5 Pandemic Digital Marketing Trends You Need to Get on Now
2020 was not kind to anyone — the pandemic and subsequent social distancing measures disrupted society on all levels, even forcing the commercial sector to rethink the way they operate and conduct their digital marketing efforts.
As a small business owner trying to cope, you’ve probably had to rely more than ever on your online presence to bring in customers. You’re not the only one doing that, though. A majority of companies and marketers are in the midst of a massive digital transformation.
To help you assess your strategy for the new year, we’ve compiled a list of digital marketing trends for 2021 and show you how you can make it work to your advantage.
Paused Digital Marketing Campaign Launches to Resume
Numerous businesses elected to hold back the launch of new digital campaigns, pause existing ones or defer their plans to outsource digital marketing services in respect to the gravity of the situation.
The pressure is on to keep operations running, however, and they are expected to resume or even ramp up their activities this summer. Make sure that you adjust your own campaigns to reflect the influx of competition online.
Businesses are re-thinking how they execute their marketing campaigns.
Major Changes to Existing Online Marketing Campaign
Almost half of marketers (42%) state that their teams didn’t have the bandwidth to radically alter their digital marketing plans at a drop of a hat. Instead, they’ve been re-prioritising and learning about creating valuable content during the lockdown.
The result is that existing content marketing strategies have gone through moderate changes to major overhauls to better suit the more digitally focused context of their audiences.
Start the new year at an advantage by revisiting your campaign strategies and making appropriate adjustments, paying particular attention to your social media platforms — a majority of your market has been spending more time there as of late.
Search for Better Real-Time Collaboration Tools
Convenient in-office communication took a blow when lockdown measures took effect. Around a fourth of employees working from home experienced difficulties communicating and collaborating effectively on top of having to shift their business’ priorities.
To avoid the same pitfalls for your workers this year, make sure to invest in collaborative tools like Basecamp, an online task manager and communication channel rolled into one.
Employees are gaining new digital competencies during their downtime.
Upskilling Digital Marketing Competencies
Thinking of putting yourself and your team into extra training sessions and seminars to broaden or upgrade your skill sets? You better! This matter is of special interest to your digital marketing team or service provider.
A survey revealed that 76% of businesses used the downtime caused by the lockdowns to upskill in the areas of SEO, social media, and data analytics. If you want to stay competitive, you need to make sure that your team’s abilities are not only current, but valuable in light of the current situation.
Implementation of More Digital Transformation Strategies
It’s already apparent that a majority of SMBs’ target audience has migrated much of their old activities online. In response to this, a significant number of companies have plans to digitally transform their operations beyond just marketing online.
Although this sort of progression is expected for the industry, the pandemic has set it to overdrive. In order to stay a step ahead, your business needs better tech solutions, like those that allow better aggregation and analysis of customer data.
Whether your business has already made provisions to get a leg up on the recovery or is just about to it, you can count on an emerging method to help you make a clean transition from the outdated model to a more efficient one capable of withstanding the pressures of a global crisis: Digital Process Outsourcing by Axadra.
Discover the optimal way to do online marketing with digital process outsourcing.
Trust Your Digital Transformation to Us
Axadra, a digital marketing agency, can help your transition to a digital presence that provides your consumers with an online experience that is aware of their expectations and uses the best available tools and technologies to address them at every step of their journey.
Get in touch with us to learn more about our Digital Process Outsourcing service.
Start the Year Right: Top 5 Digital Marketing Strategy Resolutions
After the unprecedented events of the past year, even if not everything has been solved neatly, the coming of the New Year still feels like a chance to officially start turning things around and face the future. So, while the start of the year has traditionally been reserved for self-reflection and personal goal setting, perhaps this is also the year we break a little from the usual and familiar.
If you are a business owner, you should look beyond the self and set an online marketing strategy resolution to revamp your digital marketing services. You’ll be able to tailor a smarter and nimbler strategy based on the lessons learned last year, thereby helping increase performance rates and revenue in the face of the new normal, as well as revitalising your brand’s digital presence.
To help identify which digital marketing practices could make your year, we’ve listed down five resolutions that are sure to give you an opportunity to get ahead of your online endeavours.
Curate a More Meaningful Online Presence
You can future-proof you and your company better this year by overhauling your business’ digital marketing strategy to make it more meaningful. Make time to review your website and social media pages and curate content accordingly.
You want to go for a look that is both true to your brand without being flippant of the circumstances you and your clients are in the middle of. Empathy and compassion, with a drive to overcome obstacles of the present, is key for the new year.
Better Digital Marketing
Step Up Your Digital Marketing Gameplan
For too long, marketers have been overly focused on keyword-based digital marketing campaigns. This year, your business’ online gameplan should take advantage of burgeoning online advertising tools, platforms and other opportunities, such as providing content that your audience will value and engage with and ensuring excellent user experiences.
Remember: your marketing plan isn’t a two-dimensional map. Rather, it’s a complex web of interconnecting parts that move at their own pace but still significantly affect one another. Your 2021 digital strategy should thus also involve:
Investing in Video Marketing. Videos have undoubtedly come out on top when it comes to keeping an audience’s attention, as well as garnering likes, shares, and other types of engagement. While it does take a little more effort and resources to create and distribute this type of content, the payoff for quality work is worth it.
Optimising for voice search. Voice search volume has steadily been growing a loyal user base in the background. Mobile users alone are three times more likely to use voice search, which is not to say that their smart speaker counterparts aren’t utilising the technology to shop and to input a search query widely as well.
Voice search is a heavily underutilised tool that you can use to rank your site because competition is so scarce. Grab the opportunity to pull ahead this year.
Utilising video content. With so much information bombarding your consumers, it’s natural that they’d gravitate towards a medium that could give them what they need to know quickly, briefly and efficiently — and, with brains able to process videos 60,000 times faster than text, resolving to use this type of medium more in the new year seems like a no-brainer.
Enhancing your business’ social media presence. Social media platforms are one of the most dynamic forces on the internet, currently. This year, don’t hesitate to enhance your online presence by utilising interactive posts and stories — polls, promotions and the like — to encourage engagement with your business content. Also, don’t forget to keep your social media efforts consistent!
Building an Online Community through Digital Marketing
Use Digital Marketing to Build a Community
While a large audience is a dream for online marketers and businesses, it’s not a very realistic one if you really want consumers who are present and truly interested in your brand or products and services. Make it a New Year’s resolution to focus on building smaller but tighter-knit communities.
You’ll need to take advantage of all the resources at your disposal, including checking product reviews and engagement on your social media posts, to realise this resolution. So, be sure to actively listen to your existing customer base.
Show that you value their opinion and that you’re ready to take their suggestions into account. This won’t only be a positive mark on their books, but will also make a good impression on first-time visitors.
Learn a New Digital Marketing Skill
As we discussed in a previous article, the digital transformation was accelerated further by the global circumstances last year. Not only is an above-average understanding of emerging trends online a nice “extra” to have. Rather, it’s become somewhat expected in order to keep up.
Right now is the best time to learn a new digital marketing skill. It could be about learning the bones of a social media campaign or getting better at using your online tools for paid ads like Google Ads or Facebook Ads. Not only will it look better on your resume; the new skill will help with creating an integrated digital process for your business so your marketing channels move more synergistically.
Opportunities from Digital Process Outsourcing
Get Out of Your Comfort Zone: Look into Digital Process Outsourcing
Your New Year’s digital marketing resolutions serve as your business’ road map to the online landscape in the middle of a transformation. When things seem difficult along the way, just refer to this and remember what you and your company strives for — you can even use this as a basis to tailor your own list!
Whichever method you choose to use to set yourself up for the year, Axadra can help. We are a digital process outsourcing company that can provide the online marketing solutions you need to thrive even when things are in flux.
Contact us today to learn more about our services.
