Marketing during Covid-19 Times: How can it thrive in difficult times?
Friday, 10 July 2020
Everything has changed. During the past six months, the entire world has had to face many challenges it wasn’t prepared for. The Covid-19 pandemic has ruined many lives and changed them for good. The world has gone through hand sanitation, social distancing, lockdown and extreme fear. Many also had to experience getting sick, seeing a loved one get sick and, in many cases, losing a loved one because of this pandemic. Let’s see how this virus has impacted on marketing and if it has changed it as much as everything else.
A global crisis can do one of these two things: paralyze a marketing team or galvanize it to thrive. After six months of living with this pandemic, that is exactly what the world is seeing: some are cutting back on marketing expenses and others are being more intelligent and coming up with innovative ways of engaging their audience.
What happened to Marketing during Covid-19?
If you want your business to thrive, you can’t stay isolated for too long. It may seem that being conservative during times of uncertainty seems to feel safer, but that is the complete opposite. Businesses need to balance finances with the need to keep customers informed when things get tough.
If you completely disappear, then nothing will remain of your business once the crisis is gone.
There are plenty of studies showing that the right decision to make during times of crisis is to increase -not decrease- your marketing expenditure. Otherwise, your competitors will outcompete you once you try to come back to the market.
Just take this in mind: consumers are at home -and on the media- all the time with time to waste and bored to death. This is your opportunity to thrive. It has been proved that people spend more money when they are bored. But this time, they cannot go window shopping -at least not physically-. They have to turn to other methods: online shopping (which has actually been on for some time now, not just because of the pandemic).
This is what has happened during the pandemic: people have stayed home and started shopping online more than ever.
Marketing’s main medium has been, for some time now, the internet. For that reason, during this pandemic, it hasn’t suffered as many changes as other areas or businesses.
The internet has made it possible for businesses to thrive during this pandemic because marketing is made possible through it.
However, marketing didn’t stay the same because of this pandemic. It has actually increased. Numbers show that many businesses that didn’t use paid ads, now do because of the pandemic- and, also, because they are cheaper now than before.
Marketing is an interesting field because it mixes business progress with customer satisfaction. It is not easy to get both, but marketing has made it possible for some time now.
Marketing is the process of getting potential clients or customers interested in your products and services. "Process": key definition in this definition. Marketing involves researching, promoting, selling, and distributing your products or services.
This discipline centers on the study of market and consumer behaviors and it analyzes the commercial management of companies in order to attract, acquire and retain customers (hopefully instilling brand loyalty) by satisfying their wants and needs.
In this way, they make sure their business’s needs will also be satisfied and will thrive.
Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on the internet. The number of people who go online everyday is still increasing. Doesn’t it sound weird, considering how accessible the internet is? However weird this may sound, it is true.
For that reason, offline marketing isn’t as effective as it used to be.
Digital Marketing is the present and, most importantly, the future of businesses.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers.
Where can you study marketing?
If you are interested in studying Marketing, you should consider pursuing any of the following degrees offered by top universities in South Africa.
All these programmes in Marketing are focused on the current and future needs of the field and you can be sure you will be ready to face any challenges that the job requires.
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