COVID-19 has surely affected ecommerce. Now that isolation and social distancing measures are implemented, workers in various countries are directed to work from home. However many stores have closed shops that have made even traditional consumers use ecommerce as an alternative to conventional shopping.
Which Products Are Seeing A Rise In Demand?
There is a huge demand for queries related to home-schooling and school equipment because many schools are closed worldwide. This spike in demand is good news for retailers. Since people are home and kids need to be entertained, therefore the demand for craft sites and general crafting terms has also increased.
Which Search Terms Are Declining?
Currently, fashion retailors don’t have plenty of visitors as everybody is just staying at home which eliminates the reason to get a new outfit. COVID-19 has caused a dip not just for high street retailers but for ecommerce brands such as Asos as well. Travel has decreased due to obvious reasons but traffic to various websites, especially related to customer service requests or cancellations, has increased.
How Can Digital Marketers Adapt?
Several companies will be revising their financial plan in light of COVID-19, with a digital marketing budget obviously a soft target for companies that want to make cuts.
Working smarter under these conditions is certainly a need, but it’s a critical period for marketers to implement plans for long-term profitability.
1. Manage PPC Budget Efficiency
Statements about turning off PPC campaigns completely, one of the main sources of new business for various companies, could obviously be extremely harmful. Instead of that, try to handle efficiencies through accounts where possible.
- Reduce any unnecessary upper-funnel keywords with lower conversion rates where search-demand may be declining.
- Keep potentially reduced budgets for keywords having more possibility of causing conversions.
Halting campaigns briefly and restarting will result in higher CPCs as campaigns will have to return through an early learning phase. CPCs at present will probably be lower as several businesses downsize, so for those clients who can remain functional they should make the most of this where possible. The consideration of longer-term impacts is also there.
The quality score is dependent on your CTR compared to others in the auction. If others won’t advertise then you can make CTR gains which will ultimately advance your QS and decrease your CPCs. Its opposite is also true. Therefore clients should know that they can’t just stop campaigns and restart them as if nothing ever happened!
2. Retain Organic Visibility
As far as organic activity is concerned, SEO is evidently a longer-term approach and it can’t just be stopped, as with PPC. Google will increase tweaking their algorithms to make sure that accurate information reaches the public, so to overlook the fundamentals would risk decreasing organic visibility in the long term.
Organic search is one of the most feasible channels in any situation. People will be constantly searching, maybe more than they ever before did. Businesses having online selling abilities are in a superior situation than any to continue to do business at this time.
3. Share Experiences Through Digital PR
Yes, the news is full of stories about COVID-19, but that should not stop digital PR activity. It provides a good opportunity to contact journalists with interesting news stories that are different from the broader news that is covered about coronavirus. The news about a pandemic is all over mainstream media right now and people want escapism by reading good news stories.
Journalist has been quoted several times on social media saying they need non-CV themed stories to put a smile on the faces of the people. The story can still be selected right away provided the story is strong. You can offer suggestions to help other businesses, entertain people or distract them during this tough time.
4. Be Useful on Social Media
Professionals have begun to adjust to the remote work lifestyle and lots of people are logging in to and spending time on social platforms. This provides you an incredible opportunity to reinvent your social media strategy. You can also begin to plan and work on it if you already don’t have one.
The following are some useful tips for brands that want to overhaul their social media strategy and messaging considering the latest trends.
- Be helpful: Provide reliable, comprehensive information to the customers about the things they need. Emphasize that you want to help them.
- Let local and global connections develop among people. Help form communities among customers.
- Be there, whether it is the early hours of the morning or late hours of the evening. Since our habits are developing and the consumers must know the solutions are offered regardless of what time it is.
- Find those who are helping and look for ways to support or encourage them. They can be employees, customers who use your products, or people in need of support.
- See how to improve people’s lives as we quarantine and fight both monotony and anxiety.
Hence all of us might be feeling isolated, the coming few weeks are full of opportunities to make our businesses more social and more community-led. Make your brand a ray of happiness in these dark times.
Emerge Ready To Do Business
These were some general guidelines for adjusting to COVID-19. However, no one-size-fits-all approach to digital strategy exists. But what is certain is that marketers have to make sure that their brands are set to do business online as soon as the consumer confidence begins to increase. This approach will allow us to evade a long-term impact on market share.