In today’s business world, it is very important to know how to help your clients deal with unexpected changes. Some companies have been able to successfully adjust to the Coronavirus pandemic while others have not been as successful.

We can’t always predict when the markets will make a major shift, but we can help our clients prepare for the possibility of it happening. We protect ourselves from losing money or failing by doing this, and it can even help our clients do better than their competitors when times are tough.

This article covers how to help your clients implement flexible marketing strategies and build businesses that can weather tough times. You’ll also be better equipped to answer questions like these:

• What can you do differently to optimize your client’s online presence?
• Should you invest more in existing customers? Or target a different audience base?
• What resources can you offer your client’s customers to help them at this time?
• How can you expand your client’s customer community?
• What changes should you make to your client’s SEO content?
• What can you learn from competitors?
• What tests can you run? What are customers now responding to?

Let’s dive in.

What Is Flexible Marketing?

This is called flexible marketing because you are constantly making adjustments as things change, rather than sticking to a set plan.

Organizational success depends heavily on good communication, which is especially important during difficult periods. This concept is also known as agile marketing or adaptive strategy.

You might be using some of these concepts without realizing it in your own business or with your clients.

Although it may seem like everyone is talking about flexible marketing or adaptive strategy, there is no need to worry if you or your clients have not integrated these things into their businesses yet. You can help your clients become more resilient at any time, using these principles. These techniques will help them in the present and in the future.

In fact, now’s the perfect time to do so.

7 Short-Term Adaptive Marketing Strategies for Your Clients’ Businesses

1. Optimize Your Clients’ Online Presence

This is the perfect time to help your clients move their businesses online so that everyone can access them.

Look at the products or services your client currently offers and see how you can make them available or easier to use digitally. This could involve specific parts of their business, just one of their services, or all of them.

Some possibilities to consider:

You could improve the customer support on their website by adding a live chat or chatbot to their homepage or help center.

Companies can make the shopping experience more seamless for customers in a few different ways, like by streamlining their fulfillment mechanisms so customers can check out faster, or by adding live tracking capabilities. Perhaps automated sales processes, like using AI to prioritize leads, could be helpful for clients.

Improving customer communication and setting up triggered emails could be simple solutions. You don’t have to make huge changes to have a big impact, and making smaller changes can help your clients feel more stable during times of upheaval.

In order to find out how our partners have been finding success during this difficult time, we recently asked them for their input. Here are some of the responses we received that you can use to get inspired:

An agency moved a real estate client’s data to a cloud storage system.

Another company set up store pickup as a delivery option for catering.

This yoga studio has integrated Zoom into their website so they can offer online classes.

In addition to helping your clients carry on during the Coronavirus outbreak, you may also need to help them improve their online presence.

If your client is already offering digital services or their business is already on the web, you can help them optimize their user experience for a crisis.

This could include creating experiences designed for mobile devices first, helping your clients be available to communicate in real time, or building a site structure that is more easy to use.

Some Wix partners have been sharing that they have been adding pop-ups, new pages on their website, and other resources to help their clients during the Coronavirus shutdown.

2. Reevaluate the Target Audience

Many companies are finding that their target audiences have changed as a result of recent events, so it’s important to make sure that you and your clients are still targeting the right people.

If you want to get the most out of your client’s resources, you may want to target a more specific segment of their usual audience. Or maybe your client’s business is suddenly relevant to a new group of prospective customers.

You could try catering to different segments of your client’s audience who are impacted by the crisis in different ways, to match their needs and state of mind.

When thinking about this strategy, for each segment of your client’s customer base, ask:

• Where are they physically and digitally?
• How does the current crisis affect them and what would motivate them to convert?
• Has that changed since the start of the crisis at hand?
• What’s the best way to reach them?

It is important to understand the needs of different segments of the customer base in order to keep up with them. Identify the keywords that people are searching for by using your preferred SEO tools.

Do they also communicate in groups on social media or other online forums? See what people are talking about right now, so you can help your clients take advantage of that intent.

3. Offer Relevant Resources

Even if your client is reacting to a major shift, they don’t have to pause their lead generation. During times of uncertainty, you can still sustain growth and make the resources your client offers more helpful to their customers.

For example, if your client hasproperties that generate leads (e.g., ebooks, case research studies, infographics), see if they can be updated to be more appropriate for the present time.

In order to help clients make the most out of their content, it might be necessary to package it in a certain way. Your client may decide to keep their eBook as is, and simply update the social media ads driving traffic to it. This would allow them to address consumers’ needs or pain points in the current situation, or highlight the most relevant aspects of that eBook.

You could incentivize your customers to create new resources. Consumers have more time to look for answers and useful materials. This is the perfect moment to buy those articles and leadership pieces that you have been wanting.

4. Reinforce Clients’ Client Communities

With the world becoming more separated, people are looking for ways to connect. You should help your customer create areas where consumers can interact with each other.

The purpose of the forum will differ depending on the client and their customers. It could be a place for clients to share how they’re using the product or service in a different way due to the current crisis, or to voice general thoughts and concerns. Try to come up with ideas that will be valuable to your customer, and then find out what they are most interested in.

Additionally, motivate your customer to run webinars. Platforms such as Zoom and BlueJeans make it easy to connect with large groups of people virtually, from multiple locations.

You can also record enhances and make them available to customers in the future, or take advantage of them as lead generation assets.

You can also help your customers interact more with their customers. If you are running social media posts for your customer, ask a question and invite customers to respond in the comments.

You could create a Facebook poll to allow consumers to vote. You could have your client write an article that would encourage customers to leave their own thoughts and opinions in the comments.

You and your client can also consider developing a more unique community, where the most devoted clients can interact with each other. A method that some companies use to make it so that only certain clients can access functions that aren’t openly offered is by having a member’s area on their website where these clients can create profiles.

Last but not least, when your client makes space for customers to connect, it shows that they are not only interested in making money, but also in bringing people together.

5. Develop Your Customers’ SEO

Your clients’ clients’ search intent may have changed as a result of the current crisis.

Because adaptive marketing and evolving your customer’s material method likewise apply to SEO, consider implementing these methods:

• Usage Google Trends to identify shifts in search intent.
• See if there’s new search intent in Google Browse Console, so you can enhance appropriately.
• Produce vibrant pages where you can quickly upgrade SEO material and meta tags.
• Concentrate on long-tail expressions and update existing ones to match what clients are looking for.

You can now attest that crisis situations are fluid. This suggests that it is important to regularly check for changes in organic search trends and quickly respond in order to keep your customers’ SEO material up-to-date and ranking strongly.

6. Plan Your Clients’ Competitive Edge

Crises like the one we’re currently facing have a global impact, affecting your customers’ competitors as well as everyone else. If this changes the way they are positioned against their opponents, it could impact their tactics. This could be the perfect opportunity for your customers to turn a threat into an opportunity.

See how your competitors are handling the current crisis and find ways you can help your customer by filling any gaps. You can also get motivation from your competitors to make sure that your customers are keeping up with them as well.

7. Iterate & Test

It’s important to test different types of content to see what works best with your target audience.

A Harvard Service Evaluation post entitled Adaptability: The New Competitive Advantage highlights the significance of experimentation as part of a company’ adaptive method:

” In a constantly changing environment, organizations must be able to adapt their designs, strategies, and procedures quickly and effectively. Businesses that are adaptive use experimentation more broadly than their competitors.

This refers to a customer’s web design, SEO, site material, or business design as a whole.

In addition, do not let failure get you down. Every time a test doesn’t work, it brings the customer closer to finding an option that will. Allow your company to constantly evolve, remove what does not work, and attempt more of what does, even in the middle of a live marketing project.

Using Lessons From the Short-Term Post-Coronavirus

Learn From Your Clients’ Own Experience

Since each organization is different, the best way to understand how an organization will be affected by an unforeseen change is to look at the lived experiences of those within the organization.

After you have calmed down and can think more clearly, ask yourself the questions from the beginning of this article again and see if your answers have changed.

Have a meeting with your customer after the major change to discuss what you want to add to their website or service to make them better prepared.

Embrace Modification

The only part of this time period that is special is the fact that we get to be together. Change.

The unknown can feel intimidating or challenging, both to you and your customers. This is perfectly natural. The key is to be flexible and adaptable, and to encourage your team and clients to do the same.

There’s no requirement to have all the answers. When you follow the ideas above, your customers will be in the best possible position, even though no one can predict the future.

Utilize a Platform That Allows You and Your Clients to Adjust Rapidly

Give yourself the power to create and collaborate quickly and easily with an all-in-one platform. If you don’t have a central system, it takes longer to put together your business tools.

Instead of trying to manage your team’s workflow in multiple locations, focus your resources on the areas that matter the most. Wix helps you efficiently manage your customers’ online presence, do their SEO, analyze site performance, and more.