It is a very testing time for everyone in this current climate with the impact of the Coronavirus dominating people's lives and it is inevitable that a lot of businesses will struggle in the coming weeks, months or years, we just don’t know how long all this will last at this stage. As many businesses struggle others will thrive as demand for certain products or services will increase dramatically.
We look after the digital marketing activities of a very diverse range of businesses here at WebBox and so we are constantly adapting campaigns to make sure that our client's ad spend is working as hard as possible in order to keep enquiries coming through the door. We are constantly looking at different audiences that are appearing and using existing audiences such as previous website visitors, leads and buyers to keep them updated in this fast-moving scenario that we find ourselves in.
For a lot of businesses, it is too early to say what will happen however we are keeping tabs on every campaign to monitor the changes that are currently happening and coming up with different strategies to counteract any changes. Below is a list of scenarios that we may see in any paid marketing campaigns:
- It could be a case of which one of your competitors blinks first and switches off/reduces spend for their campaigns. If you hold on a few more days then you may start to see CPC’s decrease and this may have a positive impact on conversions and CPA. OK, there are a lot of other variants to look at as although competitors may drop out, the number of searches for your product or service may also decrease and so you may find that the CPC remains steady.
- Businesses may stop outdoor advertising freeing up spend on online activities. As fewer people are supposed to be going outside and using public transport then this would obviously reduce the effectiveness of outdoor advertising. It makes sense to put this spend into online advertising as more and more people will be self-isolating and I can guarantee, that will mean more notifications on your phone telling you that your screen time has increased! Again, it may mean that as more businesses utilise online advertising, the CPC will increase but there will be more ad space due to increase in impressions so it remains to be seen how this pans out.
- Put a spin on campaigns and make the most out of a rubbish situation. One of our clients sells franchises and with a lot of people who are facing losing their jobs, there may very well be an increase in searches to work for yourself. By changing ad copy or even audience targeting you can reach new people who fit into your target audience.
- Keep in touch with potential or existing customers via remarketing. The spend through remarketing is generally much lower than prospecting campaigns and by keeping users up to date with services/products then this is a great way to retain or encourage them to convert in a few weeks/months time when hopefully things start to get back to some kind of normality.
- If fewer people are actively searching for your product or service then now is the most important time to go and find them via more passive channels and by utilising your own audiences that have been built up over the last few months. This does not mean simply increasing spend through Display channels or boosting more organic posts via very loose audience targeting, it means being very granular with your targeting and using a mix of lookalike/similar audiences which are narrowed down with overlapping targeting. Yes, spend may be limited as the targeting would be tighter but the results in terms of CTR and onsite engagement should be higher.
We know that in these uncertain times, sometimes it is the first budget that gets the chop, but think before you completely switch all paid digital marketing activity off because just think, your competitors would love you to completely drop out of the game and hand all of the customer bases to them.
If you’d like to discuss your campaign further, or simply want to chat with one of our team about changes to your campaign, then please get in touch.
