NEWS

COVID-19 has changed the digital landscape, meaning now, more than ever, startups need to ensure their digital marketing is effective 

Both consumer and business habits online as well as offline have changed due to worldwide shutdowns, and consequently, advertisers need to adjust their digital marketing to keep it effective. 

Having seen the impact for startups across several industries, here are our recommendations on how best to adjust; 

1. Review Your Spend

Given the current uncertainty, reviewing spend levels will likely be the priority digital marketing change for most startups. 

There will be a lot of business variables that will affect this however consider your targets first. 

• Does your acceptable Cost Per Acquisition need to change to reflect a change in sales conversion rate? 
• Do you need a new target ROI to reflect increasing costs? 

Assuming you have effective tracking and attribution in place this should be relatively simple, adjust your digital marketing campaigns to match those new KPIs and monitor closer than ever. 

2. Adjust Your Messaging

The most important adjustment you can do for your digital marketing is to ensure that your message is relevant. 

Everyone has been affected, and so your messaging needs to; 

• Reflect any updates or changes to your products  
• Give customers confidence in your business 
• Be considerate of changes to customer purchasing decisions  

Here are a couple of excellent examples; 

• L’Estrange becoming the ‘work from home’ trouser in their Facebook Ad 
• British Airways updated brand ads on Google 

3. Update Your Website

A temporary notice will be sufficient. Redesign or redevelopment is not necessary as the current state is temporary. 

What exactly that looks like will vary on your product or service, however consider the following 

• Updated product pages  
• Live chat messaging 
• A banner across your website  

4. Consider Facebook & YouTube Ads

The graphs below (from the New York Times) show how the use of both Facebook & YouTube has increased, making now a better time than ever to be using both ad platforms. 

5. Invest in Top of the Funnel

Where possible, invest in top of funnel activities to increase your brand’s awareness. 

A McKinsey study of nearly 700 companies from the 2008 financial crisis shows that making counterintuitive moves (such as increasing sales and marketing expenditures) can improve a company’s position when the recovery begins. 

Investing in effective brand awareness over this period will benefit you when your customers are more ready to buy by being in front of their mind. 

Consider the following; 

• Promoting brand stories  
• Educational content across social media  
• Targeting new, informational keywords for SEO