By Chris Attewell, CEO at digital agency Search Laboratory.

As UK businesses gear up for a return to semi-normality, many marketers will be considering how their communication and digital strategies will translate from operating under a lockdown state to ‘the new normal’. Here are five tips on how businesses can ensure their digital strategy holds up in a post-COVID world:

1 Use the data at your disposal in the right way:

Marketers have access to more data than ever before, but the key to getting results from your digital strategy is to make use of the right data. A data-driven strategy is bound to deliver better results for your business, but only if you successfully identify the data that is of most use to you. Use these insights to create a bespoke strategy to suit your business needs, aligning the metrics and KPIs you track with your wider business objectives.

It’s also important to make sure you’ve got the right tools in place to track these effectively too; web analytics, social analytics, or custom solutions can help you to identify the impact of your marketing activity on your KPIs and allow you to adjust accordingly to meet your goals. For example, in the current climate it could be most useful for you to be tracking metrics relating to building brand awareness, whilst customer purchases are decreased, including social impressions, brand searches, new followers and website visits. By investing the time in building your brand awareness now, you’re setting yourself up for a stronger return to normal with a larger potential customer base.

2 Invest in the right channels:

Once you’re successfully tracking your data effectively, you can use your findings to identify which marketing channels are delivering the best results and helping you to achieve your business goals. Understanding this is key to making informed budget decisions about where your marketing budget is best spent. By properly attributing value to your channels, campaigns, creatives and keywords that are driving conversions (and other goal KPIs), you will be able to identify success via return on investment and demonstrate the value of your work.

3 Take a cohesive approach to your channels:

If you’re not already doing this, one of the first things you should be looking to get in order ready for a return to full operation is tying up your organic and paid channels for a cohesive approach to marketing. One of the biggest mistakes that businesses make is to operate each of their marketing channels in silos – and this is particularly true of those businesses that outsource work to various agencies. A lack of integration can lead to duplication of work and a disjointed customer journey, ultimately resulting in lack of sales and wasted time. Instead you should have a wider strategy with overarching objectives that all channels feed into - improving performance and increasing efficiency across all channels.

4 Consider your customers as individuals:

Your customers are unique, and the time and budget invested into attracting and retaining customers should vary according to their habits. Two of the most important factors to take into consideration are the lifetime value of the customer and the likelihood they are to covert; pay more attention to those high-value customers, but also use your analytics to identify the patterns in behaviour that led to successful conversions pre-coronavirus and look for similar current activity. By matching the site interactions high-value users used to take before purchasing historically, with current user activity, you can identify the current consumers that are most likely to convert.

Smart bidding, sequential messaging and segmenting your audience are all tactics which can help you to tailor both the content you show customers, and the amount you pay for their clicks, meaning higher conversion rates and sales.

5 The customer journey is key:

The past few weeks may well have shifted how your customers make their way through the buyer-journey. It’s important to put the time in to identify the various touch points on the journey and make sure these are targeted appropriately ahead of getting businesses back up and running - reaching the right person, with the right message, at the right time, is an essential part of any marketing strategy.

Chris Attewell provides strategic leadership and direction for Search Laboratory’s operations in the UK and the US, working with clients and internal teams to deliver profitable online customer acquisition campaigns across multiple countries.

Photo by Georgie Cobbs on Unsplash