Google and Facebook stock just shot up. It’s because they’re the gateway to kickstarting your business post-Covid — and you can start acting now. 🦠

Google and Facebook post better-than-expected Q1 results and ping, up go their share prices.

Facebook saw their monthly active users across their platforms (that also include Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) shoot up by 11% year-on-year, mostly likely as a result of our bored, idle, locked-down thumbs reaching for our phones more regularly.

But get this: ad impressions were up 39%.

With Google it’s a similar picture. Their revenues fell in March, but are predicted to bounce back quickly, both in terms of PPC search ads as well as YouTube pre-rolls. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai:

The good thing about Search Ads and direct response on YouTube as well, but Search primarily is that it’s an extraordinarily effective system, it’s a transparent system. You have a very clear sense of ROI, it’s very measurable, highly cost effective, and so we’ve always seen, and we saw this in 2008 as well, people respond in the short-term, but the recovery is also fast when it comes back, and so it tends to work. It is very diversified, not just geographically by different verticals and even through moments like that, we do see businesses responding to demand shift and so we see it through our system if people suddenly are looking for office furniture or even pajamas, the system responds, right, and so you see the dynamic nature of it.

In these strange times, cutting my performance marketing ad-spend would be the last thing I would do.

If I’m capable of fulfilling my customer’s needs, then it’s obviously a no-brainer — you can reach your audiences right there in their lockdown homes. But even if you’re waiting for this all to end before returning to full-scale marketing, there’s still a case for running some “upper-funnel” awareness ads if you can.

1. As I’ve already said, the audience hasn’t gone away. Paid Social is a great way to get into their locked down lives. More people are continuing to use social media for longer, and this has only been heightened during Covid.

2. Now is the time to test at a low level. Even with a tiny media spend we can garner 1,000s of impressions. Multivariate-test creatives and/or target audiences and keep the results on the back burner. You’re now ready to unleash a pre-tested campaign for maximum impact as and when needed.

3. We can use whatever Awareness campaign we have running now to create audiences for the future. We can build pools of those who engaged with our ads now and retarget them with a more sales-led message when the time is right for them to fulfill post-Covid, confident that this audience has already given us a signal of interest or intent. We can also expand the reach of a second wave of Awareness ads (perhaps when we can be more sure of their effectiveness post-lockdown, for example) by using these first-wave “engagers” as the basis for Lookalike audiences (users who aren’t those who have interacted with our ads the first time but closely resemble them on a number of touchpoints, e.g. their interests/behaviours).

The way out of this Coronavirus situation is obviously down to our governments and respective healthcare systems. But come that time, the way for your business to start driving leads and sales again should be through considering Performance Marketing techniques like this.

And, as I have shown you, there are things you can be doing right now to help facilitate this.