The coronavirus pandemic and quarantine measures to contain it have had a strong impact on different businesses and the world economy. It has already significantly changed entire industries and the behaviors of companies and consumers. In times like these, it’s important to adapt quickly and change your business strategies in line with the new reality hence the need for digital marketing.
Many traditional marketing efforts are no longer effective: customers have stopped listening, or companies are too scared to spend money in such an unstable environment. You need a different approach that lets your clients know that you understand what they are going through. Digital marketing is one of the best instruments that can help not just to keep the business afloat but grow it during the crisis.
Everything goes online
The first shift we see is the rapid growth of online markets. Social isolation is one of the key factors that increased the demand for various online services/products during the pandemic. As a result, there is an influx of new users in the online marketplace. Taking advantage of this trend, it makes sense to review ways of selling products and services for those selling offline and open up new opportunities for their business.
Though, it’s not enough for an offline business to simply move to the Internet: you need to deeply understand what you are doing and why. And an investment in digital marketing can help reach a wide target audience, despite difficult times.
Analyze the behavioral patterns
Another important thing that you should remember is that this crisis will not last forever, and the consumer’s demand will not disappear completely. The demand will change, as well as people’s behavior, priorities, and intentions.
Therefore, the most important thing for a business in a crisis is to constantly analyze the consumer sentiment and predict the behavior of a potential target audience. With digital marketing tools like Google Analytics or HubSpot, you can easily analyze data and identify new behavioral patterns of your customers. That will help you restructure the marketing system so that all this corresponds to the situation and new demand. Remember, it is better to have a plan for different scenarios or at least provide flexibility.
Keep up to date with your marketing metrics.
Now more than ever, it’s more important to keep a close eye on your digital marketing data. Please pay attention to what works and focus on it. If previously successful marketing is currently not producing results, then reduce or stop this type of marketing for a while.
This, of course, should be your daily philosophy. Study the data; explore trends; make changes as needed. Ideally, it would be best if you had daily monitoring and marketing analysis to make conclusions for small periods and, most importantly, to make the right business decisions.
SEO during COVID-19
Some companies might have decided to temporarily suspend their SEO campaigns during the pandemic due to the limited resources. But would it pay off? Is it the most efficient way of optimizing the marketing strategy? The answer is no.
SEO is a long-term game, and what you do today with your SEO campaign will affect the organic search traffic that hits your site even after two months. Yes, budgets are tight right now, but stopping your SEO campaign would be a critical mistake. Customers may no longer find you when they are googling your product or services, and your revenue will decrease. As a result, your business as a whole will suffer from lost leads and lost revenue. So take advantage while your competitors might have stopped their SEO campaigns to dominate the search results.
The main benefits of digital marketing
One of the best things about digital marketing is that it is cheap compared to traditional marketing. For instance, according to WebFX the average cost for digital marketing services for SMEs in 2020 may range from $2500 to $12,000 per month. Digital marketing is more customer-focused and proactive. You can quickly analyze data, tailor your strategy, and personalize content based on the current needs of customers. It is relatively easy to determine the return on investment in digital marketing. You just need to define a specific marketing goal for each campaign and select the appropriate metric to measure. Finally, digital marketing generates more leads and has higher conversion rates, which generates more revenue compared to traditional marketing. For instance, according to a study conducted by Ipos, companies, which use digital marketing, experience 2.8 times better revenue growth expectancy.
Conclusion
Due to the pandemic, the market structure is undergoing significant changes; it has affected almost all business areas, especially the B2C segment. Though it’s important to understand that any crisis is also about opportunities, you just need to see them. The main thing is to act quickly and be agile. While other businesses are giving up, think about what has changed, what tools you can use, and how you can play with them.
This is an adapt-or-die situation: businesses need to make a digital transformation and invest resources in digital marketing. In the online age, marketing requires market leaders to be proactive and use digital tools to monitor customer behavior, predict their needs, communicate with them, and build strong customer relationships.
At Phidev we provide comprehensive digital marketing services, so our clients rely on us. We can help you optimize your marketing strategies so you can minimize your losses from the crisis, increase the customer base, and continue growing your business. Feel free to contact usso that we can start working together to create effective solutions tailored to your business needs and transform your business during this crisis.
