Marketing and COVID-19: Which Sectors are Most Affected?

In this Marketing Report:

• Growth by expertise – Global Overview
• Growth by expertise: France, Belgium, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands
• Conclusions
• Methodology

It is in this context that we asked ourselves a question: how was the marketing landscape impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic so far?

In two months, we have seen notable developments in the marketing field and this article seeks to present which expertises are suffering the most from the crisis we are going through, and which expertises are in greater demand than usual. Because we help companies partner with the best marketing providers, we are perfectly positioned to measure market developments and understand what the trends are.

If you are a marketing professional, knowing such information could allow you to adapt your offer and services to better meet market demand and thus get through the crisis more easily.

Rising expertises in Sortlist’s core markets

The most sought after expertises on Sortlist since the start of the pandemic in France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands are:

• Web Applications – grew by 100,51%
• Digital Strategy – grew by 56,85%
• E-Commerce – grew by 41,64%

The increase in demand for web applications, e-commerce, digital strategy, and website creation could be linked to the confinement that these countries are going through. Concretely, the impossibility of making offline sales, in stores, for example, seems to push companies to rely much more on their online presence to compensate for the losses induced by the confinement. 

Expertises that lost demand in Sortlist’s core markets

The expertises that lost demand during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sortlist’s core markets are:

• Graphic Design – went down by 27,02%
• Branding & Positioning – went down by 30,51%
• Movie – went down by 32,30%

But on the other hand, investments in online advertising are declining. Even if it may seem contradictory, we believe that this is linked to the fear of making advertising investments that would not have a positive ROI. 

What can we learn from this information? Marketing during the Covid-19 pandemic has been greatly impacted by external factors. The demand for expertise in SEO, e-commerce, content strategy, and web applications is growing, and rightly so: companies need to be able to gain online visibility and put in place tools that allow them to sell their solutions effectively, to compensate for the loss induced by the confinement we are going through. And they need to be able to do this while minimizing their advertising costs, hence the fact that the demand for advertising and online advertising has fallen over the last two months, compared to 2019.

All of these trends we have seen are consistent with the slowdown in offline commerce and the acceleration of the digital transformation that has already been observed for some time. The only difference is that this COVID-19 crisis puts businesses in a situation where their digital transition must be faster and more painful than expected.

For this study about how the marketing environment changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, we compared the number of projects that have been submitted to Sortlist in 2019 with the number of projects that we have received between February and April 2020, for the 15 expertises that are generally the most requested on our website. Concretely, we looked at the percentage that each expertise represented among the total number of projects posted on our platform.

In addition, you should know that we have made this comparison on two scales:

• For all the countries where Sortlist is active ;
• A focus on Belgium, France, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands;

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