Corona crisis redefines digital marketing mixes for marketing leaders, Gartner

As the novel corona virus pandemic continues to disrupt how businesses operate, brands are innovating by going digital in what now presents an opportunity for marketing leaders to rethink their digital marketing strategies, Gartner Inc. posits.

With economies and businesses bleeding, marketing players are looking at ways of bolstering digital and social marketing but pulling back spend in areas like paid search and indirect ad buys.

Lili Meng, Principal, Gartner Marketing practice: “Due to suppressed consumer demand – a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic – a wide range of industries experienced declines in total desktop traffic in the first quarter. To best optimize both short-term objectives and create long-term efficiencies, marketing leaders must first focus on what to put spend behind versus where. Once they settle on what they want to communicate to consumers, they must shift their digital marketing mixes in order to better scale messaging. “Consumers are no longer clicking through to sites from traditional ad formats, so marketing leaders must now adjust the messaging of ad creatives to enhance advertising effectiveness. Leading brands are leaning more on cost-effective alternatives, including direct and organic search traffic, and utilizing more linking strategies to drive traffic from frequented sites.”

According to Gartner, marketing leaders should consider the following aspects when re-evaluating digital marketing mixes.

Monitoring performance on search keywords, pulling back from paid search where organic search is the dominant driver of site traffic. To drive more organic search visibility and minimize reliance on search ads over time, they should optimize webpages for common search queries to increase content relevancy, including adjusting meta tags.

Revisiting the messaging of advertising creatives prior to making any further changes to advertising spend allocation. This should be followed by testing different ad formats across channels to pinpoint where it makes sense to invest additional spend.

Capitalizing on video viewership momentum by investing more in ad placements on video-first sites seeing high traction. They should also maximize the ROI of video ad placements by developing creatives with differentiated messaging for example highlighting relevant services or features in the current environment versus expressing concerns.

Diversifying the marketing mix to increase cost-efficiency by pivoting to channels that provide access to audiences on sites seeing momentum in traffic activity, including referral domains and social networks,.

Gartner has a detailed guide into other ways marketing leaders can do during the COVID-19 in a report dubbed “Optimize the B2C Marketing Mix Through Shifts in Channel Activity.”

www.gartner.com

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