How Businesses Can Overcome COVID-19

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On New Year’s Eve 2019, the ’20s sounded like a promising new chapter, and we all planned to start with 2020 vision and clarity. When the COVID-19 virus came along—and impacted all of our lives and careers. While many businesses were forced to close temporarily or permanently, not everyone was negatively affected by COVID-19. Many companies overcame obstacles to not only stay in business, but find opportunities for growth.

How has COVID-19 affected new businesses?

According to Startup Genome’s global survey in April of startups, 41% of startups were in what they call the “red zone,” defined as having three months or less of cash runway left. While 29% were in that situation already before the pandemic, the COVID-19 crisis tipped many more over the edge.

Since the beginning of the pandemic and the effects of the shutdown to their businesses, 74% of startups have had to terminate full-time employees, sending millions of people into unemployment. More people without an income means more have to be frugal with their spending habits, which causes a cycle of lost revenue opportunities for local businesses.

Which businesses are overcoming Covid 19?

1. Zoom

Zoom was just a vaguely familiar virtual meeting software back in 2019. It was seen as an intriguing tech company that was only used at cutting-edge companies for meetings when a professional remote video chat call was appropriate. Once the world adopted social distancing and working remotely, Zoom became an essential platform used worldwide to keep people connected for both professional meetings and personal social uses. Daily downloads of the platform grew 30x year-over-year and Zoom has consistently been on the top downloaded apps of Apple iOS. 

How successful is Zoom since the start of Covid 19? The company recently published its earnings from the Q1 2021 year, reporting a 169% YOY growth. Their cash flow increased from $22.2 million last year to $259 million this year per quarter. This incredible growth of the platform is, in a sense, due to the luck (as much as one can call a pandemic ‘lucky’) but the company has continued to improve safety and encryption measures with the new spotlight from COVID-19.

The key takeaway? Zoom was given the spotlight due to incredibly unique circumstances—and rather that flounder under pressure, they managed to leverage it into a new chance for growth.

2. Canva

Canva, a graphic design and innovative collaboration creative software, is experiencing immense growth due to widespread COVID-19 shutdowns. The pandemic caused many businesses to turn to social media as their only way to connect with their customers—which turned many business owners into their own graphic designers. Canva allows people in all professions, from teachers to construction workers to boutique owners, to easily build their own social media graphics, business cards, presentations, and more on a platform that incorporates thousands of pre-populated templates. 

How successful is Canva since the start of COVID-19? The startup has received much recognition in the industry from investors and recently announced $60 million in new funding led by their previous investment company. The investment values Canva at a total of nearly $6 billion, almost doubling its previous value of $3.2 billion set in October 2019.

Canva’s takeaway is that finding a digital way to help others (with your product or service) is bigger and faster than in-person could ever be.

3. Local Bike Shop: Outspokin Bicycles 

Our favorite local Tampa Bay and Clearwater bike shop, Outspokin Bicycles, is finding success in 2020 during a time when biking and outdoor sports have become a popular options for exercises while gyms remain closed. For Outspokin, demand has unexpectedly exceeded supply, due to the fact that factories are not running at full capacity and a scarcity of bike parts.

While Outspokin was seeing unprecedented growth, they also saw that their local Tampa Bay community was being affected negatively by COVID-19. They took this as an opportunity to support their neighbors by hiring people who lost their job during the pandemic. Outspokin Bicycles is a great reminder that giving = getting. 

How can your business overcome COVID-19?

Whether your revenue is down or your industry is struggling to get back to its full pre-pandemic pace, you can still market your brand and find innovative ways to overcome COVID-19 and succeed.  For example, social media marketing and search marketing are two digital tools that every business should be investing in.

As a digital marketing team, Digital Neighbor is committed to staying cutting-edge and neighborly, which means we provided our clients creative ways to stay successful—because we care. Send us a note and we’d love to grab coffee with you (virtually or at our favorite outdoor cafés)!

Why It’s Important That Google Ads Just Removed Low Volume Search Terms

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Whether you’re a local small business or a Fortune 500 corporation, Google is an important part of every company’s marketing mix. Google is the most used search engine, receiving over 5 billion search queries a day, and is reported to provide a high return on investment. However, Google recently announced an impactful update regarding their search term reporting policy. 

From Google’s Search Terms Report:

“Starting September 2020, the search terms report only includes terms that a significant number of users searched for, even if a term received a click. You may now see fewer terms in your report.”

In short, this means that advertisers will have reduced visibility into which search queries trigger their ads, even when terms correspond to a click or conversion. Reports moving forward, according to the Search Terms Report support page, will “only include terms that were searched by a significant number of users.” This is a concern for many marketers, as they rely on this visibility with their ad campaigns in order to optimize to the best Google Ads performance as possible. 

Our neighbors at Seer Interactive ran a study of this change immediately after it was announced, and found that Google Ads hid about 28% of paid search budgets. Likewise, they saw that search term visibility was not shown for about 20% of PPC clicks.

Why is Google making this change? 

In a statement, Google cited this change was incorporated to maintain their standards of privacy and strengthen protections around user data. Privacy and protection are a trending topic amongst marketers right now, and as a tech company, Google should be respecting and maintaining user privacy. Google is expected to set the standard that personally identifiable information (PII) that could be tied to someone out of search term reports should be kept private. 

In 2011, Google started this by limiting visibility into the search terms that drive organic traffic to websites for users logged into Google, again citing privacy as the reason for the policy change. When this policy first happened, keyword buying became the solution to this challenge, allowing advertisers to buy search ads, and match keywords to search queries. 

Are we heading towards the death of keyword targeting?

This update may signal that Google is phasing out traditional keyword targeting and replacing them with Dynamic Search Ads and Smart Campaigns, such as by minimizing search term visibility and replacing it with audience targeting. We saw the very first step towards audience targeting when Google Analytics launched the new predicted purchase and churn metrics in July of 2020. 

How did Search Term Reporting Work?

Google Ads includes a Search Term Report feature that shows you which specific terms triggered an impression on your live advertisement, as well as reports how closely the search terms relate to the keywords your ad was targeting.

This report is so important when reviewing digital marketing efforts and budget; without reporting, the business has no way of measuring the effectiveness of its campaigns and deciding whether these ads are driving traffic to their site or not. This change to the visibility report is concerning for companies and marketers alike because it may negatively impact advertisers’ ability to determine which search queries will trigger a click or conversion.

#1. Leverage site search on your own website

Your website should have its own visible search bar for guests to easily find what they are looking for when visiting your website. According to eConsultancy, up to 30% of site visitors use internal site search. Plus, once a site visitor does complete a search, they are 5-6X higher likely to convert than the average visitor. Not only are you creating a positive site experience and increasing the likelihood that a site visitor finds what they are looking for and converts, but you are also learning something more about your customers. 

Google Analytics incorporates site search tracking into your website, allowing you to measure which keyword searches are driving traffic, and also enables you to optimize your website tagging based on the results you’ve measured.

Action items: Make sure your site’s search bar is engaging and ready to use, and that you’ve turned on Google Analytics into your site for reporting!

#2. Learn more about your audience outside of keywords

While leveraging your site search results to better understand your audience is one tactic, it’s one of many! There are other ways to fill in the gaps of information, such as:

  • Leveraging audience segments
  • Hosting surveys
  • Researching closed-loop data through audience research methods. 

You can also gather insights from social media, by measuring and researching your top competitors, and by researching secondary data to further understand your target audience.

Action items: Dedicate time to researching your audience and utilizing your insights to inform your marketing tactics outside of Google.

#3. Test Smart Bidding on Google

Smart bidding was designed to help make advertising easier and more efficient for marketers and businesses, allowing an automated resource and utilizing machine learning to optimize ads for the best conversion. With this automated resource, businesses can take a more hands-off approach, allow the search ads to prioritize certain goals, and take advantage of the fact that smart bidding algorithms do factor in search queries into their signals. 

Action items: Look into Smart Bidding and run a test to measure performance.

At Digital Neighbor, we’re all about the latest trends and changes in the digital marketing world and finding new ways to support our clients and neighbors. We’d love to grab a coffee and discuss ways to help your business grow on Google Search and beyond!

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