The Impact of Covid-19 on Global Marketing & E-Commerce Industry

Ever Since its outbreak in late 2019, Coronavirus pandemic has shocked the entire world with its severity and crumbled the economies all around the globe. The horrific virus first appeared at the Chinese city of Wuhan and slowly clutched many countries in its deadly grip. Sadly, not only had it cost billions of lives worldwide, but also, it has shaken up and altered the natural living standards and habits of the people around globe.

While any nations are in lockdown and following strict social distancing policies with other precautionary measures, many businesses are fighting for their survival. One of the major reasons for drastic fall in business, apart from the deadly infection itself is the fact that consumer’s shopping habits and their way to approach things have been deeply affected. Not only the pandemic and self-quarantine have left them economically challenged, but also people are immensely stressed with disruption to their daily routines.

Why SEO will dominate during Covid-19 time?

Apparently, the marketing seems to be the only ray of hope for many big or small scale business industries.  The marketers currently are expecting low budget with high goal achievement as low cost Digital Marketing seems to be the top choice rather than other costly options such as paid media and reduction in headcount ratio.

The survey on current marketing scenario which included many high rank executives and top entrepreneurs shows that:

1. A survey at Gartner shows that, over 65% of the marketers are anticipating a substantial decrease to their annual marketing budget.
2. While 86% of the enterprisers are foreseeing there marketing goals will be harder to reach.

In this situation, lowering down the budgets, limiting the channels and reduction in the staff numbers is eventually becoming one of the top concerns for many firms. Majority of marketers are considering that SEO services are way more beneficial during this time.

Moreover, despite the lower budget 40% out of total of 72% entrepreneurs predicted that their marketing goals will be increased while 32% of them anticipated that their goals will remain same.

Source: The Impact of COVID-19 on Marketing (2020)

Likewise 58% of marketers told that they will lower the budget and on the other hand 34% of them seemed to be more inclined toward investing in low cost channels like SEO.

Additionally, 63% of enterprises are predicting that SEO will be a prominent aspect in the current marketing scene.

In addition, the latest search results from Google have also corroborate the rising importance of SEO services as the searches for term “SEO” is rising at substantial pace.

With over 66% of markets reported that SEO was also the top most performing channel in last year, leaving behind other marketing channels in competition with a large margin.

Conclusively, Digital marketing and low cost channels like SEO are turning out to bet the major focus for many marketers worldwide and more than half of the firms are turning to the digital content for brand building as it seems more efficient, safe and high gain approach during the time of self-isolation and social distancing.