Guide to Growth Marketing in the Coronavirus Pandemic

3 Q ’ S W H I T E P A P E R S E R I E S

Learn the mentality, data sources, media mix, and strategy to keep your team on track.

2Guide to Growth Marketing in the Coronavirus Pandemic

Even for growth marketers who can’t disrupt quickly enough, the consequences of the Coronavirus surge have emerged with overwhelming speed, with each day bringing more event cancelations, more school and office shutdowns, higher numbers of those infected, and more consumer uncertainty. To help marketers get their bearings and stand tall for their companies, colleagues, and clients in a chaotic time, we’ve provided a proactive guide to growth marketing in the unpredictable wake of the Coronavirus.

By the end of the guide you’ll understand the major trends we’ve seen across industries, how to revise your growth strategy as the Coronavirus story develops, how to protect yourself against unforced errors on the marketing and PR fronts, and where to look for silver linings as the landscape continues to shift.

Let’s jump in.

Introduction

3Guide to Growth Marketing in the Coronavirus Pandemic

Marketers the world over are trying to set their feet and determine the best course of action as the COVID-19 situation develops. From the first wave of data, we’ve pulled out some common trends that can help provide direction.

Note that while some industries (e.g. health care) generally share the same challenges, other challenges vary entirely by company, not vertical (e.g. an eCommerce medical supplies site has very different considerations than an eCommerce company selling wholesale school supplies).

The six main challenges (and solutions) that have emerged across our client base are:

1. Brick-and-mortar store visits are decreasing. All kinds of retailers are seeing foot traffic dwindle to their offline properties. The fastest way to offset this is to shift digital spend from driving in-store traffic to driving digital interactions. Retailers whose overall sales (online and offline) have slowed might consider offering promotions and discounts that extend to future months when purchasing behavior may return closer to normal. Retailers providing necessary products, like pharmacy and grocery stores, are seeing success in offering delivery and drive-through services and pushing this messaging out on all digital platforms.

2. Direct-response volume is quickly decreasing - or increasing. Companies (and verticals) that won’t get new customers right now should consider shifting focus from DR, at the end of the customer journey, to upper-funnel engagement and lead gen for retargeting once the effects of C-19 abate. On the other end of the spectrum, companies whose digital services are becoming wildly popular alternatives for inaccessible offline services (think: food delivery vs. sit-down dining) must ensure they have the resources to meet surging demand, set accurate customer expectations, or both. For companies at every point in the spectrum, any reassurances of safety, whether from safe handling of food and product delivery, sanitary standards of third-party delivery services, or instructions on responsible in-home use, are helping proactively address customer concerns.

3. Performance is fluctuating wildly. For some organizations, user behavior is fluctuating by the day or even by the hour as news breaks. It’s imperative to set automated triggers/alerts to address traffic and performance increases or decreases; we also recommend assigning ownership of frequent performance checks, both macro and granular, so you can adjust on the fly as needed.

Familiarize yourself with common challenges amidst the chaos

4Guide to Growth Marketing in the Coronavirus Pandemic

4. Messaging and creative need to speak to the times. Almost every organization has an opportunity to speak to user needs/desires in a different and meaningful way. Make sure your ads show genuine empathy for those struggling with isolation, balancing work and child care, facing an uncertain future after layoffs, and trying to find space for self-care. At the same time, make sure to vet your creative and messaging for verbiage and imagery that may have been inoffensive a couple of months ago but ring potentially insensitive or tone-deaf in the C-19 age. Anticipate user concerns and needs (safety, comfort, connection, delivery expectations) and make sure your messaging communicates how your organization will address them.

5. Budgeting, forecasting, and KPIs require real-time adjustments. Even the best-laid Q1 plans, with all the sophisticated analysis in the world, have been negated by swings in consumer behavior due to C-19. Make sure your team is aligned with overall business goals as they shift, and keep lines of communication flowing to adjust marketing budgets and goals accordingly.

6. Canceled events make 1:1 connections and top-of-funnel leads harder to come by. Social distancing and isolation has swept the event calendar clean in 1H 2020. Marketers are scrambling for solutions to connect with their audiences digitally and keep the pipeline full. We tackle this issue at length in the next section.

5Guide to Growth Marketing in the Coronavirus Pandemic

The event dominoes started to fall in early March as Google, Facebook, SXSW, and other big names began canceling in droves. Events still on the calendar into May and June are tenuous, at best, which means marketers must quickly reallocate spend from three months of lost events to build the top of the funnel. There are three immediate areas that marketing should count on to build the top of the funnel:

• Organic content• Paid social, native, and programmatic• Non-brand, top-of-funnel keywords

Yes, content and paid media are already a part of every marketer’s mix, but it’s time to double down. Less in-person time means more time in front of devices, more need to consume thought-leadership digitally, and more people to reach with an initial (or early) touchpoint.

To brainstorm content topics that you can push out on paid social and native, scan the agendas for 2-3 major conferences where you would expect to find your target audience, cross-reference AHREFS to get an idea of volume and CTR, and get rolling. It’s not always essential to capture leads with your content, but make sure you’re tracking KPIs to measure engagement and brand awareness, as well as a process to measure the value of a top-of-funnel content lead vs. an event-driven lead. Before kicking off longer content pieces or webinars and putting money into advertising them, do some research on your proposed subject and title to do a saturation check, since your competitors may be doing the same thing.

Re-invest resources in creative and analytics

It’s not necessary to reallocate 100% of your short-term events resources of budget and bandwidth to content and media; look to creative development and testing and analytics to help improve performance of your campaigns, which will pay off at any scale and help lay a healthier foundation for when things return to a more predictable state.

No matter where you’re spending time and money for the foreseeable future, make sure to safeguard against mistakes that can erode your budget – and your brand equity.

In other words...

Optimize your funnel as the marketing mix changes

6Guide to Growth Marketing in the Coronavirus Pandemic

Chaos almost always results in more mistakes. Minimize unnecessary fallout by taking these measures:

Turn up the frequency of negative keyword reports

Makers of costume masks may be relieved that Coronavirus has struck between the Mardi Gras and Halloween high times, but they’re a great example of an industry that must be on the lookout for negatives; missing one negative on surgical masks, which were already surging in late February, could tank a budget for weeks.

Protect against unforced errors

7Guide to Growth Marketing in the Coronavirus Pandemic

B2B companies must be on the lookout as well; an event marketing agency, for instance, should cut anything viral-related ASAP:

It’s hard to predict what the next news cycle will bring for potential negative keywords, so stay on top of the news, trends, and your internal reports to address any trouble spots early.

Remember latency and seasonality

Not all shifts in performance and scale will be directly related to the Coronavirus; industries whose numbers historically trend lower in February and March should take that into account before over-reacting to this year’s results. Latency is another factor to be considered; while purchase cycles may be longer in the current climate of economic uncertainty, revenue numbers may ultimately show less divergence when latency is factored into performance.

When in doubt, over-communicate

Whether you’re a lead gen company whose sales and marketing teams have a feedback loop to discuss lead quality by source, channel, or audience, or a retailer whose inventory team feeds out-of-stock information back to its advertising colleagues, communication can proactively cut down on tons of mistakes.

8Guide to Growth Marketing in the Coronavirus Pandemic

Consider a company selling hand wipes that have been cleaned out of stock; advertisers proceeding without frequent updates from the inventory team may rack up tons of wasted spend on users who click to the product page to find long backorders – or, perhaps worse, customers who purchase the product with shipping expectations that the brand can’t fulfill, resulting in wasted spend, refunds, and poor customer experience.

Getting ahead of potential communication challenges is key; providing your team with a templated response for customers, or using platform tools like Facebook Messenger for real-time communication can help to mitigate those challenges. You can also use social media to share important information with ease by pinning your brand’s posts to the top of your Facebook and Twitter profiles. Overall, good, frequent communication between teams can keep all parties in the loop on where to pull back spend, where to increase spend, and identify where customers may be experiencing friction.

9Guide to Growth Marketing in the Coronavirus Pandemic

Uncertainty can often put a company’s opportunities in greater relief – if you’re keeping a growth-oriented mindset. Companies willing and able to exercise patience may realize the difference between immediately pulling back spend and exploring the possibilities of arbitrage from competitors leaving the marketplace. Lower CPCs and CPMs and suppressed competitor activity may mean more available traffic within your performance goals if you’re willing to stay the course as long as the data supports it. (Note that as of mid-March, the fluctuation is making trends hard to identify; a comparison of pre-Coronavirus and post-Coronavirus data for two major B2B clients, for instance, showed volume down and efficiency up for one and the inverse for the other.)

Because the picture is murky, make sure to use all the data at your disposal to recognize and react to trends. Pull Auction Insights often to see where competitors are reining in spend (or increasing spend, given that event cancellations have diverted a higher proportion of funds to digital media); use MTA tools to see which channels (if any) are rising or falling, and redirect spend as needed. Because potential customers may be hesitant to buy or commit in a time of uncertainty, keep a close eye on your funnel distribution, and be prepared to increase investment in the top of the funnel to offset a longer consideration phase.

“In 2001, after the first dot-com bubble burst, I negotiated a year-long deal with Microsoft that got guaranteed placement at the top of MSN for the word ‘lawyer’ for .25 a click,” 3Q CEO David Rodnitzky said. “Obviously the landscape is not the same, but it’s generally true that an environment with lots of change brings lots of opportunity.”

Maintain a growth mentality to identify opportunities in your industry’s landscape

10Guide to Growth Marketing in the Coronavirus Pandemic

It’s cynical to think you’ll get any good PR out of the Coronavirus age, but you can and must communicate clearly both internally and externally. Proactively align your teams around one message regarding travel and work-from-home policies, keep the lines of communication open for frequent updates (since the picture changes daily), and consider that what is best for employees is almost always best for the long-term health of your company. The top priority must be creating and promoting a safe environment for employees, partners, and customers.

It’s also a good idea to elevate the content of your digital communications by leveraging video conferencing, engagement platforms, and even email more intentionally than ever to help connect people remotely.

As for PR, the fallout from poorly constructed messaging can be incredibly damaging. In every medium, avoid using words that compare marketing to a life-and-death situation, including the following:

• survive/survival• outbreak• viral/virality• catastrophe• tragedy• plague

If there is any goodwill to be earned in the Coronavirus age, it will come from genuine empathy. Even an email subject line like this simple one from Sendoso conveys the sentiment that we’re all in this together:

The more your employees, clients, and customers recognize that you have their best interests at heart, and you’re determined to be resilient in the face of uncertainty, the better positioned your company and employees will be as things return to a more normal state.

Consider PR and employee relations

11Guide to Growth Marketing in the Coronavirus Pandemic

3Q Digital is a growth marketing agency that helps clients of all sizes achieve growth, breakthrough, and industry leadership. Founded in 2008 by CEO David Rodnitzky, and verified by TechCrunch as an Expert Growth Marketing Agency, it is one of the world’s largest independent digital marketing agencies, with 10 offices and more than 350 employees. Named one of Inc.com’s Best Places to Work in 2020 and recognized on the 2019 Adweek 100: Fastest-Growing Agencies list, 3Q has seen steady growth by leading its clients through paid media, digital strategy, decision sciences, creative, SEO & Content, and SMB growth. For more information, please visit https://3qdigital.com/services/.

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