8 September 2020 - It has been half a year since the global action on the COVID pandemic began. The lockdown, isolation and related terms are now a part of everyone’s life. Inevitably, this changed the industry of marketing, especially considering the online behavior.

Below is the overview of the impact on business in the scope of digital marketing and online advertisement.

Customer demand, GDP and lockdown

As expected, there is a direct relationship between the strength of restrictions and the GDP value. Less trivial (but still not surprising) is the fact that the web search volume corresponding to the queries with purchase intent is quite similar to the curve representing the restrictions level. That can be easily seen via the following graph considering the United States:

Informational queries: a splash

In our previous research as of March, 28 (2020) we noted that there was no significant growth of informational queries. Predictably, it turned out to be just a question of time: search volume associated with words “how”, “why” and “what” exploded in April, and it is still on the high levels compared to the corresponding numbers of 2019 year. 

Recovery: digital-inspired prediction

Data coming from various sources allow to assume that we are currently in an almost linear recovery regime. We elaborate 4 independent data sets to make a prediction considering the back-to-normal moment.

Both digital sources (namely, the search volume associated with isolation and goods delivery) show the similar behavior:

According to these estimations, the crossing point is likely to be reached by the end of October 2020.

We also take into account offline stats. Whereas the number of retail store visits seemingly shows a bit optimistic picture, the restaurant sector, on the contrary, pushes the crossing point towards the end of the year:

Migrating to Online

The process of digitalization was strongly enhanced by the COVID-19 crisis. However, the impact and behavior vary depending on the business sector.

Here is a summary with all sectors put altogether.

One can see a remarkable growth for almost all of them except for real estate.

Some of businesses experienced a huge tsunami-like increase of search demand associated with online services (Fitness, Food & Beverages). In other niches like Finance or Entertainment the effect was rather moderate.

We give a comment on each of the mentioned business sectors in the full article.

Marketing & Advertising

Switching to Digital is an evident trend, but what are preferable ways of doing that? We found certain nuances on the popularity of different marketing channels.

First, it is worth noting that the crisis has boslered the domination of Digital Marketing compared to the classic advertising. That can be seen from the following picture which represents both the trend of search volume associated with Ad agencies (decreasing) and with Digital (increasing, more rapidly with the COVID crisis).

The thing that seems to be characteristic is the marketing investments horizon. In the United States we can observe a distinct prevaluation of digital marketing channels that require mid/long-term investments (Content Marketing, SEO). Investing to Google Ads and Facebook Ads can be considered as a short-term. There was a short growth for the paid channels in a 2-3 months after the pandemic began, but we’ve already passed it.

This proportion seems to be specific for the United States: in scope of the worldwide stats the picture is different.

To conclude, let us emphasize that the crisis turned out to be a digitalizer: even the old-style companies that were stuck to classic advertisement had to improve their digital presence.

Digital-inspired data can also give us a hint about when our life could (to the certain extent) get back to normal: it is presumably the end of October/November 2020. This prediction is, of course, extremely sensitive to the rapid changes in epidemiological situation.

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