Is digital marketing the answer to rebuilding your client base post Covid-19?

Mkhuseli Vangile

While this strategy brought business then, the advent of social media made it more complex for marketers to reach their target audience. According to a new McKinsey Global Survey of executives the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the digitalisation of operations by three to four years.

The first step in developing a rebuilding plan for Covid-19 is determining how deeply your business has been affected. This includes hard numbers, sales, profits and cash flow.

If you have reduced your advertising and marketing budget, those are things you’ll need to account for as you identify financial resources to help you recover. Revisit your business plan, as the business model that may have worked well prior to the pandemic may need fine-tuning. The point is to look at what works for your brand and how you want to engage with your customers.

People spend more time online than they do with face-to-face interactions – this trend was evident even before Covid-19 came about. If you have been avoiding digital marketing, it is not too late to reconsider. There is a good chance that customers are already looking for a business like yours. If they cannot easily find you, they will choose someone else they can find. If a potential customer can’t find you online, they may conclude that your business is not genuine and head to somewhere else.

Why Gen Z needs to be the focus of your digital marketing

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Digital marketing is a revolutionary reporting tool: it tells you the number of people that saw your ad, clicked on it and the words that made them click. This information will help you understand which direction the business is taking or which to take.

The main benefits of digital marketing include:

• Ability to assess and adapt: allowing for a full view of audience growth and visibility of real-time results.
  
• Cost efficiency as digital marketing campaigns are more affordable to the average SME than traditional marketing campaigns.
  
• A higher level of customer engagement and an opportunity to gain a better understanding of who they are and what they’re looking for.

It is always advisable to be an early adopter of digitalisation. The more outside-the-box thinking you can do to prepare for a worst-case scenario, the better. Planning ahead can help improve your business’s odds of thriving again during tough financial times.