When several countries across the world have been forced into lockdown situations, brands started saving more on their marketing expenses by cutting down their ads. The World Economic Forum reports a 9% down on ad spending by June in Europe and 12% in Germany. Brands either enter into crisis mode on their own and cut costs or try to grab the opportunity which other brands have left behind. In order to survive in COVID-19 outbreak, a lot of brands preferred the former option.
Usually, the paid marketing budgets are the first funds that get cut during the pandemic. According to the report revealed by IAB, around 70% of businesses have already paused or adjusted the ad spending as they already planned while 16% of them were yet to decide the right action plan.
How SEO Helps Marketers at the time of crisis?
When a lot of businesses were planning to cut their ad spending, there were plenty of leading brands who started investing more in organic search and other cost-effective SEO strategies. Conductor, a search insights provider, has determined the response of marketer to crises and revealed a theory. It has been reported that investing more in affordable marketing channels like SEO is one of the most common responses to the crisis, along with controlling budgets. According to the same report, SEO is predicted to be a very vital strategy during the outbreak by 63% of marketers, and 66% considered organic search as the best channel for performance in an outbreak.
Small businesses survive by going online
Hitachi Capital UK has conducted research and found that at least 14% of small businesses are going online completely to survive the outbreak. Since the announcement of lockdown, businesses have seen 50% growth by going completely online and it has been increased to 38%. This data doesn’t include the businesses which operate partially online. It is too early to say when customers will feel prepared to return to shops as a lot of smaller businesses can’t hold back to going online. Organic search is definitely a great strategy to prioritize for smaller businesses to move to online operations.