Digital marketing in times of crisis: where to start?
Since the beginning of the crisis, many of our clients have been wondering how to direct their marketing budget towards online acquisition channels. It's true that web traffic and content consumption has risen sharply. However, less emphasis is placed on the fact that consumer behaviour in this time of crisis has also changed.
Habits and search keywords are changing, consumers consult their emails at different times, their behaviour on social networks is also changing. It is not enough to generate additional traffic to increase your turnover because conversion rates are falling overall.
Therefore, before starting to spend their marketing budget on social networks or Google, we advise our clients to first ensure a good user experience on their site and identify opportunities for improvement.
Understand the behavioral changes related to covid-19.
Anxious consumers become more price sensitive and reduce their purchase frequency. The brands they used to buy can change, and this over the long term. "Buying a restaurant" is now replaced by "cooking at home".
To ensure the continuity of a business, it is more than ever necessary to monitor and understand how its target audience will reallocate its budgets and priorities, in order to adapt both its offer and its marketing actions. Here are a few examples of strategies:
- Selling in smaller quantities (packaging)
- Promote its range of low-cost products (or launch it)
- Offering do-it-yourself alternatives.
- Rewarding loyal customers
- Rethinking delivery options
- Offer payment facilities
Digital marketing will play a key role in communicating these new messages or positions. But first we need to make sure that the campaigns concerned are measured correctly.
Web analytics as the first step in digital marketing
We know that it is important to communicate on social networks or to publish job offers on dedicated platforms, but few measure the quality of traffic generated by each individual publication.
For most businesses, setting up a good web analytics tracking system can quickly reduce advertising costs. Indeed: improving your conversion rate by 10% by offering a better online experience also means making your acquisition campaigns 10% more profitable.
For a lead generation objective for example, conversions are no longer enough. We now need to measure the quality of a lead behind a submitted form. Contrast Digital can help you link online behaviour with the status of a lead in your CRM. This will allow you to optimize your marketing actions on a real lead, and not just on a simple web form submission.
Finally, once the tracking is implemented and the KPIs are well defined, it will be necessary to create one or more personalized dashboards to follow the evolution of the business.
Conclusion
Web analytics is the key to a good start in digital marketing, it allows us to measure the impact of different banners, personalized messages, emails or even the implementation of a live chat. It is the key element to ensure the continuity of your business during and after the crisis, because your marketing teams must now prepare for a possible change in consumer values and habits, and this over the long term.
Want to reduce your advertising costs while offering a better user experience on your site?
Our team will help you identify solutions that will allow a rapid return on investment. Contact us for more information!