Question

Relate COVID-19 experience to internet marketing . Present negative or positive

impacts. Minimum 750 words

Answer 1

Over the years , the digital marketing expenditure has increased significantly. Digital marketing platforms will still dominate, given the decreased marketing budgets due to the spread of COVID-19. Some of the brick-and - mortar activities scheduled for the second quarter of 2020, such as fairs, flea markets, conferences, seminars and trade shows, have been cancelled or will be virtual. Additionally, this year's future similar event plans are very much in limbo. Despite that, advertisers are trying to focus their marketing dollars on other sites. They need to continue building their brands and generating the leads and sales they require.

Furthermore, customers hunkered down at home to prevent contracting coronavirus turn to online shopping for items they previously purchased in stores. This would generate better returns for online retailers on their web advertising, increasing online marketing investment.

The internet revolution that took place in the 1990s produced many emerging companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook, leading the way to shopping, socializing and engaging online. Interestingly, these are the companies which suffer the least during the economic crisis of COVID-19. As a matter of fact, during these difficult times Amazon is even thriving with its AMZN stock reaching all-time highs! For 2019 alone, with over $600 billion in goods and services sold digitally in the U.S., no one should deny the value of digital platforms.

However, as we peel back layers of that expenditure, we see that lower-funnel ad types in both the search and social channels across shopping and retail advertisers were not affected nearly as much as other ad types, and recovered much faster. There are Google Shopping Campaigns in the search system, and Facebook setting Dynamic Advertising for Items. This essentially reframs the disruption as strong lower-funnel advertising, poor upper-funnel advertising in the immediate aftermath of the March disruption, and this ultimately points to what we as marketers already know: to fill the tank, higher purchasing intent rates need less nudging in the buying funnel. Generally it wasn't that bare, even during the holidays

Hence, having the lower-funnel presence would be essential for the likes of retail and e-commerce. When more and more customers turn to online shopping, you need a simple degree of findability, and those ad forms cover the scenario, usually at a lower unit price than a keyword ad in search or a video ad in social. Once upon a time, filling the funnel and accounting for connection points throughout the entire consumer journey meant looking over channels. Yet although that's still a concern, these can now still occur within a single screen, with the difference coming down to the form of ad. More broadly, this also means your channel key performance indicators may need to be revisited

This crisis prompted advertisers to return to basics. Right location, right timing, appropriate post. Speak to client. Understand the Funnel of Conversion. While we are constantly reminded how unprecedented these times are, it is not the basics of how we manage through the crisis. What has changed is that we need to level out how we measure performance, and especially how we look at return on investment, both in and across channels.