Pneumonia (Covid-19) shock! How to adapt and adjust the digital marketing strategy?
Covid-19 pandemic is raging, how should the digital marketing strategy be adjusted in time? At the end of 2019, Wuhan, China, had the first case of the new coronavirus. By the lunar year of 2020, the pandemic has begun to expand and affect the world. Major industries have been affected and impacted, especially the transportation and tourism industry. It is even worse news in response to travel and flight bans from various countries.
1. Has the pandemic affected consumers’ willingness to travel?
Through Google Trend, we can quickly understand the online voice volume of keywords in various periods, and adjust the next advertising strategy through data interpretation (taking the tourism industry as an example):
- When the pandemic broke out, the searches for related terms have skyrocketed: keywords such as virus, mask, covid, Wuhan, etc.
- According to ResearchGate data, we can find that the online voice volume of related words was low in China before. However, since the beginning of the Chinese New Year (2020/01/26 to 2020/02/01), search terms such as mask, Wuhan, virus have soared. During that time, the news media reported large amounts of information on the pandemic. It can be inferred that the content that consumers pay attention to at this time is biased towards policy responses and news.
2. When the epidemic occurred, European tourism-related keywords decreased
At the same time, according to Revenue Hub data, we found that after January 12 until January 18, the search for European travel-related terms began to decrease. In addition, according to the data of Google ads, it can be seen that search interest in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Belgium has dropped by 10-15%.
But what is surprising is that the current search interest in Swiss tourism has increased by 22%, and this part can continue to observe whether tourists will change their destinations.
The keywords British Travel and France Travel picked up slightly this week. Watch the screenshots of recent news as follows:
We speculate that it should be related to the Wuhan pneumonia-related diagnosis, Wuhan people’s loss of contact in the UK, and other news, so we exclude consumers who want to go abroad for this search.
In response to the pandemic, we recommend digital marketing adjustment strategies:
Travel agency industry
- Maintain search advertising budget: target consumers who are still purposely searching during the pandemic.
- Multimedia active promotion: The summer vacation time is shortened this year, and the summer itinerary is more popular for consumers. You can communicate with the tour group after 7-8 months in advance and match the travel instructions to increase the brand impressions.
- Continuous collection of customer lists: Create a remarketing list for recent visitors of the official website, and remarket to the consumers who are still purposely searching during the pandemic.
Retail industry
- Commodity copywriting can be combined with current affairs related to pandemic prevention
- Increase the budget for pandemic prevention-related products to avoid early offline-advertising
But you must pay attention to the regulations of the Ministry of Health and Welfare and avoid directly writing more sensitive words such as effective pandemic prevention
Property insurance industry
- Strengthens the copy of explanation for overseas medical insurance
- Besides, because of previous SARS experience, it is estimated that the search heat will continue to be affected by the pandemic the next February to April, so please pay attention, and immediate adjustments are required!
Please continue to cooperate closely with us, optimize digital marketing together, and also spend this period affected by the pandemic together!
