While the world’s citizens long for the normal habits and familiar places they enjoyed pre-pandemic, CMOs are facing the need to find new marketing channels and pioneer new strategies for a post-pandemic world.

As the coronavirus known as Covid-19 steamrolled across travel plans, conventions, shopping excursions, sports events, restaurants, and retail, it drew most of the world to television and social media. Scanning every news story and watching the thousands of new ads and commercial spots framed by Covid-19, it is clear that marketers made a pivot and executed on corporate strategies to drive sales or to simply present the brand as a compassionate company during a time of crisis.

While these many ads do warm our hearts for front line caregivers, warehouse workers, and delivery personnel, this is not a sustainable marketing strategy. Rather than a plan of action, it is a reaction to current circumstances. These adverts are useful to brands as they clarify new rules, polish their image, and buy some time while the roots of some massive marketing opportunities are trimmed back behind the scenes.

Some very big channels for brand marketers will be “bonsaied,” at least until the time comes when most of the world has had a Covid-19 vaccine. In a nutshell: Travel, trade shows, convention centers and sports arenas – the drivers of brand awareness for millions of North American companies – are not likely to return to pre-Covid-19 norms, at least not for a long time. Some will be miniaturized through new strategies, such as virtual hosting.

According to the CMO Survey of 625 Chief Marketing Officers by Deloitte, Duke University and the American Marketing Association published in February 2020: “Spending on social media grows to 13% of marketing budgets, reaching the second-highest point in Survey history.

Despite increased spending and outsourcing, social media continues to be rated as contributing only moderate value to company performance (3.4 on a seven-point scale where 7=very highly and 1=not at all)—a figure that has been flat since 2016. 
Source: CMO Survey (PDF)

Any marketer that has become reliant on paid ads in social media may resort to using more of these as a stopgap measure while reorganizing the marketing mix. But no marketer can rely upon social media to bring business back to life. As of late 2019, average reach for Facebook posts was down by 2.2%, meaning that brands could reasonably expect their posts to be seen by about 5.5% of their Page’s followers.

As marketers scramble to find their own new normal, being reliant on social media and email campaigns to build a lifeboat in a post-pandemic ocean is just not going to work. In fact, 69% of event creators admit it’s becoming more difficult to get results from email marketing.

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Online advertising professionals may be shocked to read recent research from fraud management provider Pixalate, which reveals that up to 30% of all ad traffic is falsified.

In stark contrast to previously reported estimates of ad fraud, this would imply that true ad impressions are significantly lower than commonly believed. If so, “this means that many companies are potentially spending their marketing budgets on adverts which have no effect on sales, as they are never seen by real customers.” (Source: NewsBTC)

That explains why so many advertisers have quit PPC.

Apart from the studies and CMO reports, there is another reason why social media can’t do more for a brand, no matter how much money is thrown at it. It’s a big reason overlooked in nearly every research report and it has to do with what we can actually remember from what we’ve read.

A new study from Newsworks and the Association for Online Publishing (AOP) finds that left brain memory encoding, which processes words and detail, is 42% stronger when people view ads on premium editorial sites than when they see the same ads on social media sites. Social media benefited from high levels of immediate attention, but readers failed to convert this to long term memory to the same extent.

According to Dr. Lynell Burmark, education consultant who writes and speaks about visual literacy: “…unless our words, concepts, ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other ear. Words are processed by our short-term memory where we can only retain about seven bits of information (plus or minus 2).”

What does this all mean for the sign industry manufacturers, suppliers and sign shops?

We can expect that resuming “business as usual” will face monthly hiccups continuing into 2021.

We are not only a world under siege by a highly contagious virus, but we are also humans assailed by doubts and fears. Even as the curve is flattened and we bravely return to shopping malls and air travel, new sanitation measures will remind us to forego the unnecessary risk of virus resurgence associated with highly populated events.

The new normal will certainly reflect more consolidation of products coming from wholesale sign manufacturers, and fewer feet on the ground for local production. As has been the trend, there will be more subcontractors vs. employees utilized for projects on a case by case basis.

Teresa M. Young has been a consultant to entrepreneurs since 1986, in both retail and B2B sectors. In 1991 she became President of Sign Biz, Inc., a full-service business development company. Young sits on multiple boards, including as Past Chairwoman of both the International Sign Association (ISA) and California Sign Association. Her company has launched more than 200 new entrepreneurs into their own sign businesses. She is an in-demand speaker, engaging business owners with topical and powerful business insights and strategies in support of best practices and modern marketing strategies.