Digital Marketing during COVID-19: How to continue marketing your non-essentials.
Sudden changes in environmental factors due to COVID-19 lockdown and shipping restrictions have disrupted digital marketing in eCommerce. It has disrupted yearly plans for many organizations especially the non-essentials segment. Many organizations have reduced digital marketing ad spends or even paused the digital marketing activities completely. However, there are ways to make the most of this situation and make gains in the long run. Sharing some tips for making the most from marketing as below:
SHOP NOW, SHIP LATER
Instead of not taking orders completely and stopping marketing, let your customers place an order and ship it as soon as the restrictions are reduced in their locations. This helps in three ways:
You don’t lose the customer to your competitor.
Ensures Revenue instead of Bad User experience on the website.
Low cost of Acquisition due to reduced competition.
BRAND AWARENESS
The time spent on smartphones per user has gone up by 6.2 percent and Social media usage rose by 50 times between January and March in India1 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic this might be the best time to introduce your products to the new users. This coupled with Low CPCs and CPMs 77% and 70% reduction respectively vs. pre-COVID makes it the best opportunity to advertise and stay top of the mind of your consumers.
LOCKDOWN SPECIAL DISCOUNTS
What better way to entice customers than with lucrative discounts. Making these time-bound helps drive quick actions from the customers. The customer thus acquired enhances the audience list for later retargeting. Ethos Watch Boutiques, a luxury watch retailer, is offering discounts up to 50% on high-end premium watches. It is becoming increasingly important for brands to show positive cash flows amidst the current situation.
Timex Watches is also offering heavy discounts on their watches if bought from their brand eCommerce store. Attractive commercial offers in this situation are playing a major role in digital marketing in eCommerce.
LEAD GENERATION
Even if you don’t want to concentrate on the end result that is, orders either due to production restrictions or out of stock issues or some other issues, this might be the right time to fill the top of the funnel by launching campaigns to increase website Sign Ups or Subscriptions to monthly newsletters. This list of customers thus collated contains people highly interested in your products and will help you roll out the Newest Collections, Offers, Season Specials, etc. to prospective customers post lockdown.
INCREASING ORGANIC REACH FOR BRAND PAGES
Due to restrictions, more and more people are resorting to Social Media for “Virtual Socialization” that is, utilizing social media to stay connected with friends and near & dear ones. Hence, this is an ideal opportunity to create viral content (gets shared & tagged often), launch contests, Engage in Live sessions & webinars, share recipes, share How to’s, DIYs (do it yourself), etc. to help increase the organic reach & followers for your Facebook & Instagram pages.
Sources:
Market research, Nielsen
Shoptimize Insights
Times of India.
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