The pandemic and its economic ramifications have changed the face of and brought about revolutionary changes in digital marketing. As businesses are grappling with the growing uncertainties, digital marketing tools and strategies have had to go through major transformations in order to help businesses to rise stronger from the pandemic. Innovative and new-age digital marketing strategies are ensuring the seamless functioning of businesses across the world. As the situation gets worse day-by-day, digital marketing campaigns are expected to solve this Gordian Knot for businesses in the near future.
Post the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, there have been severe modifications in the way business processes are carried out and in the way products and services are being consumed. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, has stated that Microsoft has seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. Digital transformation has thus been at the core of all these transformations and is accelerating the pace of change at marketing departments everywhere today.
In today’s world, online presence has become the ultimate face of businesses. The ability to establish and maintain relationships & expand their customer base is helping businesses to grow even in today’s uncertain scenario. A huge increase in open rates is boosting the significance of email marketing and marketers are adopting an agile approach to effectively tap into the changing consumer buying patterns. Thus, the effective use of digital marketing will help businesses to thrive in this grave situation and even assist them to stay relevant post the pandemic.
1. Boost Conversions by Tapping into the Increased Online Activity
The outbreak of the novel coronavirus has brought a paradigm shift in the way people use the internet. With the number of internet users and the overall online activity increasing each day, websites are witnessing a staggering rise in their online traffic. As a result, businesses are compelled to up their game and convert this traffic into leads by redesigning their strategies and improving their presence on online platforms.
Good online visibility of a business plays a vital role in garnering the attention of customers and bringing them to your website. However, focused and attractive landing pages, good CTA’s and short, simple forms can make the visitor stay on your website for a longer period and thereby, help you in capturing leads.
With prospects becoming more active on the internet, it is imperative for businesses to create informative and engaging content in the form of text or video, that relates to customers’ needs and interests. Thus, investing in conversion rate optimization can enhance the digital presence of your businesses and thereby improve your website’s ability to generate traffic and leads even in these testing times.
2. Now is the Time to Prioritize your Digital Advertising Efforts
The advertising market had grown to around $646 billion USD in 2019 and was forecast to grow to $865 billion USD by 2024. However, with the COVID-19 outbreak, there has been a considerable drop in out-of-home, cinema as well as print advertising. As a result, relying more on digital advertising has become the need of the hour.
With the web traffic skyrocketing and the number of advertisers being comparatively less, digital ads are becoming cheaper as the cost per click for ads is decreasing. Businesses that are ramping up their paid ad efforts are seeing substantial growth in their ROI. This is encouraging businesses to optimize their bid strategies to drive better results. Thus, increasing ad spends can be a smart move for businesses today as they are proving to be more effective than ever in generating high returns.
Even though the lockdown restrictions in most parts of the world have been lifted, consumers are still hesitant to go out shopping like they used to before. As consumer purchasing preference is shifting from offline to online, businesses must accordingly focus on spending more on digital advertisements to ensure business continuity.
3. Expand Consumer Base With Geographical Diversification
The major concern for businesses today is the inability to expand their reach to more people and expand their consumer base. Especially in the current socio-economic scenario where different regions are dealing with the pandemic and economic crisis in different ways, relying on a single region to grow your customer base can be a huge risk.
Businesses can identify countries that are driving a good amount of traffic to their site and optimize their content for those countries. With international SEO, businesses can tailor their SEO efforts according to audiences in different parts of the world, thereby gaining more traffic and being less reliant on a specific region to grow their customer base.
With the help of geo-targeting and hreflang tags, marketers can build digital marketing strategies that are more personalized and relevant in different parts of the world. This way, businesses can leverage international SEO to target prospective consumers across the world and manage to grow their consumer base even in the present crisis situation.
4. Reinforce Fading Significance of Effective Email Marketing
Email marketing is certainly not a new tool in the digital marketing environment. However, with the upsurge in social media marketing in recent years, the dominance of email was slowly diminishing.
But with a substantial rise in email open rates post the COVID-19 outbreak, the significance of email marketing has scaled up tremendously. There has been considerable growth in the sending volumes as compared to that of pre-COVID times and thus, marketers must now rely on email marketing strategies more than ever.
While increased online activity worldwide is forcing marketers to increase their sending volumes, it is also compelling them to optimize and get their email marketing strategies right. This can help in boosting email engagement and email e-commerce purchases during these testing times. Thus, with open rates remaining stronger, marketers can again lean into email as a medium to effectively connect with their customers and boost sales.
5. Adopt Agile Marketing Processes to Thrive in the New Normal
With the outbreak of the novel coronavirus affecting every business across the world, marketers have been looking for ways to bounce and return back stronger and smarter from this crisis. They have realized that to transform their businesses with digital marketing, responding quickly to the extreme changes in consumer behaviour is critical.
Considering the current scheme of things, going forward, digital marketing campaigns will have to thrive under stringent budgets and perform better to generate targeted ROI. For this, marketers can bring an agile approach in their marketing strategies to be able to tap into and adapt to changing consumer behaviour.
The effective combination of AI models and data-driven marketing can enable marketers to enhance their responsiveness in order to drive better outcomes. Thus, agile marketing can turn out to be the new normal for businesses to efficiently reach out to their target audience and drive sales through optimised data-driven marketing strategies.
Coming Out of COVID-19, Stronger and Better!
The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are far-reaching and these effects don’t seem to subside soon. Businesses must be quick on their feet in adapting to changing demands and build innovative digital strategies to tackle the rising uncertainties.
Businesses must identify their target groups and assure customers how they can cater their services even during these difficult times. This attitude of putting customer’s interest forward helps in establishing relations and earning trust that can be beneficial to businesses post the pandemic as well.
Going forward, businesses will have to effectively understand and adapt to changing consumer buying patterns. Marketers will need to focus on their short-term goals to enable themselves to be flexible with their digital marketing strategies and thereby, improve sales and meet their targeted returns. Thus, by capitalizing on the current trends to generate decent revenues, businesses can make sure that they maintain the seamless functioning of their business operations and come out of the pandemic in good shape.
