Lockdown earmarks a digital progression of brands

Sameer Makani, Co-Founder, and Managing Director, Makani Creatives highlights how digital is now the new normal for brands across sectors, with ways to leveraging the medium in an optimum manner.

As the world collectively grapples with the pandemic, several businesses have come to a complete halt owing to the lockdown. With the spread of Coronavirus, the world is facing a very serious challenge of keeping the economy stable while easing the impact across sectors.

These uncertain times have shed light on a unified communication approach of creating awareness and adapting the digital business model. A gap in communication is visible, which marketers need to bridge going forward. In times of crisis, what is important for marketers is to know how they can overcome obstacles and connect with the audience.

Since people spend maximum time staying at home during the quarantine, connecting with them through digital media is the need of the hour. In such cases, a digital marketer needs to know the strategy they can use to communicate with the consumer in a sensitive manner to relate with their audience and project themselves as a brand of choice.

This pandemic has provided an opportunity for brands to create stronger bonds with consumers by creating awareness and communicating with the consumer regularly. Digital is becoming the new normal and brands are now exploring a new and diverse path to survive this pandemic.

Leveraging
Digital to the fullest

• Pay Per Click- With people being quarantined and spending more time online, it’s a great opportunity for businesses/brands to use PPC marketing to connect with their customers and gain a competitive advantage. It is cost-efficient at the same time and one can better leverage the digital marketing budget.

• Search Engine Optimization - Anything online right now will be consumed more than ever.  This is not the time to stay low-key online. Using search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to gradually rise to the top of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) is crucial for the business to gain better visibility.

Also read: BC Web Wise: How to create a people first agency…

Realigning
advertising strategies

• Pre-allocating advertising amount- As the world makes its shift toward digitalization, it is easier for the brands to restore their trust into digital aspects of their marketing strategy and allocate a certain amount of money during the times of crises as a part of the reactive strategy. Ad spends reallocation acts like a savior during such unprecedented times. It may help with online advertisements since marketers are aware that ad spends get highly affected when cost-cutting is required.
• Displayed ad spends- Due to cancellation of conferences, meetings, tie-ups, and large scale events because of the pandemic, the advertising market is expected to witness a downfall and a possible dip in performance. Displaced ad spends will undoubtedly be reallocated later in the year and would benefit both the agency as well as the brand in the eventually

At this point
what matters the most is to position your brand rightly during this economic
downturn and communicate effectively. Businesses should maximize social
listening and be prepared to put out important brand statements. Informing the
target audience on how your brand is managing the pandemic and strategically
placing your messaging amidst the content that the target audience is exposed
to is of utmost importance.

Digital marketing can be incredibly agile, and agencies should be prepared to be nimble in their approach to adjust during times of crisis.

Marketers are also planning on how to get the business to recover after the Coronavirus impact. One can optimize digital marketing by pushing useful content which will help in maintaining and sustaining the traffic through consumer engagement. Brands need to think long and hard about digital transformation that could majorly be focused through brands reinvesting physical marketing into virtual mediums.

This article piece is authored by Sameer Makani, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Makani Creatives