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COVID-19 Hidden Opportunities in JUNE & How You Can Take Advantage of Them

First of all, thank you to everyone who gave us such positive feedback from our recent post; How All Sorts of Businesses Are Taking Advantage of COVID-19 - And You Can Too - it was lovely to hear!

As it went down so well, we’ve written this post to expand upon it with further insight on the hidden opportunities of operating a business during Coronavirus and some inspiration for how to make the most of them.

We’ve been digging through the most up to date stats and found the key takeaway is: If you have the time and/or funds available for marketing and advertising, now is a fantastic time to do so.

1. There is less competition, with 89% of large multinational businesses having paused their advertising campaigns and 74% of brands posting less on their company social accounts at present. Display advertising has seen a 47% reduction in budget spend and paid social media has also suffered a 45% drop.

2. People are (still) spending more time online. Facebook’s Q1 2020 results have shown an increase in its Daily Active Users (DAUs) of 11% year-on-year (1.7 billion), driven by an uplift in social media engagement from stay-at-home orders. Its Monthly Active Users (MAUs) saw a similar growth of 10% (2.6 bilion).

3. This combined has meant the brands continuing to advertise online have seen the cost per 1,000 impressions (CPMs) fall and the trend in the cost per click (CPC) flat or down. This has resulted in return on advertising spend (ROAS) trending much higher than usual.

4. Very importantly, conversions are up. The food sector in particular stands out, with a nearly 60% increase in conversions.

5. Consumer behaviours are changing. One in ten in the UK is set to try foodservice delivery for the first time as a result of the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis.

6. Email open rates have risen by up to 25% week-on-week in retail. People are also reading their emails on desktop rather than mobile, which provides a less distracting browsing experience than on mobile devices, and consumers are taking more time to read longer content. Daily email open rates are generally increasing by 5-10% each week.

All this demonstrates that now is the time to get content about your business out into the online world, where you’ve got a great chance of catching people’s attention.

If you’re business isn’t operational, this attention can still lead to results for your business if you’ve tweaked your marketing strategy, as we explained in this post. If you are up and running, particularly in the food & beverage industry, you have a strong chance of generating sales.

To really maximise on this, incorporate elements into your social media strategy that the social media platforms want to promote. A perfect example of this is Hettie's Tearoom, Pitlochry who have been ‘going live’ on Facebook and generating loads of exposure for their fabulous wee business. This video generated 2k views, 99 post reactions, a bunch of comments and likely quite a few sales!

As stat 6 showed, it’s a great time to embrace email marketing. For our next blog we’re planning on delving deeper into this topic so we’d love to know, is this something you’ve been working on? Or have you received any marketing emails that have impressed you?

Do let us know in a quick email, and forward us your campaigns and some details of results if you’d like to be featured!