Marketing through the pandemic: what to pause, say and build

The first job is a triage of everything that is scheduled, live or planned. Take the marketing calendar and sort each item into one of three buckets.

Pause. Anything tied to in-person activity: events, trade shows, store openings, launch parties, experiential campaigns. Creative that shows crowds, handshakes, travel or shared food. Any promotion built around a product you cannot ship or a service you cannot deliver in the next several weeks. Any automation that would now send a tone-deaf message, which includes scheduled social posts written in February, "we miss you" win-back emails, and countdown timers on events that are not happening.

Adjust. Search campaigns, remarketing, email to existing customers, and organic content. These continue but with changed messaging, changed bids and changed landing pages. Keywords that signal urgency and availability, such as "delivery", "online", "near me open" and "same day", deserve more budget than they did last month. Ad copy should state what you can do today: curbside pickup, virtual consultations, extended returns, free shipping thresholds.

Build. The work you have always meant to do: website fixes, tracking cleanup, content and SEO, email list hygiene, product photography, process documentation, and new ways to deliver what you sell. This bucket grows as the first one shrinks.

Write the sorted list down and date it. You will revisit it every two weeks as rules and demand change.

By early April almost everyone has received dozens of emails that open with "In these uncertain times" and say nothing. Do not add to the pile. A message is worth sending when it contains information the customer can act on.

A useful communication answers at least one of these questions:

• Are you open, and in what form (online, delivery, pickup, by appointment, remote)?
• What has changed about hours, lead times, shipping or returns?
• What are you doing about safety for staff and customers?
• How can I reach a person, and how fast will I get an answer?
• Is there anything you are offering to help right now, such as payment flexibility, free resources or donated capacity?

Put that information on the website first, in a short banner or a dedicated page, and in your Google My Business listing, which now supports a "temporarily closed" status and COVID-19 posts. Then send one clear email. Update the information as it changes rather than sending weekly reassurance.

On tone: be plain and human. Avoid humor about the situation, avoid using the crisis as a hook ("pandemic pricing"), and avoid claiming any health benefit for a product unless you can prove it. The FTC and FDA have already sent warning letters to companies making unsupported claims about immunity and protection, and platforms are removing ads that reference the virus in that way.

Demand has not disappeared evenly. Some categories (home office, fitness, grocery delivery, home improvement, online learning, pet supplies) are up sharply. Others (travel, hospitality, events, formalwear) have collapsed. Most businesses sit somewhere between, with some lines up and some down.

For paid media, the single most important fact of the moment is that auction prices have dropped. Many advertisers have paused, so cost per click and cost per thousand impressions on Facebook, Instagram and much of the Google Display Network are down meaningfully, with declines in the range of 20 to 50 percent reported across categories since mid-March. If you sell something people can still buy and use, you are being offered attention at a discount.

A workable set of rules:

Whatever you keep running, check daily for the first few weeks. Conversion rates are moving quickly, and automated bidding built on pre-March data will take time to catch up.

Many of the businesses that are holding up have changed what they sell or how they sell it, often in days. Restaurants are selling meal kits and groceries. Gyms are running classes on Zoom and shipping equipment. Consultants are packaging work as fixed-price remote engagements. Retailers are running local delivery with their own staff and offering video shopping appointments over FaceTime or WhatsApp.

The question to ask is not "how do we market our old offer" but "what version of what we do can a customer buy from home this month". Then put that version in front of people with the least possible friction: a simple page, a clear price, a way to pay online, and a stated delivery or fulfillment promise you can actually keep. Shopify, Square and similar tools can get a basic order flow live within a week; several have extended their free trials to 90 days for new stores.

Gift cards deserve a mention. They are cash now for a promise later, and customers who want to support local businesses are buying them. Make them easy to find and easy to buy online.

For most of the businesses we talk to, the honest state of their digital foundation is "we know it needs work and we never have time". Now there is time. A prioritized list for the next eight to twelve weeks:

1. Tracking. Confirm that Google Analytics goals, Google Ads conversions and the Facebook pixel fire correctly and match each other. Most accounts have at least one broken or duplicated conversion.
2. Website speed and mobile. Run PageSpeed Insights on the five most-visited pages and fix the obvious problems: uncompressed images, render-blocking scripts, slow hosting.
3. Organic search content. Write the pages that answer the questions customers ask your sales and support teams. These are cheap to produce now and compound for years.
4. Email list and automation. Clean the list, rebuild the welcome series, and set up abandoned-cart and post-purchase flows if you sell online.
5. Product content. Better photographs, complete specifications, honest reviews. Online shoppers cannot touch the product, so the page has to do that work.
6. Process and systems. Document how leads are handled, connect the forms to the CRM, and remove the manual steps that only one person knows.

None of this produces revenue this week. All of it lowers acquisition costs when demand returns, and it keeps your team productive and employed through a stretch when campaign work has thinned.

Whatever shape the recovery takes, it will be uneven by region, by category and by customer segment. Build the restart plan now in stages, each tied to an observable trigger rather than a date: when local restrictions lift, when conversion rates return to a given level, when inventory is back. For each stage, decide in advance which campaigns resume, with what messaging and what budget.

Keep your audiences warm in the meantime. Email subscribers, remarketing lists and social followers built over years lose value quickly if ignored for a quarter. A useful note every two or three weeks costs little and preserves the asset.

We run pandemic response as a compressed version of the same four stages we use for any engagement. In discover we audit every live campaign, scheduled message and automation, pull the demand data by product line, and talk to the owner about cash, inventory and staffing so the plan fits reality. In plan we sort activity into pause, adjust and build, set a budget rule for each product line, and write the customer communication plan with the specific information it needs to carry. In build our growth, web and creative teams rework ads and landing pages, ship the changed offer (a new ordering flow, a gift card page, a booking system for remote appointments), and fix the tracking and site problems the audit surfaced. In improve we review results weekly instead of monthly, because the ground is moving, and we prepare the staged restart.

Doing this with one connected team matters more than usual right now. The message on the website, the ad copy, the email, the Google My Business listing and the ordering system all have to say the same thing on the same day, and the fastest way to get that is to have the people who own each of them in the same room, even if that room is a video call.

A representative engagement was a multi-location service business whose in-person revenue stopped almost overnight in March. Within the first two weeks we paused the event and in-store campaigns, rewrote the search ads around remote and contactless options, and built a simple online booking and payment flow so the business could sell consultations and gift cards from home. In parallel we used the quieter weeks to rebuild the website on a faster platform with the content and tracking it had been missing for years, so that when locations reopened the business restarted with a stronger foundation than it had before the shutdown. The pattern is described in our digital transformation case study.