Special Report: How To Refresh Your
Marketing Strategy As The World
Opens Back Up
Special Report: How To Refresh Your Marketing Strategy As The World Reopens
Is Your Marketing Strategy Paced to the New Normal?
2022 and Beyond
As the pandemic moves inexorably towards a possible (and once unimaginable) the third year, its impacts on consumer habits become even more firmly ingrained. Recent surveys show that quality, convenience, and comfort are prime factors for digital shoppers, followed closely by practicality and durability. Responding to these preferences, marketing strategies must be underpinned by strong value propositions.
While the world learns to live with Covid-19 – hopefully with lighter personal constraints and fewer lockdowns – it seems clear that some trends are here to stay:
With more than 500 million tweets sent out every day, customized content is a great way for businesses to stand out from the crowd.
Getting Personal Adds Value
With more than 500 million tweets sent out every day, customized content is a great way for businesses to stand out from the crowd. Games, quizzes, and Instagram interactive stories reach out to consumers and keep them entertained. As attention spans shorten (currently at less than three seconds, according to some surveys!), longer engagement is vital for better top-of-the-mind recall.
Adding value to blog posts, podcasts, and articles, unique personal experiences and educational aspects respond to widespread demands for informative content that is engaging, relevant, and beneficial. When budgets are tight, experienced marketers know that quality outperforms frequency every time, particularly when messages are customized, appealing to different audiences on specific channels.
Personalization Statistics Every Digital Advertiser Must Keep in Mind
By now, if you’re not using personalization to your advantage, you’re operating at a significant disadvantage. Marketers from businesses of all types and sizes have been working to offer the intimacy, personalization, and relevance that the technique provides to increase conversion rates, grow transactions, and boost revenue.
Statistics Data Source: Instapage; Transmyt Analysis
Personalization Statistics Every Digital Advertiser Must Keep in Mind
By now, if you’re not using personalization to your advantage, you’re operating at a significant disadvantage. Marketers from businesses of all types and sizes have been working to offer the intimacy, personalization, and relevance that the technique provides to increase conversion rates, grow transactions, and boost revenue.
Digital Gets More Competitive
For the first time, digital placements accounted for half of all ad spending last year, with six million businesses using Facebook ads. The logical consequence is that competition is heating up in the virtual world, with companies responding to lockdowns and stay-home orders by restructuring their marketing strategies.
Busier digital advertising space ratchets up the need to stop the scroll, through more creative approaches. Now is the time to think outside the box, seeking new channels for reaching out to consumers, like TikTok, Quora, and Clubhouse.
Digital ad spending worldwide in billions, 2019-2024
Net Facebook ad revenues in billions
Actively Keeping Customers Happy
Forced online during the pandemic, consumers are more sensitive than ever before to digital marketing strategies. Consequently, smart businesses are deep-probing their markets through frequent customer surveys and quizzes.
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Get your best marketing strategies from… Your customers!
Keeping customers happy is a crucial step for any business. Better still, happy customers – both B2B and B2C – are a powerful marketing tool. Here are innovative insights into converting prospects into sales, with a little help from your current customers.
In fact, a solid chunk of your marketing efforts should include your customers, preferably speaking frankly about what they like (or dislike!) about your company, its goods, and services. Crafting unique stories that show how your goods and services help them solve problems is a sure way of ramping up interest among leads and prospects.
Sharing Goals
Success is always a common target. And success for your customers spills over onto you. A little effort put into spotlighting customers’ triumphs quickly leads to closer engagement, particularly individual accomplishments that reflect well on customer brands. So share upbeat stories on employees who stand out in some way, mention prize-winning campaigns, offer presentation slots at events, and feature happy customers in videos and social media posts. After all, customers are people, and everyone responds well to well-earned praise.
Promoting Innovation
When your product or service helps a customer solve a problem innovatively, showcasing the entire success story is a smart step for everyone involved. Highlighting individual contributions adds human interest while describing hurdles along the way builds up tension. An effective solution provides a satisfactorily happy ending and – for a forward-looking approach – nominating a person or project for a related industry award brings even more positive coverage for months to come.
Honing That Competitive Edge
There’s nothing like a little rivalry to keep things moving ahead steadily. When companies see their competition benefiting through marketing partnerships with you, they’ll start paying more attention to your goods and services, attracted by these intangible benefits. Meanwhile, customers become more tightly linked to a business through emotional ties (and also self-interest, as the advantages of these innovative initiatives begin to appear). Adding to the attraction, customer feedback systems can even be gamified, for added excitement.
Bragging About your Customers
Instead of yet another run-of-the-mill advertising campaign, why not adopt a different approach: show how your customers benefit from using your products or services. A regular Customer Wow! feature on your website – supported by social media posts, videos, personal profiles, and other insights – is a subtle way of showing (without telling!) what a great partner you are, helping your customers surmount even the toughest challenges. Well-documented case studies like this can also be nominated for awards, and even make their way into college textbooks.
Many proactive customer retention actions focus on loyalty programs (points, bonuses, gifts, etc.), while others offer special services. Less obvious are back-office improvements that eliminate the reasons for defections, particularly sluggish or standardized responses to queries or complaints and inaccurate or inadequate information. Chatbots are an obvious solution here, added easily to almost any website and slotting painlessly into most marketing budgets.
Automation Streamlines Digital Marketing
When expertly designed, marketing automation smooths away friction points and speeds up the conversion processes. Better still, it’s an effective way of cultivating long-term customer relationships, with benefits that extend well beyond closing deals.
Adding automation to any digital marketing strategy boosts its efficiency, allowing marketers to spend time on more creative aspects, once the repetitive tasks in their workflows are automated. A seamless blend of sophisticated software and smart strategizing, automated marketing nurtures prospects through social media posts, emails, and ad campaigns that are tailored to their individual interests.
Data Drives Decisions
By analyzing individual information, data-driven marketing strategies lead to more accurate predictions of consumer behavior. With brand communications optimized and tuned to current needs and future aspirations, companies can pursue the best possible returns on their marketing investments.
Supported by well-informed insights into their segmented audiences, data-driven marketers develop tightly targeted strategies that ensure enhanced user experiences through more consistent messaging. Fast feedback and sophisticated analytics software also steer product development and presentation, with marketing strategies that build up pre-launch buzz among potential buyers.
So… What Should Companies Do As The Country and World Open Up Again?
Therefore, brands tuned into their customer bases are thinking outside the box, reassessing their approaches, analyzing their ROI, and evaluating their conversion rates.
Digital Marketing In 2020 And Beyond
Successful businesses are well aware that they need to know their consumers even better. Changes in lifestyles – WFH, protective bubbles, limited travel and entertainment options – are naturally affecting consumer habits. And as needs and preferences change, expert marketers know that quick reactions are needed to reach potential buyers as they cautiously venture out into an unfamiliar (but largely vaccinated) world.
Here are a few expert tips on drawing up sound digital marketing strategies shaped to this new normal, where innovative approaches to targeting and timing are vital:
- Rethink: a year and a half of lockdowns and sheltering in place have naturally reshaped individual priorities, and marketing strategies must reflect this.
Times Are Changing
Doing double duty as employees and teachers, and with no quiet commutes, parents may well have no time during activity-packed days to sit down and catch up on their social media. Consequently, their personal downtime might be delayed until after the kids are safely asleep. The upside is that consumers can plan their days more efficiently, building in convenient breaks for exercise, errands, and entertainment. And savvy marketers are using analytics and customer feedback to pinpoint these peak times.
This means that ‘traditional’ schedules for uploading social media posts may need to be re-evaluated, together with email blasts and ads. For marketers, data-driven analyses of consumer behavior are still the most efficient way of establishing prime placement periods.
More time at home, more content consumption
% of U.S./UK internet users who report doing the following things more frequently since the coronavirus outbreak
Question: In light of the coronavirus outbreak, are you doing any of the following activities more often than before while at home?
Source: Global Webindex; Transmyt Analysis
Base: 1,628 internet users aged 16-64 in the US. 1,509 internet users aged 16-64 in the UK.
Location, Location, Location
With snap lockdowns unpredictable and often specific to cities or areas, regional analytics are more important than ever. Different markets have always had their own spend levels and media mixes. However, snap lockdowns, uncertain deliveries, and unstable trade flows may well continue to raise unique challenges in a fragile post-pandemic economy.
This means that digital marketing approaches must become more granular, working with analytics tools that are sensitive enough to reflect nuances in buying habits at the local level. An added advantage here is that smaller regions can serve as experiments for broader marketing strategies.
Virtual B2B Sales Pitches
With almost all in-person activities shifting online, procurement and sales processes must migrate to the virtual arena as well, with unexpected benefits. In the B2B world, lengthy presentations are quickly being replaced by on-point Zoom meetings and well-illustrated documentation, with no need for expensive travel and accommodation.
For many buyers, it’s far more convenient to schedule a quick twenty minutes for an online presentation, instead of coping with the complexities of getting people from different locations together at an in-person meeting lasting several hours. Specialists from marketing, finance, logistics, and sales can log in as needed, joining sessions running on Teams, Slack, Chime (or several dozen other video-conferencing platforms).
<< Scroll Left & Right To Explore Popular Video Conferencing Platforms >>
The Countdown to Third Party Cookie Retirement
In parallel with all the changes ushered in by Covid 19, Google will phase out cookie tracking by early 2022…
As Chrome (the most popular browser) accounts for close to 70% of the total market share, marketers are well aware that planning should start immediately for dealing with this digital marketing ground shift.
At the same time, many consumers are opting out of third-party data collection schemes, eager to protect their online privacy under the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in Europe, as well as similar laws, like the CCPA in California, the LGPD in Brazil and the POPI in South Africa. Consequently, digital advertisers are already looking for new ways to track users across platforms and channels.
Some businesses are responding to this situation through zero-party data collection tactics, gathering information straight from consumers. This can be handled through simple online interaction between consumers and brands, as well as surveys, gamification, and other digital techniques. Without cookie tracking, CRM tools like these will become critical for keeping customers happy in the post-Covid world.
According to our research, trustworthiness (83%), integrity (79%), and honesty (77%) are the emotional factors that consumers feel most align with their favorite brands.
The good news is, by collaborating with end-users and consumers on approaches that serve their needs for a more personal, human experience combined with greater control, transparency, and respect for privacy, it is possible to cultivate a better online experience—and more effective advertising—for all.
Marketing Strategy Takeaways for 2022
In early 2020, most businesses and brands reworked their marketing strategies, adapting to the harsh realities of a global pandemic. But now, in late 2021, it’s time for new and more creative approaches to the unknown world that lies ahead.
No matter what else changes, it’s a sure bet that consumers will become more demanding, as they become better educated. Naturally, effective digital marketing strategies must keep pace, despite the fragility of the world’s economies. All these uncertainties make the post-pandemic world a terra incognita, where dragons indeed dwell – but conquering the fiercest dragons brings the greatest rewards!
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