These days, the entire world is scared of the Corona outbreak. More than 188 countries are infected with the Novel Coronavirus and it is spreading tremendously with each passing day.
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Along with impacting human life, Corona has started impacting the global economy as the countries are forced to declare locked down the cities and states to save people from the pandemic.
The world’s leading economies are going down as the businesses are shut down for almost 6 weeks. There are many industries such as manufacturing, retail, pharmaceuticals, and more where the daily operations take place with the physical presence of the employees. These industries are not able to operate effectively in this situation.
Compared to such industries, online businesses such as digital marketing agencies, e-commerce businesses, technology service providers, etc. do not need to shut down their operations completely. They allow employees to work virtually from remote locations as they have to perform most of the operations through internet connectivity.
Well, this doesn’t mean the digital businesses are not impacted by corona. Let’s delve into the challenges faced by technology companies, digital marketing agencies and e-commerce businesses in this outbreak.
Check out these two podcast by Dragon Digital Marketing: Coronavirus. How To Save Your Business from the Crash! and Coronavirus. What Small Businesses Must Do To Survive!
Digital marketing conferences and events have been cancelled
Due to corona, all the major marketing events including Facebook’s Global Marketing Summit and Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona, and more have been called off.
Attendees are going to bear a considerable cost as they need to register quite in advance to attend such a large scale event.
Not only that, but the event organizers are also going to lose opportunities to crack potential deals and make essential product announcements. They are going to bear the cost of events space cancellation. When the large events are cancelled, organizers cannot get the money back.
I have a suggestion. As a contingency plan, organizers can host the event without the audience. They can shoot the entire event and then stream the even for the attendees to watch and get insights.
Of course, the live elements are missing in the video streaming but it could be conducted virtually.
I guess this is a better way than not conducting the conferences or events at all. This is a win-win situation for both organizers and attendees to share and gain knowledge about the latest digital marketing updates.
E-commerce supply chains get strained
E-commerce supply chain system has disturbed due to subsequent factory closure because of an extensive expansion of Coronavirus in the key nations across the world. The marketers have analyzed that more people will shop online as they cannot go out to shop for the basic necessities.
It is also observed that online buyers are active during daypart. It is unusual as shoppers don’t typically browse during this time.
Moreover, the physical stores that have e-commerce stores are getting more business in the lockdown situation. Businesses with online stores might not see the same impact as physical stores unless the situation becomes too severe.
For example; in the Corona infected countries, people cannot go out to buy groceries, vegetables, medicines, and other basic necessities. In such a situation, they can use online shopping apps to get the grocery and vegetables delivered at their doorstep.
Have you noticed the downloads of the online food and medicine delivery app? Let me tell you the usage of online grocery apps, online vegetable apps, online medicine apps, etc. has increased tremendously.
In the e-commerce domain, consumer front is completely digitized where customers can select a product, place an order, and make a payment. However, it’s a challenge for vendors to deliver the products at the doorstep of the customers in this pandemic situation. You can get some ideas of how to improve your e-commerce store in these times from this article by Adapty
Due to the strict locked down across the nations, the supply chain has been already disturbed. Thus, on-time product delivery is also the biggest concern for the e-commerce industry during this Corona time.
Digital marketing is a safeguard due to its agility
Digital marketing is one of the better performing business domains and acts as a safeguard against some of the consequences of coronavirus. They are operating successfully with a bit less profit margin.
The digital marketing agencies can leverage possibilities to freeze different variables like marketing budgets as a part of the reactive strategy.
When it comes to online advertisements, some marketers believed that ad spend will be impacted if the opportunities are decreased. But, there are possibilities of ad spend reallocation.
According to a report of WARC, the global advertising spend will rise to $660 billion and the internet advertisement will grow by 13.2% by 2020.
We can expect that due to the COVID-19 situation, the advertising market might fall during this year and might not perform as expected. But, the displaced ad spend will be reallocated later in the year.
Though advertising strongly connected with the GDP, it is not necessary that the falling economic output (due to Coronavirus) will impact the investment in advertising.
Tech companies allow employees to work remotely
All the small to large scale technologies companies are allowing employees to work from home. For instance, Google USA has allowed its employees of North America unit that they can work from home until April 10, 2020.
Even leading mobile app development companies like Credencys took social responsibility and allowed its employees to work from home once the corona pandemic outbreak has started in India.
Undoubtedly, working remotely enables employees with next-level flexibility and better efficiency. But, when the employees work in isolation, creativity and problem-solving ability get affected due to the lack of in-person or group collaboration. Face-to-face meetings are the best way to address any issue with more clarity and quickly.
Allowing employees to work from home, the tech organizations aim to minimize the socialization as much as possible and contribute the stop this outbreak spreading across the city, state or nation.
Since the global Coronavirus pandemic hit the world and many countries were forced into lockdown in early 2020, around 88% of companies worldwide encouraged their employees to work remotely. This shift has changed the lives of many individuals and businesses, promoting different opportunities and ways of working most of us never expected to encounter.
It’s now estimated that half of the global remote working workforce would prefer to work from home, for reasons including the fear of COVID-19 and the realisation that home working offers a much more flexible work/life balance. UK Web Host Review has put together a very eye-opening article around the benefits and challenges remote working poses to us going forward, including an informative infographic.
Embedded from UKWebHostReview
Final thoughts
If you are a digital marketing agency, e-Commerce store, or software development company then there are fewer chances of your business will face a tremendous loss. As your operations are going on, you can continuously serve your prospects. But, of course, efficiency and productivity will definitely get affected.
Author Bio: Sagar Sharma
Sagar has two main areas of focus – Technology and Processes. He has worked in leadership positions in various Fortune 500 companies and has been instrumental in driving success through digital transformation. He is also an enthusiastic Agile Coach.