the voice and strategy of UpCity’s written messaging. A former newspaper reporter and editor—and winner of an Illinois Press Association award for sports column writing—Jason has extensive communications experience in a wide variety of interests and industries. He has spearheaded content initiatives in the agency world as well as at major companies such as State Farm and DocuSign. Jason believes in the 3 Cs of written messaging: Be clear. Be concise. Be consistent.