The pandemic is overturning societies and the health structure completely. While hospitals are grappling under the unexpected pressure of the COVID 19 virus with its various strains, the country is being forced to lockdown to control the spread of the infection. The socio-economic structure is falling apart. The staggering economy is making things difficult and the future uncertain. However, with help from technology, a lot of the challenges have been mitigated on various fronts. Online services are thriving and finding their true worth in pandemic times.
Changing Digital Behavior
According to a McKinsey Global Survey, The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the digitalization of customer interaction by several years. Global adaptation has accelerated by 58%. In the Asia Pacific acceleration and adaptation to digitalization has grown by 53%, in Europe and North America by 55% and 65% respectively. Though at this point it seems that consumer packaged goods (CPG), and automotive and assembly, are indicating relatively low levels of change in their digital-product portfolios, there is an increase in healthcare and pharma, financial services, and professional services, many of which have cited almost twice a jump. There are some apprehensions about the security and privacy concerns with digital space, but with greater reliance on the digital platform, more secured platforms will be created and the strong resistance that is still brewing among many business holders will be relieved as they begin to understand the returns that digital marketing will bring to their market front.
The Safety Digital Flip
This is the ideal time for companies to make a digital impact. With self-distancing being the only way to break the virus chain, this word-of-mouth marketing format is not just the most effective and powerful but the only way out with a wider penetration and far greater coverage than manufacturers and companies can envisage. Physical advertisements will always remain and will be always effective. We cannot think of a world without the presence of large and messaged billboards. Marketers understand that with people being more in front of their digital devices than on roads, there is a need to make a kinetic shift with a stronger thrust on digital marketing than the offline customer connect points. The customer connections in digital marketing are few, but the advantage is that you are closely connected with ‘prevailing customers’ and ‘potential customers. So how is digital marketing reaching out? Here are some ways that the action plan is broadly framed by deft marketers that take your product to the living rooms, core conference rooms and minds of the customers. Yes, not only is it a well-planned strategy but an analytical strategy that evaluates choices and approaches the right audience with the right product. It prides itself in convincing conversions and is scientific and clinical.
Methods
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
With a close analysis and understanding of your product, the ideal social platform is selected to position your product to the fundamental audience that relates and reciprocates to your product. Now obviously this does not happen overnight. Complete research, with will help from the manufacturer, goes into ascertaining the TG. Once that is established the already existing online audience is approached with the product in various ways. It has been agreed by experts that the power of content is the driving force for taking any product to its end customers. Rightfully, digital media uses this weapon effectively for impressing, illuminating, involving, interacting, and impacting. Yes, the 5 Is are the most effective strategies incorporated organically and the results, when they start materializing, are well beyond anything that companies can ever imagine. You will have captured a complete generation, to say the least. The social media channels targeted are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Making your website rank high in the search engine, this technique creates visibility for the business. Powering your website in various ways but making content the chief executor, SEO is the finest machinery that is posed to attract traffic to your website. A digital marketing company sketching the path toward the end resolution of conversion will be an active advocate in tailoring the website content to such that the search engine crawls uninterrupted through all the pages and tops your page with a high ranking in its search engine pages. This will help customers to readily reach you when they search, not just with the right keywords but looking for quality content creation with time-to-time up-gradation. This makes search engines appreciate the concern that you have for your target audience by delivering precision in your organized product front. SEM (Search Engine Marketing) which are paid advertisement, a strategy employed to draw eyeballs to the maiden website the channel views through inorganic means and the impact is a gradual increase in organic traffic.
Email & Mobile Marketing
These are more traditional and tested effective modes of marketing that reaches directly to the audience mailbox or phones. Emails and SMS blasts were strategies employed much ahead of the pandemic. Those companies who are still reluctant on making a total conversion to digital marketing must have used these two strategies and reaped effective returns from them. Of late the introduction of advertising in WhatsApp and through the mobile app have brought about promising results.
Small budget Sizable Influence
With budget restriction, marketers are unable to spend too much on advertising. Financial uncertainties in many companies are compromising their advertising funds. This is the right time for businesses to make a slow transition and engage with their customers on social media and other digital platforms. With limited spending, digital marketing can ramp marketing strategy with unbelievably low spending. Some advertisers, though, are still keen on keeping the traditional modes of advertisement going for their product. That is fine, but they must consider that the entire buying and selling exercise is making a safety flip to eCommerce and since that is where your market is, that is where your advertisement should be. People are even shying away from newspapers, as the spread of infection is of paramount concern. The basic links to an offline advertisement may not prove to be as effective as they were. In fact, the (Return of Investment) ROI of billboard, posters, standee, flyers are now being marginalized. Work from Home (WFH) is the preferred normal both for the employer and employee thanks to the pandemic, the upscaled productivity has built a synergic work culture that is symbiotic and sustainable. With people focusing more on work, online orders both for food, essential and nonessential goods are seeing a family-driven response. The pandemic has counteracted the sudden sense of loss that many businesses felt with lockdowns imposed last year. The doors have begun to open for businesses who have chosen digital marketing to garner their business online.
Online Analysis Greater Insight
Thanks to everything going online, market analysts are being able to closely monitor user behavior. Starting from children to the rest of the family members, everyone is under scrutiny. Sounds uncomfortable, yes that is the price you pay for going digital. But let us face it. The interest in people’s online behavior is clinical. This method helps advertisers understand customers better and bring a better quality of products that improves their life. Through digital marketing, the data is gathered. This data helps manufacturers to re-examine their products, marketers to re-examine their approach towards customers and create concepts for customers that would be appreciated and incorporated by customers when they look at its value.
Better relationship Building
The key mantra of success of digital marketing is through relationship-building activities and engagements. While you study and analyze customer behavior, make relevant implementations in your content, that would affect the life of your customers. Address demographics and deliver content with planning for your section-based audience. The analysis makes your work more streamlined and follows the audience emotion and psychology for unifying traffic and conversion with expert results. Digital marketing is an ever-evolving strategy. It understands that what worked at the start of the pandemic will not work now. Appraising former strategies with repurposed plans, they unleash the marketing racehorse with boosted energy with the changing tide of analyses. After all that, the whole idea is analytically drawn. When the results in digital marketing are so rapid it only makes better sense to experiment with new formats in various discipline from posting times, posting types, posting numbers to posting content. When they find that content has resounded with the audience, they know they are on track and build their strategy based on similar lines. The failures, too, are equally visible that offers a ready option to rethink and revise a fast action plan.
Final Thought
Involving your audience with interaction Q&As., Instagram Live, post polls, hosting webinars, community listening, and engagements are great online activities. Find opportunities to engage with your audience. For those brands that cannot create their content at this point, they can share content that bears their brand values. This is a good way to start with digital marketing in pandemic times. Visit https://www.carneytechnologies.com/ for outstanding digital returns to your business.
