As foot traffic dries up, find out how to open your own digital floodgates
Add targeted online strategies to keep your business surging in difficult times
Without a doubt, regional businesses are being tested like never before. The global lockdown is forcing entire industries to either shut, contract, or adapt. From where I sit, it’s the proactive businesses that are embracing this enforced change by adapting. For many, it’s a whole new world. Some are already comfortable with it, and others are pedalling like mad!
Here’s the good news
In any crisis, people always — ALWAYS — turn to the news to keep up-to-date with what’s happening.
For our own media industry, experiencing lockdown and contraction of our traditional business like everybody else, there is a silver lining. No, a gold lining!
For Newscorp Australia, total readership is up 81 per cent! Consumer subscription sales are up 28% — the most dramatic increase we have ever seen.
It’s the same story for video — a record 102 million views across our network, up 45% year on year.
Even in print — our traditional media expression — downloads of print replica editions on digital devices are up 34%, and supermarkets are selling out of papers, and home delivery orders are surging.
Digital readership across the Newscorp network is also up by an average of 61% versus this time last month across all sites and categories.
What does that mean for your business?
These are giddy figures that would make any marketer go misty-eyed. Yes, your regular, traditional foot traffic may have melted away, but those same people are glued to their online news channels. Let me repeat that. They are watching their
online news channels, not merely going online!
They virtually cannot get enough information to satisfy their need for guidance, support, encouragement — and hard news. In short they are looking for some semblance of their normal life, something that continues to make sense. Their questions still are, “where can I get this? How can I get that?”
Can I also point out that many people are getting a bit overfull of the whole coronavirus thing, and are looking for a bit of light relief in the midst of it. Could that be the basis of your digital campaign?
It doesn’t take a clever marketer to see the wisdom of piggybacking on this intense interest and engagement. It’s not rocket science. It’s pure common sense to embrace a guaranteed method that is currently delivering a growing throng of readers hungry for information on how to get stuff they want. Of course savvy business owners are going to embrace this with everything they have, recognising the shifting landscape could well be delivering them a new level of market share. It could be that businesses — good businesses — that don’t/won’t adapt will not survive this global crisis.
Clever use of digital marketing and trading doesn’t mean it has to be complex, or you have to reinvent the world wide web. Many businesses are finally, for the first time, offering their traditional products and services online, some changing nothing except simply offering home delivery.
This is the new norm!
The ease and ability to reach your audiences by the digital platforms they are spending time on has never been greater. So, the questions you should ask yourself as a business owner or manager is, “If we’re not capturing the attention of our customers while they spend their time online, then which of our competitors are and what will this cost us?”.
Carving out your new future?
My digital sales colleagues and I are busier than ever, not just with sales, but with filling many tradition-foot-traffic businesses in on what online opportunities are so readily and immediately available though our media platforms.
For many it could be the refocusing of their old business, and so building an entirely new way of conducting sales. No doubt this is going to change the business landscape locally, not to mention globally.
I’m sure many in the world will hope everything will eventually go back to how it was before, but I think the clever marketers will see the future for what it is — a truly dynamic digital landscape that can be mastered and harnessed — and really is a gold mine of opportunity!
Give us a call today, and at the very least, launch a illuminating discussion with digital media experts.