It would be an understatement to say that we are living in challenging times.
It is like saying that watching the US presidential election debate earlier this week was a bit painful. I don’t think any of us really need reminding that the impact of the most famous obligate intracellular parasites of 2020 has been felt across the planet and, I am afraid to say, that we are not out of the woods yet.
If you know me well, you will know my views on the world’s reaction to the virus but I do not want to turn this blog post into a political rant. As we enter Q4, I wanted to share some thoughts/reflections on the impact that the coronavirus has had on our wonderful industry and consider how it may continue to affect us all in 2021 and beyond.
A Hammer Blow
Many digital marketing agencies have sailed through these troubled waters unscathed and some have even experienced meteoric growth, but I think it is fair to say that the majority of marketing agencies had a worrying March / April period and I know of several that continue to struggle.
Transparency is core to the way that we do business and I am happy to share a snapshot of our net profit margins across the past year:
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that we didn’t have a great March. It was, in fact, the first month in over 15yrs that we suffered a loss. Not the end of the world but hugely frustrating as I had hoped that this was the year that the ‘Brexit uncertainty’ brakes would finally be eased.
An unfortunate truth is that marketing budget is typically the first to be slashed when the going gets tough. I say ‘unfortunate’ as it is often the worst decision to make and there are numerous examples throughout history of how marketing your way out of tough times is a successful strategy. This is obviously not always the case and we were in the unusual position of advising some of our clients to hit the pause button due to the unfolding events. It felt as though the world was falling apart and that we were all doomed.
Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining
I spoke earlier of how we were adapting in the early days of lockdown and I was already starting to see some positives amongst the gloom. Whilst I have developed a strong dislike of most aspects of 2020, there are definitely some positives that should not be overshadowed by government incompetence / economic meltdown / project fear / challenging times (sorry – I am trying so hard not to rant….).
We had always built the agency to be cloud-based, so the move to the remote model was actually very easy in terms of logistics. I have no doubt that being forced to work remotely must have been a total nightmare for some businesses but we were very ready for it and there really wasn’t any interruption to our ability to deliver work for our clients. The clue is in our name – as long as we have a browser, we can