COVID-19 Digital Marketing: An Overview of Google’s Strategy Playbook

One of the latest resources emerging from the pandemic is Google’s COVID-19 marketing playbook titled Navigating the Road Ahead. The free pdf discusses strategies and insights to help businesses stay ahead of the quick changing landscape. While the playbook only features three main sections, the document is 40 pages, so we’ve outlined some of the key takeaways to start considering if you haven’t already.

Consumer Insights

Google outlines five key behavior changes they’ve seen across consumers in different industries. A few of these behavior shifts include even more time spent online through multiple mobile devices, the shift for virtual connections and maintaining relationships through technology, and looking for credible, clear information to meet everyday needs.

Key Takeaway: In order to ensure your business is meeting the needs and desires of your audience, it is important to review your COVID-19 digital marketing strategy, be open to new ideas, and adaptive. Without understanding the current consumer environment businesses will fall behind.

What Are Your Goals?

Every business is truly unique and will need to reflect on goals and priorities to respond to COVID-19. Google highlighted four ways they’ve seen marketing impacted during this time and made a point to note that there is not necessarily a linear progression between each one. The four situations businesses are experiencing are:

1. Challenges including supply and demand or logistics
2. Re-assessing priorities or mitigating risk
3. Quickly adapting products or services
4. Investing to meet increased demand

Key Takeaway: Taking the time to understand which situation(s) relate most to your current business state will play a big role in what your marketing strategy response will be and even how to execute it.

The Response

Based on the four situations companies are experiencing, Google outlined marketing strategies to test out in Google Ads that support each one. They also included brief case studies of other brands that shifted their PPC strategy and what their results were in the end. The playbook also includes best practices for other media campaigns outside of paid search and tips for new content creation.

Key Takeaway: The actionable changes you come away with for your COVID-19 digital marketing strategy will be purposeful, help you continue moving forward with everyone else, and provide you some short-term assistance.

Worth the Read? 

Even though the bulk of marketing strategies provided are PPC focused, Google’s COVID-19 marketing playbook guide provides enough information to find something useful for everyone. If anything, the most valuable pieces of this guide include consumer insights, models, and measurable statistics on user behavior during this time. The playbook gets right to the point and provides a straightforward framework that can be relatable for everyone. Whether you read the playbook or skim sections that relate more to you, it’s not a bad resource to have on hand.

Read the PDF here