Good morning marketers, events are canceled. Now what?
“This is the time to embrace integration, create comprehensive, compelling and even longer-lasting campaigns that surpass single executions and reach audiences at a new scale.” Those are the words of Kathleen Gratehouse, co-founder and principal of Highwire PR, in a feature that offers strategies to help brands make the most of what they have at a time when live events and traditional marketing activations are on hold.
From re-assessing your core objectives to shifting your thinking to audience-first and channel-native, Gratehouse champions the approach of doubling down on what’s working, rather than reinventing a perfectly good wheel.
In predictable fashion, COVID-19 is also having a dramatic impact on search behavior. During Monday’s Live with Search Engine Land episode, Merkle senior SEO manager Alexis Sanders shared some representative client data highlighting some of the wild swings in click behavior as social distancing took hold. A large grocery retailer saw click growth skyrocket by 433% in mid-March, while an online discounter saw click growth drop by 56% during the same period. A hotel client saw revenue from bookings plummet to a 1/10th of what they typically see.
It’s a small sample, to be sure, but it highlights the striking distances between the so-called winners and losers in this crisis — at least for the time being.
Taylor Peterson,
Deputy Editor
