Welcome to life living in the middle of the coronavirus. We’re in uncharted waters. We have no idea what’s next.
You might be worried about many different things. Your business. Your employees. Your family. What problem should you tackle first?
Health is a vital concern, your first concern. But if you’re stuck at home, as a business owner, your mind automatically drifts to business matters. Where should you cut back? What about marketing? What can you do to ensure sales return when all of this is over?
The world is changing. We’re going to do things differently.
But we’ll still need the products and services we’ve had before. We’re not going to give up on life; we still want a certain lifestyle. Albeit in a changed way.
Now is a time your customers might be hungrier for information than ever before. And the best place – the only place to reach them is online.
How Trends Change
Search patterns change day to day, week to week, month to month. Around the holidays, you might search for things to do on New Year’s Eve. You start searching for summer camps for your kids in the middle of spring. Shopping for a new home sees growth in search terms during the warmer months of the year.
We search based on trends. Sometimes it’s predictable. And sometimes it pops up based on current events. Six months ago, there wasn’t any search based around coronavirus; oh, how a few months can change things.
According to Google Trends based on the last week of March 2020, our search phrases are honing in on everything surrounding the coronavirus. And it’s not just about handwashing or finding the nearest test facility. “Do we still pay rent during the coronavirus” has tripled in search in one day. “Are we in a recession yet” has moved up 1400 percent as a popular search phrase in one week.
But it’s not just the biggest questions that are seeing a rise in Google search. It spreads way beyond that. People are searching for ways to find everything they need online. They search for toilet paper. They search for open hours of their local grocery stores. They search for ways to make the work-from-home experience a little easier. None of that trended just a few short months ago.
Why Copywriting Matters Right Now
Let’s talk about copywriting for a moment.
Copywriting for an online marketing strategy has everything to do with attracting visitors and converting them to paying customers, then holding on to them for repeat business over time. If you have a product or service to sell, you need to present it in such a way so that consumers build the desire for it, and somewhere along the way choose to say “yes” and hit the buy button.
Of course, that can involve a variety of tools and tactics. It can be a short process – a landing page on your website – or can include days or weeks of messages that a visitor receives over time. This is where email marketing can work well, nudging a prospect along the path of converting from a maybe to a yes. The entire process involves copywriting at its finest. It takes a lot of skill to write it in such a way that it motivates viewers into action.
There are many different types of copywriters, each with their own unique skill set. Some people may be really good at writing print pieces, for example, postcards and flyers are their specialties. Some people are involved in corporate copywriting; they write internally for goodwill with a company.
But online copywriting is something else entirely. Not only does the writer have to be well-versed in writing for an audience, and making sure the article is captivating for the reader, but they also have to spend time ensuring the search engines will love it too.
Which brings us back to understanding what the search engines want, right now.
Copywriting is all about the user experience
A good copywriter understands that with every change in our lifestyle, there will be short-term and long-term changes.
Right now, we’re living with a whole lot of short-term changes going on. Toilet paper is the best example. The largest producers of toilet paper have assured society that there is plenty of toilet paper in production. The problem comes down to hoarding. When people rush in and buy it up as fast as the store can stock it, it causes panic. Suddenly, everyone wants it, and it makes the news.
But eventually, we’ll get back to normal. Toilet paper will become, once again, no big deal. It will be nothing more than a bullet item on your checklist for when you shop the stores.
In the short term, toilet paper is a key search phrase. People search for it in all kinds of ways:
- Toilet paper near me
- Order toilet paper
- Who has toilet paper
- How much toilet paper can I buy
If you sell toilet paper, you can capture some of this market share by focusing your copywriting and online marketing strategy on this latest trend. Long after this pandemic is over, however, this craze will be over and we’ll return to searching for other things.
That’s how short term search trends change. But if you watch carefully what’s happening in society, you’ll also start to see more significant change happening as well. Long term change that will be with us long after life returns to “normal.”
Work from home opportunities will continue to soar long after we return to work. Why? Because we’re figuring out the logistics of it as we go along. What was once thought of as an impossibility is no longer seen in quite that manner. And with so much infrastructure going into creating teams who work from home, we’ll most likely see more companies jumping on this bandwagon for the long term.
Travel is going to change, as well. If your company is built around that industry in any way, your change is just beginning. We’ll change the way we hold conferences – virtual will grow quickly to be king. Cruises? That’s still up in the air.
Our point isn’t to pick out and talk about any one industry, but to make you aware that change will be here for every business, just in a variety of ways. And that means your marketing is going to change forever, as well as the way you reach out and talk with your prospects and customers.
We’re reinventing right here, right now.
Good online copywriting captures that in a transparent way, and gives your prospects and customers the ability to watch how you change in the process.
Health and safety is everything right now. But if you’re sitting at your kitchen table, contemplating what direction to go, give your copywriting strategy a second look.
