If your North Carolina business took a hard pivot from multi-faceted to mostly digital marketing because of the pandemic, you may soon be able to consider going back to normal. While the pandemic is still far from over, North Carolina is planning to open up vaccine distribution to all adults on April 9, so it’s fair to say that there is light on the horizon.

It has been a long road getting here, and many business owners in North Carolina and around the world have had to make drastic changes to their operations and business models. In many cases, those adjustments necessitated changes to associated digital marketing strategies. We explored that impact firsthand in discussions with our clients regarding how to quickly familiar their established clients with the changes, as well as how to promote their business to new groups of consumers whose lifestyles changed with lockdown.

Obviously, different businesses and different industries have had varied results. For some, the pandemic has unfortunately been a death knell, and no amount of skill in digital marketing was likely to save them from its effects. For others, it has been a downturn, but survivable. And for a small handful, the pandemic has actually been a boon to their business, or at least to the levels of interaction with their digital marketing campaign.

Those companies that are still afloat – whatever category they fall into – will now have to put some careful thought into how and when they want to shift back to their normal operations and their pre-pandemic digital marketing strategies. But more than that, some may even have serious questions to answer regarding whether that kind of a return to normalcy is even desirable.

For those who have actually benefited from the effect of lockdown, it’s possible that one of the effects of the pandemic has been to shake up an approach to doing business that had grown stale. It may not just be that new consumer behavior suited the business; it may be that the changes you had to implement were good for the business regardless of surrounding issues of public health. If you’re not sure whether this describes your situation, it’s something that you might very well wish to discuss with your digital marketing partners, if you have any.

But even for those who have been harmed, albeit reparably, by the pandemic, there is good reason to wonder about whether things can be expected to simply go back to normal once the virus is under control. This situation has gone on so long that there’s a real chance it will have a lasting impact on consumer habits and people’s general ways of engaging with the world. If that’s the case, then some of your adjustments over the past year may still need to be undone, but others may be slow to fade, and still others may be more or less permanent.

This, too, is something that’s worth discussion with digital marketing professionals, who may well have their own insight into how people are responding to different business models and different types of marketing content now that the slow transition to non-pandemic life has begun. Although the pathway out of this situation will be a lot easier than the road that got us here, it’s still advisable for everyone to watch their step and make a strong effort to learn from the experience.