The COVID-19 lockdown around the globe is drastically impacting the world economy, and is changing the ways of life- behaviour, work routines, attitude towards health awareness and whatnot. We are heading towards an unknown critical future where everyone around the globe is feeling the impact, both personally and professionally.
As everyone is sitting at home, usage of the internet has spiked multifold. Be it work from home or people socialising on various channels and connecting to their friends or families, people are leveraging the digital technologies to connect and keep themselves busy.
At The Marcom Avenue, we thrive to build memorable experiences for brands and consumers with the support from our talented force of brand management team. Today, we will focus on understanding the trends & behavioural shift in media consumption and how brand managers can leverage the insights to create focused marketing campaigns:
- Internet Traffic is on a regular upswing:
As the people are spending time in their homes due to the countrywide lockdown to help curb the spread of coronavirus, people are spending most of the time with their electronic devices, such as mobile phones, laptops, or tablets.According to the statistics by Google, internet activity has increased by 30% in India. People are increasingly searching for information on Coronavirus in the US, India and other countries, and similar searches are being seen around the world, from Spain to Singapore.Consumers are searching web for various topics related to the novel Coronavirus like updates from the government, knowledge on symptoms, tips to #FlattenTheCurve, and more.People are consuming digital content, playing more games and spending 3X more time on social media platforms.
Brand Manager’s Plan of Action
As the digital traffic is continuously rising, the brand managers can take this opportunity to launch targeted-marketing campaigns with higher budgets to reach maximum TG. Brand managers can also focus on Programmatic or Video campaigns that are experiencing heightened performance given the automated bidding process of Programmatic and engaging ad experience of Video. Consult some of the video marketing companies and top 10 online marketing companies for developing the best plan of action for your brand. - Surge in Premium Internet Traffic
The traffic volume has gone up by 2x for familiar and most trusted online publishers like NDTV, ABP and more. The increase in traffic has pushed the audience towards not believing in all that is available but what is true and genuine. Such news platforms are gaining brand recognition with improved automatic consumer trust and belief.Brand Manager’s Plan of Action
Premium traffic can be competitive and costly to acquire depending upon the quality of your ad campaign. While it’s not possible for marketers to only target individual publishers (i.e. you can’t just target NDTV traffic), there are ways to optimize toward high-impact placements. It is advisable to increase the bids for top-performers by 25%-50% to lift the competitiveness of your campaign within the network and gain more traffic. Reach out to the best digital marketing services in Gurgaon for the best brand communications strategy for your brand. - Online Media Consumption Times are Shifting and Increasing
As the consumers are confined to their homes and local neighbourhoods and are staying up late to interact and discover content online, the media consumption time is shifting and increasing. Instead of the usual media spikes during commuting or meal hours, we’re seeing more of a flat rate of consumption throughout the course of the day.Brand Manager’s Plan of Action
By gaining insights on when your ad performs and converts the audiences the best, you can utilize scheduling tools to understand and tighten your budget and use it to promote your brand/product/service during high-performing hours. To understand when your audience is converting, you can test a campaign at low budget not on your usual scheduling times to see if the flattened consumption spikes help your performance. - Pay Attention to Thriving Verticals
Performance trends are strongly associated with both- the type of marketer and the vertical/category/type of content. For example, with travel bans in place, the Travel vertical is experiencing major business pains, whereas Home & Lifestyle is experiencing the opposite. Conversions have dropped for Brands, developed for Affiliates, and surged for Publishers (News + Media), who are largely driving the 69% increase in clickthrough rates. Some of the thriving verticals:- a) Business & Finance- Investing + Careers = CTR increases up to 73%
- b) E-Commerce = Weekly growth rate of 52% – for Essential Items
- c) Entertainment- Games, TV, Binge-watching, Music, Books = CTR increases averaging 70% with Music specifically seeing a 5x increase (with little to zero price fluctuation)
- d) Health & Fitness = Significant growth in all categories
- e) Recreation = RPM growth with potential for Marketers to tap into
Brand Manager’s Plan of Action
Brand managers can try to play with their content to attract the audience. Your product or service may fit in one category, which should not deter you from building content around high-performing categories. Remember to utilize Audience Interests to gain insights as well as create ad campaigns towards high performing interest categories.For example: Some of the industries which thrive on physical activities like, fitness or the event industry are shifting to digital platforms due to bans on large group gatherings. Hire the best ecommerce SEO services agency in Delhi NCR for optimising your ecommerce platform for attracting high amounts of traffic.
- Platform Performance Shift
One of the interesting shifts happening around the countries during lockdown is that people are using mobile and home computers for media consumption more than ever. When it comes to Coronavirus-related content, Desktop campaigns are performing stronger than their Mobile counterparts. As people continue to follow the trend of WFH policies, people are utilizing the home systems, like laptops or Desktops to get the office job done, which has resulted in higher consumption of media more than ever.Brand Manager’s Plan of Action
Remember to sort your campaigns on the basis of platform and consider mobile-first for non-coronavirus-related content and desktop-first for the opposite. Remember to be sensitive while developing content related to coronavirus. Ensure that the content is informative, fact-based and humane.
At The Marcom Avenue, we develop high value paid marketing campaigns. Therefore, consult some of the best PPC management companies in Gurgaon.
