COVID-19 has severe effects almost on the entire human establishment leaving few minor areas with minimum damages. The damages are not only on physical health but this virus has also affected the cognitive health of humankind. People are forced to stay indoors and quarantined where it is in our nature to socialize and over the centuries it became one of our preliminary needs. Like we cannot think of leaving without fulfilling our ever defined basic needs of food, water, shelter, and clothing on an everyday basis, the restrictions were never meant to put down on our social activities. This virus hit on our social gathering and forced us to stay quarantined for months. Researchers have predicted this mental fatigue that we might encounter during this quarantine period and also recommended a host of remedies for them. Many of the remedies recommended investing this time in productive works like reading, writing, and honing personal skills. This will not only divert the attention towards the productive activities but also keep the attention rooted so that it does not get fractured or hopped around the corners where it might bring back negative emotions.
The situation is similar to the advertising industry. The global pandemic has forced many organizations to slash down their budget on marketing and promotion including a major cut on the advertising. The reason being the stagnant condition in the production and operation of many industries that forced to bring down the budget on multiple levels. In a recent scenario, where a decline has also been witnessed in online advertisements has affected the industry as well where the number of advertisements on social media has reduced to a great level. While the advertisement has always been a great strength of the promotional strategies, any organization that has an online presence is almost bound to promote their brands on the social media platforms, making social media advertisements an integral part of the promotional strategies. The increasing interest and involvement on social media unlocked the doors to reach out to a large number of people at the same time even belonging from different parts of the globe. Similarly, the Return on Investment (ROI) is also being calculated for social media to keep a track of the investment made on social media platforms. N. P. Jadhav, R. S. Kamble, and M. B. Patil proposed an equation to calculate the ROI for social media that would help to keep an eye on social media expenditure and investments.
Social media return- social media investment
Social media ROI= —————————————————————————————————————————————–
Social media investment %
Figure 1: equation proposed by N. P. Jadhav, R. S. Kamble and M. B. Patil to calculate ROI for social media
Investing in social media promotion might be a clever option especially during this global pandemic when most of the traditional mediums are going low with the advertisement expenditure. While the cost of promotion on social media platforms is relatively lower and flexible enough, it allows even the small and medium scale entrepreneurs can easily afford to publicize their products and services on social media. There are tracking mechanisms to trace out the reach of the advertisements on social media to evaluate the performances of the advertisement campaigns which is a difficult task for outdoor advertisements. Social media posts also allow imposing reactions in the form of ‘like’, ‘love’, ‘simile’, and similar to understand the reactions of the viewers while enable them to share and re-share the content on their timelines and groups and pages. The Comment facility works as a detailed analysis of the consumer’s reactions to the contents shared by the organizations and often helps the researchers to bring out the essentials from them. The recommendations coming from the comment section are not a rare sight that viciously helps the developers and marketers to improve on their production and promotional strategies. Like the beta testing of the websites which preliminary works for the developers to signify the consumer reaction and level of satisfaction towards the product or service, some organizations prefer to run the campaign for a shorter period to test out the consumer’s reaction on them to launch it for a longer period and a greater market diameter. This doesn’t not only provide a brief forecasting about the market and their probable reaction on the promotion but also end up saving cast and preventing damages to the product or service. These beta testing often produce the changes identified by the views or users that the developers failed to incorporate in the first place that helps out in making a near-perfect solution for the consumers.
Every social media is different from others and caters to the need of its users therefore the promotional strategy for different social media should be different depending on the requirement of the marketers. While deciding upon the promotional strategies, we should also look out for the basic functions of social media as some of them are primarily for sharing pictures, some are dominant in sharing video and some hosts all kinds of content into it. Marketers should design the campaign aligning with the basic nature of social media and measure the outcome based on similar parameters. The best part of the social media has probably been realized during this global pandemic when the physical gathering has been restricted, encouraged the marketers to go online with their offerings while using innovative ways to showcase their product or services, and what could be a better option than reaching out to the mass market through the social media!
