Digitalizing Crisis

It has been half a year since the global action on the COVID pandemic began. The lockdown, isolation and related terms are now a part of everyone’s life. Inevitably, this changed the industry of marketing, especially considering the online behavior.

As expected, there is a direct relationship between the strength of restrictions and the GDP value. Less trivial (but still not surprising) is the fact that the web search volume corresponding to the queries with purchase intent is quite similar to the curve representing the restrictions level.


In our previous research as of March, 28 (2020) we noted that there was no significant growth of informational queries. Predictably, it turned out to be just a question of time: search volume associated with words “how”, “why” and “what” exploded in April, and it is still on the high levels compared to the corresponding numbers of 2019 year.

Data coming from various sources allow to assume that we are currently in an almost linear recovery regime. We elaborate 4 independent data sets to make a prediction considering the back-to-normal moment.

According to these estimations, the crossing point is likely to be reached by the end of October 2020.

The process of digitalization was strongly enhanced by the COVID-19 crisis. However, the impact and behavior vary depending on the business sector.

Some of businesses experienced a huge tsunami-like increase of search demand associated with online services (Fitness, Food & Beverages). In other niches like Finance or Entertainment the effect was rather moderate.

We give a comment on each of the mentioned business sectors in the full version of the report.

Switching to Digital is an evident trend, but what are preferable ways of doing that? We found certain nuances on the popularity of different marketing channels.

First, it is worth noting that the crisis has boslered the domination of Digital Marketing compared to the classic advertising.

The thing that seems to be characteristic is the marketing investments horizon. In the United States we can observe a distinct prevaluation of digital marketing channels that require mid/long-term investments (Content Marketing, SEO). Investing to Google Ads and Facebook Ads can be considered as a short-term. There was a short growth for the paid channels in a 2-3 months after the pandemic began, but we’ve already passed it.

Digital-inspired data can also give us a hint about when our life could (to the certain extent) get back to normal: it is presumably the end of October/November 2020. This prediction is, of course, extremely sensitive to the rapid changes in epidemiological situation.

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Michael Osipov
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This release was published on openPR.