Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses and organisations had to re-evaluate their marketing methods and strategies. And as we draw a close to 2020, people worldwide are looking back on how this year affected them. Many marketers had to adapt their usual marketing methods and strategies to fit the unusual circumstances. Moving forward into 2021, there are many new trends on the rise that people will be focusing on when creating their marketing strategy for the year.
Social Media Will No Longer Be Just for Discovery:
Social media marketing channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Snapchat are featured during all stages of the buyer’s journey. But they usually impact the interest and awareness stage the most. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram now include a shopping feature. This allows consumers to go from the interest and awareness stage, all the way through to conversion and retention without ever leaving the app. As social commerce grows in 2021 and social media becomes a top channel for purchasing, optimising and adapting to these new features can open your business up to a world of great benefits.
Forced into Our Lives but Here to Stay:
Due to COVID-19, events worldwide were brought to a halt, leaving businesses and organisations forced to find new ways of holding events safely. This led to virtual events becoming a thing of 2020. Many found that virtual events were more accessible and introduced them to a whole new audience, which they may never have reached with physical events. With virtual events allowing for higher attendance and more participation, ROI for many has increased because of the lower costs for more people. As we look back on the year, although events became virtual out of necessity, many will continue this way even when no longer required, and physical events can resume. Travel restrictions, visa issues and costs for events have become a thing of the past. So, in 2021 as we see virtual events become more popular, businesses should get creative with their event content and drive engagement by including live interactions.
Increased Action on Social Issues and Advocacy:
Over the past year, many consumers have expressed their desire to see more brands and businesses take a stand on social issues. Although this is an interest for all generations, the most significant push for action on social issues has come from Gen Z (people born after 1996). As more Gen Z enter the workforce, their voices will be louder than ever, encouraging and inspiring their employers to show meaningful action on social issues. Throughout 2020, many brands spoke about world issues like climate change, racial inequality and human rights. Yet, they were not practising what they preached. Now more than ever, we are seeing world issues being brought to life on social media. Moving through 2021, we will be seeing more brands participating and connecting with their community, creating a more customer and human-centred marketing strategy. As a business, being able to authentically speak to your audience about world issues will be the thing that sets you apart from your competitors.
It’s Going to Be All About Your Customers:
In 2021, B2C based brands are going to be making sure their customers are the main focus of their marketing efforts. During the past year, for many, consumer behaviour has changed. In the new year, we should be getting to know our customers again, as if they were new, by interacting to find out what matters to them and how to provide solutions to their issues. While focusing on our customers, we also need to consider the customers content experience. By providing interactive content and designing visual content suitable for computers, tablets and mobiles, you can create a satisfactory content experience. This, in turn, will help retain customers and drive ROI. As businesses have now lost that face-to-face element they had before COVID-19, personalisation will become an increasingly important replacement. By personalising content, you can differentiate your content at different purchase funnel stages and optimise user’s relevancy. Marketers use it to attract and retain customers as the content is more targeted and relevant. It also has a higher conversion rate, increases brand affinity and drives efficiency. Alongside content personalisation, now more than ever, people want and need to feel genuinely connected to your brand. If you can build that genuine connection with your customers, it will help build trust and drive actions leading to better results.
Do You Really Know Your Audience?
Now you’ve worked out that 2021 is the year for you to start personalising your content and putting your audience and customers first. It’s also time to start learning more about your customers by researching your target audience and developing personas if you’re not already. People only want to see content that is completely relevant to them and they expect brands to already know what they are feeling and thinking. By researching and selecting the right target audience for your brand, you can show your ads to the most relevant people based on location, demographic, interests and behaviour. Developing customer personas will enable you to understand what your customers or potential customers think, how they feel, and their behaviour. This will then allow you to create your content, messaging and tone specifically to the needs, behaviour and concerns of your customers or potential customers.
Loyal Communities Matter:
It’s no longer enough to just have a large following. Nowadays, you must have an engaged community. Building a loyal community can be relatively straightforward. They are great because they promote engagement, increase brand visibility, attract more people and foster brand affinity and trust for your brand. A great place to begin is interacting and engaging with your customers, whether this is responding to them on social media about positive or negative experiences they have had with your brand. Some other ways are to welcome your customers, cross-promote (i.e., join interest groups), invest in paid methods and work with influencers. A loyal community will make it easier to gain valuable insights and feedback, network, drive repeat sales and manage customer, product or service issues before growing out of control. But, once you have built that community, it doesn’t stop there because now you have to manage and maintain it. To do that, you should be responsive and engage with followers, share content strategically use CTAs, have recurring topics and use a personal identifier.
Email Marketing Is Not Dying:
During 2021, we will gradually see a trend where brands are focusing more of their attention and budget on email marketing. This is due to losing third-party cookies over the next few years and COVID-19, resulting in the recession. More marketers are slowly losing the ability to use third-party tracking to identify customers. Email marketing has traditionally been overlooked, especially as channels like Instagram and Facebook have been dominating social media in recent years. In the new year, you should focus your attention on email if not already. Email targets specific buyers, it’s easier to personalise, generates high ROI, it’s cost-effective and provides fast, effective and measurable results. In the past, brands have often steered away from email marketing as some think it’s dying. But it’s really not. People love receiving emails and they prefer to communicate with brands through emails.
Content is Still King:
Consistency always has and will be vital when it comes to content. But your audience will get bored if you continuously put out the same content. People want to see content that is exciting, new and interesting. With many brands and businesses having to reduce their budgets, some marketers are struggling to continually create content that is high-quality due to lack of time, money or people. Due to this struggle, many marketers are looking at other easy ways to put out content that is timesaving, cost-effective and requires lower resource levels. Content repurposing is great for this as you are strategically taking successful content from one medium to another, without losing your audience’s interest. Using blog posts to create infographics, whitepapers, or podcast are great ways to repurpose content. But that’s not all because content curation is also a great way to post useful, credible and relevant content through utilising third-party content.
At arc, we are very excited for the New Year and to see how marketing evolves throughout the year. We will most definitely be looking at these trends and using them for our own marketing, especially for our content. So a we move into the next year, we wish all the success this exciting year has in store for you.
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