While it’s tempting to cut the budget on digital advertising spend, this will likely only serve you in the short-term and you’ll lose out in the long-term. While some of your competitors stay in the digital marketing game, connecting with their customer base and finding new audiences, you will have to spend more when the economy recovers just to catch up.

And if that’s not enough reason, the cost of digital advertising is way down at the moment which means you can actually do more with less. Whenever the overall volume of ads in your industry drops, there is less noise to compete with. We saw it following the 2008 global financial crisis when ad spending dropped 9% worldwide and 12% in the US according to AdAge’s Marketing Fact Pack in 2019, and we’re seeing the same thing play out now. This is an opportunity that you need to seize.

People might not be attending events, visiting shops, or walking past outdoor ads, but they are certainly online. A lot of people are at home, working or not, and they are spending a lot of time on their devices. So much so that figures suggest Internet usage has gone up between 50% and 70%, and streaming up 12%. At the same time, the cost of placing highly targeted digital ads has gone down approximately 40%, which you will notice immediately when you enter theCPC/CPM bidding process.

If you’re planning to launch a new product or service -and that offer still makes sense today - now is a great time for setting up a strategically targeted SEM and paid social media campaign. Give your brand its moment on the biggest stage in the world.

It’s more than likely the campaigns you developed a few months ago are not entirely relevant anymore. Speak with your audience in a way that’s meaningful, by showing you understand the situation they are in and how you can help.

You might need to revisit your buyer personas to uncover new insights into pain points, aspirations, and behaviour. New consumer priorities mean your positioning needs some slight adjusting as well. It could very well be that what your brand offers has changed to being something that’s essential or a luxury, or maybe it fulfils an urgent need rather than something that can be postponed.

With clever brand research, you’ll be able to find out the answers to those questions and develop a digital marketing campaign that resonates with your customers because it makes sense to them.

That said, don’t go out and change everything about your brand chasing trends after the fact. Stick to the core purpose of your brand and use that to respond to the challenges ahead. Keep your long-term marketing strategies in mind and keep embedding your brand story and vision across your marketing channels.

When things get tough, lean in. That’s how you stay ahead of the game.