Digital Marketing During The Coronavirus Outbreak

The spread of COVID-19 has been a major source of worry in the world these past weeks. Its impact has been felt not just in our daily lives, but also in the economy as well. In fact, it is SMBs that will take the hardest hits now that people are quarantining themselves in order to prevent the spread of the virus. As a business owner, now is the time to reevaluate your digital marketing strategy to make sure that you are prepared.

Impact on Pay-per-click (PPC)

Current trends on the PPC side show that costs per click (CPCs) are tending to stay the same. However, conversions have dropped across most industries as people are more hesitant to convert today due to the uncertainty caused by the virus. Of course, there are some exceptions. For example, businesses that offer business management solutions to facilitate remote work are seeing a boom as more and more people prepare to work from home now that it is encouraged to stay at home to prevent the spread of the infection. The current trend overall with CPCs staying the same and conversions going down is causing an increase in costs per acquisition (CPA) across the board.

Short Term vs Long Term

We can already see the short term impact of COVID-19 on businesses across the United States. We’ve had a rough couple of weeks. The sad reality is that businesses will continue to struggle for the rest of the year because the current losses need to be recovered. For some businesses, this has meant putting their PPC efforts on hold in order to try and save some money for now. However, this is only a short term strategy. This is the moment to start looking ahead and plan a strategy to get ahead of the competition by the time things start to improve again.

Warren Buffet famously said: “Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.” Now that many businesses are cutting back on their marketing expenses, this is the time when you can double down and work on your marketing strategy so you can hit the ground running by the time your competition is barely looking to restart their own marketing efforts. It is during times of economic downturn that you will find less competition and better results. Maybe there will even be a potential reduction in costs per click due to the reduced competition as ad spend is cut back.

To prepare your digital marketing for the long term, it is important that you look into investing on your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is different from PPC, but they go hand-in-hand when it comes to building an effective digital marketing strategy for your business. SEO works by checking your current website organic search rankings and optimizing them for search engines to improve the quality and quantity of traffic that lands on your site. Unlike PPC, you don’t have to pay for the traffic you get from SEO. It is recommended for businesses that are advertising online to use a combination of both PPC and SEO in order to reach their target audience. PPC helps you stay on top of search page results by paying for your keywords as your SEO catches up and uses the best performing keywords from your PPC strategy. SEO can take some time to fully kick in, but once it does, your investment will surely reward you in the long term.

Final Thoughts

This is the time to strengthen your digital marketing efforts as it will enable you to maintain a competitive edge over your competitors that are slow to react. If you still want to reduce your PPC spend, consider investing it into SEO instead. SEO will allow you to start ranking organically and be ready once business starts to recover. Hopefully this crisis will end soon, but in the meantime I strongly recommend that you double down on your online marketing to minimize your risk and improve your position relative to your competition.