What Happened in 2020?
If you weren’t just born this year, you should already have a grasp on what had happened in the year 2020 and what is still going on.
The Story of the Pandemic:
January 1, at midnight the year started off like every other, where people cling glasses and say cheers to the New Year. Pretty sure, no one this year was expecting a huge pandemic to break out cross the world, instead people were making New Years resolutions to work-out more, to lose weight, or to even just simply be more productive. Honestly, if that was your New Years resolution like it was mine, 2020 was a hard slap in the face when March came around and the whole world went dark.
Imagine seeing New York City in films and television shows where people are constantly on the move, busy streets, outdoor concerts, restaurants and bars open til 5 the next morning and you dream about living in a robust area to finally be a New Yorker. Well you can keep dreaming just as I am. After March, 2020 New York City hasn’t been the same and who knows if it ever will be the same. The United States Government had us on lockdown for months, until the day when Covid-19 cases started dropping, when businesses that could afford the shut down were reopening, when people started leaving their homes again and walking the streets is when New York City, became a new city.
There were businesses that boarded up their shops during the pandemic and still to this date haven’t reopened either due to health and safety measures or because they went bankrupt. Covid-19 destroyed families, businesses, jobs, and the everyday life we were all used to. The Labor Department reported in July 2.9 million jobs were lost due to the pandemic and businesses not being able to stay afloat during these times. Statista bar chart shows the results of adults across the world whom have lost a job in result of the Covid-19 outbreak in November, 2020.
As the world is slowly decreasing cases, with a few spikes here and there, the world is still trying to grasp how to move on from this pandemic in November 2020 and to continue to live. As life continues to go on, with or without us, we are all in need of some way to support ourselves. According to Career Force, they list the top thirty jobs in most demand due to Covid-19 and a Marketing Manager is ranked twenty-fifth.
The Story of a Student in the Pandemic:
As a current Master’s student studying Integrated Marketing, applying for jobs without experience prior to the pandemic was hard enough trying to catch a bite from a few companies. Now during the pandemic, it is even harder for a student with no experience to find a job in Marketing. Luckily I was able to land a unpaid internship for experience with Tribe. As the Social Media Marketing Coordinator I was given the opportunity to learn and grow with the content creation and content ideas as a marketer with the enhanced education from my professors at NYU.
From countless Zoom calls, break out groups, group projects, and weekly assignments I am confident to say that online learning isn’t all that bad, as long as you are determined to put the work in and learn. I had learned important concepts as a marketer that I would want my clients to know if and before I was to create a digital marketing strategy for them. As my search for a marketing full time job continues, my actions as a marketer would involve taking the opportunity, strategize, and act accordingly.
The Story of the Marketer in the Pandemic:
Creating SMART goals are always a key concept when creating defined deliverables, but what are the steps to get successful SMART goals? Here they are:
- Making pivots in your digital marketing strategy will help your business reach the consumers you weren’t reaching before.
- Make sure you are doing your research on your consumers area of interest and demographics.
- Make adjustments to your digital marketing advertising spend. According to Statista this bar chart shows the expected change in marketing budgets influenced by Covid-19. Consumers are spending a lot more time spent indoors, they tend to spend more time using technology devices, and less time reading traditional advertisings or they read the advertisement on their social channels first before they see the advertisement through traditional marketing.
- Based on the change in social channels, will help you decide on who you are targeting and how to target those consumers. This will determine how to interact and build viewers into consumers and how to maintain current consumers through your social channels.
- Create content through your social channels, create newsletters to engage and interact with your consumers, and then measure to see which methods work with your campaign and what doesn’t.
- Once you gain customers loyalty and retention and understanding which methods work, you should build an emotion connection and start your growth approach.
If you aren’t strongly reporting the conversion KPI’s you should change your digital marketing strategy, because you are either directionless, don’t understand who your consumers are or your market share, you don’t have a powerful online proposition, you do not know your online customers, you may not have the digital ad spend budget, or you aren’t optimizing your search results. By changing or pivoting your strategy could increase your brand awareness and revenue based on who your target audience is and how to properly reach them during the 2020 pandemic.
