Facebook offers free digital marketing courses to help business overcome COVID-19 pandemic
Facebook announced news to provide free digital marketing education to their business owners which is called “ Summer of Support”.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a huge amount of small businesses of Facebook struggle with financial challenges. Facebook directly provides financial help through a US grant program. Since Facebook opened applications for the program, Facebook supports Black owned-business to serve the black community to provide free virtual training in the digital skills this summer, starting with the Summer of Support program, launching on June 24.
Digital marketing became important during the pandemic
Many people spend more time online at home while small businesses operate based on customer engagement and interaction, both online and offline, and the pandemic period of social distancing disrupted the traffic to the sites or expanded customer base. Therefore digital marketing has become more crucial than ever.
The changing world
During the period of COVID-19, people work from home and spend more time browsing on websites rather than work at a company. Business owners consider changing their marketing strategy from offline to online based on the behavior of consumer change. However, some small business owners are not familiar with digital marketing, Facebook provides free courses to tell them how to use digital marketing to boost their business.
In my opinion, Facebook realized the needs of business owners to help their business while appealing to more business owners to put advertisements on Facebook which benefit business owners and Facebook. I think Facebook uses the content market to attract business owners to know what digital marketing is due to Facebook’s six weeks digital training class with six topics. There are few concepts that are significant for business owners when they utilize digital marketing.
From June 24–28, the theme is “ The Changing World ”. By acknowledging the endless opportunities of accelerating innovation. Fast-changing conditions in which a business can accelerate the success of growth especially in the digital market. Today’s consumer don’t in a single channel or on a single platform, most consumers looking for a seamless cross-channel experience. Businesses need to know how to use multiple messaging channels in unison to drive up engagement through digital marketing education. Consumer’s behavior has changed due to the pandemic period. Take myself as an example, before the period of COVID-19, I usually would like to shop at an office store or Saks Fifth Avenue. However, since the university is remote from March, I have to stay home. Then I have time to look through the influencers of Instagram, they usually recommend many fashion news and elegant clothes. I would like to browse online shopping stores such as Saks.com, Farfetch and official stores to buy the recommended clothes I need.
About Re-Emergence and Community
I am really interested to realize the theme “Re-Emergence” from July 13–19, some business owners never put advertisements online before the COVID-19 , but some business owners try to put their advertisements on Facebook in order to keep the business. Should the business owner change or keep the previous business strategy according to the new landscape emergence. As for a business, it needs to seek to gain competitiveness across nations, markets and segments while strengthening their value propositions.
I think the theme “Community” from July 27–31 attract me because Facebook has been listening to small businesses and trying to do what we can to help them weather the storm-including provide direct financial support to business owners and they find a huge amount of interest from Black-owned business which facing enormous challenges to provide them financial support to serve the Black community. This year Facebook spent much money with diverse suppliers, black-owned businesses and nonprofits that serve the Black community. Facebook builds their brand image and customer loyalty through the “community” digital marketing.
Reference:
Hutchinson, Andrew. “Facebook Launches ‘Summer of Support’ Program to Provide Digital Marketing Training to Businesses.” Social Media Today, 23 June 2020, www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-launches-summer-of-support-program-to-provide-digital-marketing/580397/.
