It’s almost end of the dreadful 2020, and if you are reading this article after some 5-10 days after we published it, it’s already 2021 for you. Wish you a happy, or should I say “hopefully-happy” New Year? We can undoubtedly establish it in common that this was a ‘dinosaur-extinction’ kind of revolutionary year for us, only we managed to somehow live through it. Also, the sudden locking down of the whole world turned the very face of marketing towards the ‘digital’ boon. All of a sudden, we marketers began to thank the “Technological Evolution” that brought the internet into our lives. Knowing that we have no option but to plan our marketing in a way that neither the market stops nor do we have to step out in the open, made our minds to open up to some whole new dimensions. It was amazing to see how people came to work on zoom calls wearing pyjamas.

People learnt to be with each other even when they were separated by distances, and markets learnt to keep moving when the rest of the world came to an abrupt halt. We saw some amazing marketing campaigns that tried to connect with the people in isolation and make “staying at home” a trend in itself. Say, for example, Nike, a brand that stands for its tagline, “Just Do It” which highly promotes movement, managed to come up with a campaign named “Play for The World”, where they kept the soul of their tagline and still motivated people to keep being sporty, only being at home. Many other marketing trends also evolved during the adversities.

Well, we don’t know that 2021 would be any different, or if doors would open with the clock hitting 12 on the 31st, but we do know that there are some marketing practices that are going to go beyond just 2020. Let’s see what these practices are.

• Top-Notch Customer Experience

2020 or 2050, the customer is always going to be the king. This year, we saw a massive shift in how marketing really functions. It isn’t any longer about trying to convince the customer to pick your product. It isn’t about having faith that a face-to-face meeting is the only way of knowing that you are hitting authenticity, and it’s not easy like going to a shop, touching the material and buying it. It’s rather about providing a fantastic “customer experience” by which your customer would keep coming back to you over and over again. Brands live on reliability. If your digital marketing technique is providing a great experience and making the customer trust your product, that’s where you know your strategy is working.

Make your marketing so seamless that your customers don’t have to step out their houses every time to reach you, keep answering to their questions, make a customer-experience-driven strategy that helps them access your services seamlessly, and last but not the least, always make it “about them”.

• Focus On Visual Content

It’s not a brand-new thing to know that people tend to enjoy visual content more than written ones. Ask them to read a book and they might not even go half-way, but when you make them watch a movie with the same theme, they’ll do it. Facts show that 85% of customers would buy your product after watching a video about it. Also, our brain processes images 60,000 times faster than texts. Facts being laid, you do the math!

With shifting more than half of your marketing to digital, you might also need to ensure that your posts and other content have enough images and videos. Visual content is the future of marketing!

• Personalization

Check out some trending campaigns that were a hit in 2020. Most (rather, all) of them shifted their perspective to providing the customer with a personalised and customized experience. Take the “Zoom’s Virtual Background” campaign and you’ll see how they have made the best of the pandemic by trying to resolve the issue of isolation and boredom by providing some interesting tasks.

Even if not that, consider the tasks that our PM, Modiji came up with every week and the whole nation unanimously supported and participated in. If this were a marketing campaign, it would have been a total hit, because it was personalised.

Sure, you have to follow the trend, but you also have to ‘be the trend’ to be at the top. Personalised marketing experience would bring you that.

• Position “Zero”

SEO is and going to be a huge part of digital marketing in the future as well. It’s been a while now that you might be noticing a new feature added to Google’s search results. Now, if you trying to search for something, you wouldn’t have to click a link and read the whole thing. The information that you searched for would be right at the top of your search result. These are known as Featured Snippets or Position Zero.

If you’re planning to stay in the market in the future as well, you’d have to consider hitting the position zero with your website. Marketers are trying newer strategies to get to the position. If you come with the right strategy, your content would be there for sure.  

• Voice Search

With humans getting lazy and technologies turning pro-active, the time is not very far when voice search would rule the world. Consider Patròn’s strategy where Smart speaker users can command their digital assistant to “ask Patron for a cocktail recipe”. It helped them to enhance their brand awareness as well as visibility. Even if you aren’t ready for a smart speaker advertising, you must ensure that your content is voice-search optimised.

Voice search shows no signs of slowing down; make sure you are moving right with it!These and some more are going to rule the market in 2021 for sure. Get in touch with us at https://smithksolutions.com/contact-us/ to know more.