Understanding the Coronavirus Impact on Marketing

Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic has just started. It will become worse, and businesses will be affected in practically all industries. Marketers have to adapt and change, or companies can end up with huge revenue losses. There is no way to get around that. Even if you use the best social media marketing strategy tips and tricks, you can still have problems.

When it comes to the impact of the coronavirus on marketing, the most important things to remember are the following.

Your business will struggle

The only situation in which it will not happen is if you operate in an industry that is needed by people now, like companies that manufacture hand sanitizers. If this is not the case, your business will struggle. Even if the pandemic slows down, you will incur losses that might take months to recover. For instance, in China, retail sales dropped by 20.5% in the month of February. With the travel industry, statistics are worse since it is expected that 820 billion dollars worth of revenues will be lost.

Organic traffic is going down

Organic traffic is going down for most industries. For some, though, like finances and news, traffic skyrocketed. In some cases, traffic drops were huge, like in travel. You can expect traffic to go down because people are more interested in what is going on in the world than in the information that you offer.

While organic traffic is going down, companies that want to increase sales need to invest more in PPC advertising, which might not be possible if sales go down too much. Fortunately, pay-per-click costs also went down since the number of advertisers interested in buying keywords went down.

Conversions are going down

In most industries, conversions are going down. This is because people are much more careful with their finances. For instance, they do not buy shoes when they do not know if they will have a job in a month. Only some industries saw conversion increases, like news, with the Washington Post only offering a limited number of articles for free and requiring readers to pay for future extra content.

Because of the fact that conversions are lower, PPC is even more affected. Even if in some industries there is no real difference in how much a click costs since conversions went down, the overall cost of the marketing campaign is higher.

The competition has to be monitored

Last but not least, different companies will react in different ways to the coronavirus situation. It is now more important than ever to know what the competition is doing. This is because companies that react appropriately will be punished by bad results.

You always need to know what the competition is doing, but now it is particularly important. It might mean the difference between surviving this pandemic as you take advantage of opportunities opened by bad decisions made by others and failing as you do not know things are changing. As an example, if the competition lowers prices and you do not do the same, you might end up with sales dropping by an insurmountable rate.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *