How can businesses transform their Digital Marketing and PR strategy in the age of COVID-19?
Blog: NASSCOM Official Blog
The Need for a Response
The COVID-19 outbreak is a human tragedy, affecting the lives of millions of people globally. But it is also having a grave impact on the global economy. As estimated by Wikipedia, the Indian economic losses are expected to be over ₹32,000 crore (US$4.5 billion) every day during the first 21-days of the lockdown. It was also seen that under complete lockdown, less than 25% of India’s $2.8 trillion economy was functional. Up to 53% of businesses in the country were projected to have been highly affected.
Given all this, communities, businesses, industries and almost everyone around the world have started to respond to COVID-19, even though it presents unique challenges to any business. Due to physical distancing, the businesses that earlier required the physical presence of the buyer, seller or brick and mortar structures are now turning to alternative ways to go about their daily work and reduce the impact of this pandemic.
The New Response
Almost all institutions have put basic policies in place to protect their employees and even their customers. Businesses have adopted no-travel and work-from-home policies for workers and physical-distancing-at-work measures for others. However, these policies save the industries from further spreading the virus, but the harsh truth is that these directives and policies do not allow them to grow in these tough times. It is the continued running of the services and regular growth that will help them keep their businesses alive. In order to achieve this, institutions will need to come up with some innovative methods.
Businesses which want to survive and even grow in these difficult times, will need to sympathize with their consumers, understand their physical, mental and social states and come up with consumer-centric models. Analysis done by internet giants suggests a sudden spike in internet consumption due to the pandemic, since almost all of the population is indoors and consuming online content more than usual. Businesses can take advantage of this situation and turn their business models digital to reach their consumer base through smartphones and computers to cope up with physical distancing, all the while being sympathetic to the consumer’s state.
Thoughtful Transformations
In the current global situation, almost every business is present in the digital space with direct consumer touchpoints, however, in order to keep growing and working in these unprecedented times, some businesses have shed the traditional ways of marketing and adopted new methodology to stay in the market. Some of the prominent ones which used Digital Marketing and Digital PR to come out in the front are:
- Ford, one of the biggest car manufacturers of the world, was one of the first ones to come out with a terrific response to the pandemic and their consumers getting affected by it. Ford Credit came out with a payment plan which would enable new buyers to delay their first payment for 90 days.
- Toyota on the other hand, looking at the dynamics of the situation, dedicated their ads to the importance of family and people helping one another.
- Chevrolet made a huge impact worldwide when their ads turned to, “Chevy Cares, because, we’re not just a car company, we’re a company who cares”.
- SBI Life Insurance, released the campaign ‘We Can, We Will!’ reiterating the power of collective unity and solidarity in fighting the spread of Covid-19.
Being a Digital Marketing agency ourselves, we at SRV Media are helping many of our clients take decisions in response to the pandemic and utilise the sudden surge in internet consumption.
We have been actively supporting and promoting Pune’s Sri Balaji University’s decision to shift their admission process online and allow students to complete their entire admission process even through a smartphone with internet.
We are helping CBS Kolkata in moving on to using platforms like Facebook live to interact with the audience digitally, which has resulted in better engagement and is working well for the institute.
Need of the Hour
These are unfavourable times that require unprecedented efforts. The best we can do is remain connected through the internet, make the best out of our current resources and isolate COVID-19.
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