👩‍🚒 🐺 👋🏿 Quarantine Marketing 💪 📙 💅🏻

Attracting new customers is something that most businesses cannot exist without. Those who are responsible for this process - marketers, marketing and sales directors, sometimes CEOs - are now confused: it makes no sense to invest in advertising, but you can’t lose orders either. How to be

In the study that follows, the foreign data is mainly used. This is appropriate: the spread of COVID-19, as well as the economic consequences from it, are already more ambitious and measurable there.

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The pandemic COVID-19, a potentially severe acute respiratory infection caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (2019-nCoV), has officially been announced in the world. There is a lot of information on Habré on this topic - always remember that it can be both reliable / useful, and vice versa.

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The first and most obvious: with the exception of essential goods and a few other segments that directly benefit from quarantine, in most business areas there is a drop in the number of search queries: The worst decline: tourism, B2C services. Growth: online services, media, delivery, porn (sic!). In addition, people will not save on children (especially since now everyone is at home and they need entertainment). Surprisingly, the pandemic and quarantine did not lead to a sharp increase in information requests such as “how ……”, “why .......”: Probably, the increase in traffic of all kinds of media resources comes from other traffic sources (for example, news aggregators).

Demand growth

On the other hand (and again surprisingly), “selling” requests with the words “buy, order” show growth (at least not a decline), even if we exclude from them the clearly super-popular words “food, medicine, pizza, mask, ...” : Probably, this growth is associated with other consumer goods: it is quite obvious that expensive goods (like large plasma TVs) are looking for less.

Yandex.Direct, Adwords, and targeted advertising

Since the beginning of March, there has been a noticeable decrease in the volume of paid advertising purchased by advertisers:

Obviously, the "operational" marketing channels that give instant returns are now becoming unprofitable (as always, with the caveat about traders of toilet paper and sanitizers).

“Since conversions, the cost of clicks and impressions are constantly changing, you should carefully monitor your paid advertising. (...) As for targeted advertising, many are now sitting at home, so often you can get much more coverage for the same money. Be prepared to change your budget and bids by constantly adjusting your advertising campaigns. ”
- Jeff Snyder, President of Elumynt

Paid advertising in social networks (target), although it will become noticeably cheaper in the near future, is unlikely to be profitable in the short term: there will be a lot of traffic and few purchases.

Content Marketing and COVID

A good example of what is happening with content marketing is the growth schedule for the number of email newsletters from 4,000 to 42,000 (10 times!):

Of course, many of them are related to remote work as such and various mailings in the spirit of “we are fine "But the trend is the trend.

Personally, I believe that those companies that continue to implement their digital strategy (especially in terms of content, improving conversion and SEO as a channel of attraction) will be able to recover much faster and more efficiently when it all ends. ”
- Nick Eubanks, CEO of From the Future

Creating new content is important from the point of view that these are investments that should not be paid back immediately. It does not matter that right now there is no demand: it will return, and contact with the buyer must be maintained continuously.

In order not to look like scoundrels, you should use, for example, recommendations from Google:

Take into account the local context of current events.
Constantly overestimate and clarify: everything changes quickly
Creative - with caution. Do not promote the virus
Change priorities to help people in situations of uncertainty
Contribute to the fight against the epidemic whenever possible.

The policies that Google has adopted for their marketers can be found here www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/covid-19-media-principles

Coronavirus SEO

Promotion in the organic search of Yandex and Google, along with content marketing, comes to the fore. Investing in SEO will have an effect in 3-4 months, when the peak of the crisis is behind us and we will have to do our best to catch up.

Those who do not take advantage of the current moment to do SEO properly will lose a lot.

Conversion and UX Investments

Another way to competently spend a marketing budget during a crisis is to make eternal investments in customer acquisition tools. Now, when there is an order of magnitude less operational activity, it's time to do (for example) increase website conversion, redesign it, improve UX. Here's what Forbes writes about it:

... Companies are switching to digital channels and transforming. For a couple of weeks, we recorded a real peak of calls from companies that want to create or update a website, launch a new online store or social media advertising aimed at working remotely, and focus on SEO and influencers in order to find a new audience ”
- Scott Jones, CEO of 123 Internet Group Forbes.com

B2B marketing and coronavirus

Business segments such as HR outsourcing are also in the red (almost no one hires people except direct beneficiaries of the quarantine regime).

The most traditional B2B marketing channel - exhibitions - has suffered a lot:

It should be noted that since the situation is developing rapidly, this data is correctly perceived as a trend, and not as a static correct proportion.

… B2B- , -. – . – , - .
— Bernard Marr (Enterprise Tech) Forbes.com

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Any crisis is a time when the strong become stronger and the weak die.

An example from China says that the worst phase of the epidemic will last several months. Having frozen all advertising and marketing activities at this time, the companies will sign a sentence.

The economy will need from one to several years to recover. This can be understood from an analysis of previous global economic crises: An

increase in the number of bankruptcies and a reduction in marketing budgets will lead to a noticeable decrease in competition. The problem is that the "surviving" companies will fight with each other for the consumer, who himself has become poorer.

Therefore, a reasonable strategy is to reduce the cost of current active advertising and redistribute them in favor of long-term marketing investments.

It must be borne in mind that it is unreasonable to just “sit out” the crisis without changing anything: with the same marketing tools that you had in February 2020, you will not return to the same indicators as before.

Summary

After the crisis there will be an unusual and non-seasonal surge, for which you need to prepare.
Companies all over the world are switching to Digital.
Reduce PPC costs by leaving only the most effective campaigns.
Conduct competent content marketing. If he was not there, start.
Invest in SEO: this will give you an advantage in 3-4 months, when it becomes easier.

Quarantine Marketing

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