Strategies to Grow E-Commerce Brands During Coronavirus
A collaborative piece by Blue Light Media.
Every new year brings new challenges for brands to grow within the digital landscape. Whether it’s learning to navigate new platforms like TikTok, or keeping up with best practices set by Facebook and Google, the life of a brand and their marketers is one that’s always evolving. Unfortunately, this year one of those challenges is Coronavirus (COVID-19), which was declared a pandemic as of March 11, 2020, by W.H.O. (World Health Organization). Staying protected and healthy should always be at the top of everyone’s priority list. However, we cannot ignore the impact that the coronavirus has made on market and consumer behavior.
COVID-19 is a disease that is transferred from person to person and as a result, there has been a widespread abandonment of crowded areas. Colin Sebastian, an analyst from Baird Equity, terms this user behavior as “cocooning” and believes eCommerce will see a rapid boost in sales as a result. While social distancing continues, the consumers are looking to purchase their daily essentials (and not so essentials) through online buying. As this behavior continues, so will consumers’ dependency on their phone for news, updates, entertainment and staying connected, which will result in more time people find themselves viewing a digital ad on whichever platform they may be on.
A recent study by Within shows that Facebook CPM has decreased by up to 25% in some sectors. A few weeks back, we were seeing a similar trend as well — likely due to increased screentime and advertisers pulling back on their media spend simultaneously. But is this the approach that your brand should take? Well, it depends. While it’s important to protect profitability and the wellbeing of your employees, it’s also important to identify advantaged and adapt to the new digital environment.
What Does Coronavirus Mean for Natural Products?
So far, the most obvious target for COVID-19 has been mostly people with weak immune systems. What does that mean for U.S. based/supplied natural products? Well, one main thing: providing the right information and providing it swiftly. Since the widespread preference to stay at home, health-based natural products have been in high demand in the United States.
Joe Farrell, vice president of international operations at PFS, emphasizes the need to create ads/messaging that will attract new customers to your brand. Farrell states, “Brands who go the extra mile to address customer frustrations due to the impacts of Coronavirus will make a positive impression on consumers that can only encourage brand loyalty in the end.” As creators and advocates of natural products, there is a unique situation at hand to provide consumers with new ways to tackle their health concerns.
Revisit Your Your Brand’s Messaging
(by Hadiya Quidwai and Mikhail Alfon)
Brands and marketers may wonder whether they should stay out of the Coronavirus conversation but in our opinion, you can’t ignore the elephant in the room. It’s important to ensure that your customers are aware of your empathy and commitment at this time and it is crucial to be proactive about what your brand will say about its benefits, whether internal or external and how your brand will say it.
Don’t forget that many might not have ever had to turn to e-commerce brands and will now be viewing some for the first time. It could be a good idea to provide consumers with simple facts about your products that might grab their attention while scrolling through a site. Consider addressing the nutritional value, simplicity of use, and safety precautions used during packing and delivery.
Messages such as “Let us help you prepare” may bring comfort to users as they continue to read the news. Through your brand’s messaging, buyers will feel they are able to confront their potential health risks while also being introduced to your products.
As always, remember that community is key. Take this time to connect with your customers and understand what they’re looking for. By answering direct messages, inquiry emails, or simply looking at the comment on your latest post, you’ll find the top concerns that need to be addressed in your brand’s messaging.
Among the chaos of this new pandemic, there are many opportunities to be taken for those with an online presence. If your product has the ability to help, it’s imperative to get the message out there quickly and effectively.
Shift Your Influencer Marketing Strategy
(by Karlie Myszka, Head of Accounts)
In addition to messaging, consider how you can leverage your different mediums across all platforms to connect with your audience. If you’ve primarily used Facebook and Instagram ads to gain awareness for your brand, it might be time to look to influencers to help provide social proof and improve your trust-factor.
We understand that there’s a lot of uncertainty with the current situation, however, we recommend pushing your influencer marketing efforts forward, instead of pulling back. By tapping into your influencer network, you’ll be able to get your brand and product across to new audiences in an authentic and personalized way.
Not to mention, while most commercial photoshoots have been postponed, these creators are able to produce original content in the comfort of their homes.
Here are a few tips on how to readjust your influencer campaigns during this time:
- Be Transparent with Your Influencers
Be transparent with your current partners, and don’t be afraid to ask for their input. The creator knows their audience best and can provide helpful content and messaging pointers. If the influencer doesn’t think that their audience is ready for a sponsored post, then trust their insights and be flexible with timelines.
2. Adjust your messaging.
Change up the messaging to focus on educating the audience instead of pushing a sale. Elaborate on the benefits of the product or service, and how it can provide value to them during this time. Ask the creators to share personal experiences while using the product or service. And above all else, keep it authentic.
3. Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose.
Use the content that influencers create (with their consent, of course) for your feed, and for ads. We see that this type of imagery works best for building awareness because it blends into users’ feeds. We’ve seen ROAS improve by 3x nearly overnight by implementing this strategy for our partners.
However, always make sure that the product is clearly shown. If users can’t see what your product is about, then they won’t be interested in your brand and won’t be moved further down into the marketing funnel.
4. Provide a promotion without being pushy.
Provide influencers with personalized promo codes with higher discounts. While we don’t recommend that you use your influencer campaign as a sales push, it is important for the creators to politely include the discount code for consumers to use if they do decide to make a purchase. Think of it as “hooking up your homie” of friends and family rather than a car sales ad.
5. Roll with the punches.
Remember that this is new to everyone, and things are changing by the day. Be prepared to make adjustments within your campaigns, and keep your current partners up to date.
Maximize Your Ad Spend with These Two Tips
(by Hannah Moyer, Head of Paid Media)
Ecommerce brands, especially those in the natural product space, have an excellent opportunity to increase sales during this time. It does take a few tweaks, though.
The first is to add some careful and strategic ad copy. We began testing “stock-up” messaging (that did not play on scarcity), and promoting free-shipping for larger orders. As a result, our e-commerce partners and saw their ROAS improved by nearly 40% just from these changes alone.
The second adjustment we’ve made to increase revenue for our e-commerce partners is by widening our top of the marketing funnel interest-targeting. More people are scrolling on social media, and more are looking for products that are in-stock and can arrive quickly, so we’ve relaxed our typical targeting to match.
We’re using one or two broad interests per ad set, and testing those against each other. For budgets under $5,000 per month, we recommend testing two to three of these at a time. This change led to an 85% increase in ROAS for one of our partners. (This is on top of the 40% from “stock up” and “free shipping” messaging.)
While some brands may be pulling back on their ad spend, we recommend that e-commerce brands make some careful tweaks and keep spending while monitoring weekly and monthly progress.
