How Developing Marketing Strategies Has Changed In 2021
2020 witnessed a massive digital migration as everything shifted to the virtual space, easily fast-forwarding the anticipated digital transformation by years.
As of last year, the number of smartphone users worldwide reached up to 3.5 billion people – signifying a shift to the digital and clearly indicating the importance of digital marketing in order to reach them.
Businesses hoping to survive and succeed in 2021 should definitely incorporate smart digital marketing strategies in their marketing efforts. But digital marketing is not just one single tactic or tool, rather it is a whole system working to get the right messages across to the right audience.
Amidst these changes, developing marketing strategies in 2021 would look a lot like:
Being prepared
Do your research and do it well. With the fierce competition and challenges you’re already facing, you can’t afford to make random guesswork based on mere gut instincts. Having a clear vision of your company and the market you’re operating in can help you build a strong foundation for your objectives and consequent marketing strategies.
Unlike in the past, doing in-depth research takes place less in libraries and more in the digital space. For instance, marketers and brands can listen in on their audience on social media platforms. This way, they can get insights into current trends, what and who their customers like (social media influencers are the new opinion leaders). Furthermore, they can also get broader industry insights by diving into reports that are available on digital databases.
But most importantly, 2021 will see even greater adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in market research, such as the AI-supported tools such as Robotic Marketer for clients’ internal and external research. Such AI-assisted market research depends a lot on big data and analytics, of which the scale of knowledge, accuracy and predictive capability is totally unprecedented.
Regardless of the tools you use, be it complex big data research, or daily social listening, the ultimate goal is to have a clear idea of what you are working with, and what you are working towards.
Being social
Social media is going to be the hub of all of your marketing activities. From discovery, engaging to advocating, customers have most of their brand interactions on social media platforms. However, all these activities also make social media a very saturated space.
That is why content marketing is important for grabbing attention and forming connections, especially if the content you offer is very relevant to your audience.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to do everything.
Here’s an example to consider, virtual events are rapidly spreading because of their accessibility and affordability, making it the answer to experiential marketing in the time of the pandemic. However, businesses shouldn’t do event marketing for the sake of doing events, unless they are sure about the value they bring to their audience. Instead of increasing engagement, these virtual events might add to the “Zoom Fatigue” that is already plaguing those working from home.
There are many other ways to build good customer engagement, from having prompt social media replies and live interactions, to having conversational Q&A sessions in your content.
What matters is to be genuine, coherent and consistent in your social media efforts.
Being automated
As companies become increasingly careful with their budgets, marketing departments are demanded to work more and more efficiently.
To increase efficiency in your marketing strategy, you would need to set up marketing processes that are systemized and automated. Fortunately, this doesn’t necessarily mean forgoing creativity and authenticity, as you still have a say over countless features, workflows and customer experiences for your audience. Automation just takes care of the mundane, repetitive stuff so you can direct your creativity and efforts into managing more important, high-level decisions.
By mapping out detailed audience segments, customer journey, marketing strategy and pathways, you can have a whole marketing process that is thoroughly automated without sacrificing the quality of manual interactions. Quite the opposite, you can actually minimize human errors, and save time and costs in your marketing strategies.
This automation can extend to all of your customer touchpoints, from email marketing, digital campaigns, to converting leads into sales. Moreover, it also makes it easy for businesses to constantly measure, evaluate and improve their performance.
