Posted by : Mohit Impact of Covid-19 on strategic communications
Covid-19 has resulted in changes to marketing, advertising and media spends, forcing businesses and brands to reevaluate their thinking about current and future marketing and communication strategies. As organizations and brands figure out the best means to promote their products and services in the midst of a pandemic, Caspian Debt organized a webinar: “Impact of Covid-19 pandemic on strategic communications” with Communication and Public Relation experts having vast experience in the marketing and communication domain to find the answers.
The panelists included:
- Mouna Devaiah, Head of Digital for SMEs, Redwood Algorithms
- Vishal Gupta, CEO – Mompresso
- Tushar Bajaj, SVP – National Digital Lead – MSL
The session was moderated by Debleena Majumdar, co-founder – Kahaniyah and StoryEd, and contributor, ET Prime.
The urgency:
With the unprecedented challenges ushered in the wake of Covid-19, we have seen changes in communication strategies driven by shifts in both marketing budgets and in large-scale digitization. Here are some of the interesting statistics that indicate the shift towards digitization:
- 40 % increase in video streaming in tier-II cities
- 80% of people have shifted to OTT platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime as the primary sources of entertainment.
- 38% are ready to give up watching television.
- 27% growth in digital marketing
With this as the backdrop, we decided to drill down into the following questions that are most relevant for start-ups and SMEs.
Making Digital Marketing work: The Data magic
While the growth of digital marketing is obvious, making it work, especially, with tight budgets, is not always easy. Our panelists shared some practical strategies.
Digital marketing is more effective when the brands can customize in terms of demographics and psychographics using analytical tools. Effectiveness of the campaigns can be tracked more easily using analytics tools, which gives Digital Marketing an edge and also a possibility for bootstrapped start-ups to implement with limited budgets and chances for implementing quick changes.
Over the last two quarters, we have seen how digitization has been at the forefront of conversations. Even well-known brands have repositioned their marketing & sales strategies, due to more awareness, consideration, and purchase and the realization that digitization could drive more qualified leads and also help in the analysis of the marketing and sales funnel.
“Social media tools today have made it very easy for you to actually test and learn yourself. You can start to do small campaigns.” – Tushar Bajaj
A key question here: data and digital are two sides of a coin using which SMEs can have more targeted reach. But is it effective for conversion?
The answer still is yes. Investing early in a good CRM system (they are quite affordable now), generating automated MIS reports to track the status of conversion at every stage, and arming the sales team with that intelligence is important as we monitor the metrics to see the success of digital marketing strategies. Other than this, attributing the cost to different channels also helps in tracking the conversion rates. Leveraging tools like Zoho, Google analytics, and insights provided by social media platforms like Linkedin, Facebook and Instagram provide a very deep information on how the social media campaign is working for the organization across different segments.
“The key to growing any business is customer retention.” – Vishal Gupta
That said, the key to growing a business is on retaining existing customers as well. Customers are explicitly or implicitly sharing feedback on products. Hence seeking feedback is very important. For companies that are soliciting reviews through online media, it is very important to read reviews, analyze what people like the products. Using sentiment analysis, they could create themes from the reviews and respond back to close the loop.
“Unsatisfied customers are very vocal and provide a wealth of data on why they did not buy your product or service.” – Mouna Devaiah
By the power of Influencers:
One area where we have seen a lot of focus is influencer marketing. Apart from mega influencers who could have upwards of 1 million followers, there are other segments even within influencers, from micro-influencers whose followers range between 1,000 to 1,00,000 and nano-influencers, with 1000 odd followers, and small but deep and trusted presence online, according to studies from Duff and Phelps.
While mega influencers and celebrity-induced branding could be out of bounds for smaller companies, MSMEs and large companies have approached nano and micro-influencers to create relatability among the consumers and most importantly, to build trust, which is a critical ask, when choosing the right influencer.
In order to reach out to regional consumers through digital means like blogs, Instagram, and Facebook, companies like Oneplus, FeviCreate, and Godrej have taken the micro-influencer and nano influencer route. One of the benefits of utilizing nano-influencers is that they have the highest level of engagement. Because of this, many brands have started to place a large focus on nano-influencers. Brands represented by nano-influencers are often deemed more authentic, given the higher likelihood that the nano-influencer has a real-life relationship with the majority of his or her followers.
The PR and ad mix:
Another key question many organizations have is about choosing between PR and ad campaigns in terms of allocating marketing budgets. This depends on the objective. If the objective is purely promotional, then running a social media campaign would be a better approach. But if the objective is to create interest in a new or unique product or solution, then PR helps as it creates a larger audience and spreads awareness which is important in the beginning and later, one can plan much more targeted marketing tactics in other platforms to reach the end consumer.
The way forward:
One key learning is that one should not look at digital as a short-term campaign to campaign focus. Digital marketing is an enabler for the long term with the shelf-lives of creatives and information often lasting longer. Meanwhile, it is important to also keep in mind that social media could become an echo-chamber and one should keep proactively seeking authentic feedback from real customers.
As marketing and communication shapeshift to adjust to the changing customer journeys and digital pathways, the hope is that the Internet becomes a more safe, accessible, and authentic space with more equal representation of men and women in the digital space.
This blog is based on the discussions by the speakers at the webinar “Impact of Covid19 pandemic on strategic communications organized by Caspian debt. You can watch the recording of the webinar here.