The completely unexpected outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has affected the world and its economy at large. There are very rare events in the history of mankind where more than 60% of the world went under a strict lockdown which led to the huge unrest in the global economy.
Billions of people have lost their jobs and they are barely left with any source of income. Also because companies, especially medium and small cap businesses are shutting down. Giant companies are closing many of their units and putting some of their expensive processes on hold. Even the way people have been working since years has changed which has decreased human commute at large.
How coronavirus (COVID-19) has impacted digital marketing?
Corona virus has made modifications to many of the business processes starting from manufacturing, supply chain, services, and marketing of various brands.
With increasing demand of digital marketing in businesses, many tools and platforms to promote the brands have become paid. To cut down these expenses during the COVID-19 pandemic, they have paused their digital marketing activities temporarily. If you’re on that side, you’ll probably have decreased traffic, sales, engagement and pushed down search engine rankings in a short period of time..
Digital marketing is not a one-time solution to gain or increase your visibility. It takes consistency and required efforts for at least 4-5 months to see results.
So if you have chosen to stop or reduce your digital marketing activities, you could see a severe downfall after a quarter unless you’re an established brand with a serious customer retention rate.
The times are tough for people which have changed their consumer behavioural pattern and factors influencing decision making while buying a commodity. We have observed. Markets are closed, required commodities are out of stock and are sold with increased price and the government is also implementing tax rates on other products.To counter attack this challenge, many companies are confused about their target audience and how they can maintain the demand of their products.
Taking all of this into consideration, we all need a different approach towards marketing.
Best practices to adapt
Being flexible and open to experiment is going to be the most important practice. In these volatile circumstances, we all now need to identify what works best in this type of market situation.
First of all, you will have to start from scratch and do a basic study once again to implement a digital marketing strategy for this scenario. You can start with
Understanding your audience
Identifying whether your product/service is still in demand
Noticing user behaviour on your website
Revamping your offering according to the derivaties
Increase your focus for organic content
Since the supply of goods is limited, we have seen a huge fall in paid ads. There are now fewer ads on most used social media marketing platforms like google ads, instagram ads, facebook ads, and twitter ads. With the cost of paid ads taking a downward trend, it could be a great opportunity for a brand to gain exposure and gain more traffic and sales through organic advertising.
One can work on increasing your community by posting valuable content on social media channels like facebook and instagram to gain attention from people.
During bad times, your focus as a brand should be on building relations and not just sales. Most of the marketers forget that social media platforms are for socializing and not for marketing. Though one can use it as a marketing channel, that does not mean it should be always used to market your brand.
This is the time where you can use it to listen to their stories and problems, empathize with them, tell your story, and respond to their comments and questions. This will help you to establish yourself as a responsible brand and increase your customer base.
Increase backlinks
Create as many backlinks as you can. Increasing the number of referring domains can increase the rankings of your brand among search engines. Having a good number of backlinks means you’re gaining your customer’s attention wherever they visit on the internet. This will help you to build trust in the minds of your customers and your sales will not be much affected by the fluctuating market situations during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Run paid ads
As most of the small and medium cap businesses have shut down, the competition has decreased which can give you a huge return investing into paid advertisements. Considering the current situation, social media platforms are planning to cut down the prices for running paid ads to benefit the micro, small and medium enterprises.
With fewer stocks available, customers are not taking much time to buy the products. You can take advantage of it and boost your sales with upto 40-70%.
If you haven’t tried paid ads yet, you should consider it if you can.
Conclusion
Sadly, one does not exactly know as to when will the Pandemic end.
From a personal point of view, all you can do is stay indoors, practice social distancing and try to figure out what might work best for your brand.
From a business and marketing point of view, this is the time - to make a change, to bring some valuable insights and work on providing better service to your clients and better product to your customers.
Use this time to your advantage. Work hard and put in the efforts so you can grow, come out with creative and strategic ideas for your brand to grow, and that way you will come out of the COVID-19 pandemic much stronger than before.
About Niksun Ad World Inc.
Niksun Ad. World Inc. is one of the best advertising agencies in ahmedabad that has been connecting more than 200 brands to their customers since 1993. We at Niksun incorporate accurate marketing, branding, creative innovations and experiential advertising history to help power your brand from a thought to the homes and hearts of your customers.
Get in touch for a free consultation on creative@niksun.in or call on +79 26402971 | +79 26407971.
Comments