Many business owners and their firms have gone back to the drawing board when it comes to marketing plans for the year 2021. People are realigning resources – including time and marketing skills – into their plan of action for email marketing channel they want to be on, and marketing budgets are likely to be smaller for almost everyone.
There are numerous new factors to consider, not only in terms of how businesses operate, but also in terms of how customers now make purchasing decisions. Customers have changed throughout time. They’re always online and want on-demand products and services, as well as real-time or near-real-time support for their problems.
Will there be a role for brick-and-mortar business marketing in the future year? We believe so, but the model will coexist with click and mortar for as long as most customers are unable to transact in malls and workplaces as they once did.
Here’s what Stridec believes B2Bs and B2Cs will need to accomplish in 2021 to be successful with their digital marketing strategies. We’ve condensed our ideas into eight action steps for you to consider.
Examine and reformulate your brand persona for 2021. (S)
Consumers had to adapt as economies went into lockdown. Millions of individuals first attempted online shopping as a necessity in the year 2020, and they grew accustomed to it. Do you understand how your customers have changed and how you’re meeting their new demands?
The first step, in our opinion, is to reevaluate your consumer personas in your digital marketing plans. What can you do as a brand that caters to both new and seasoned buyers to eliminate online friction? Online shopping has given you access to a whole new set of customers to promote to. It has also shifted and heightened the expectations of more seasoned internet shoppers.
Reconsider your SEO stance.
Many traditional and enterprise-level brands have been hesitant to incorporate SEO into their digital marketing arsenal. Although social media and pay-per-click advertising have traditionally been more popular than SEO services, we anticipate organic search will overtake paid search in 2021.
Your clients, as well as your competitors, are all glued to their computers or mobile phones. They’re either looking for you or seeking to gain a competitive advantage over your brand.
SEO services are still a fraction of the marketing expenditure you’d spend on traditional media and out-of-home advertising, for example. It’s also less expensive than PPC – not that you shouldn’t use PPC, but it’s less expensive and an ally to your PPC plan.
Grabbing Google ranks for your brand name and branded products is one thing; capturing buyers who are browsing online, looking for a product or service without knowing what it’s called or who offers it is another. This is where SEO can help.
In 2020, local SEO was extremely important for helping businesses maintain exposure with customers and providing them with a variety of information, some of it quite basic, such as whether or not they were open at all and what hours they were open. Local SEO used to be a tool for bolstering your brand’s online authority; now, it’s critical to the survival of many businesses.
Over the last nine months, many firms have been forced to develop immediate virtual buying markets for their customers. Gone are the days when SEO was just used to increase top-of-funnel brand awareness; now, Ecommerce SEO will be increasingly crucial in assisting buyers in moving down the sales funnel all the way to purchase.
This is the year when everyone will have to rethink how they will employ PPC advertising in the future. Google recently made significant adjustments that will have an impact on PPC advertising strategies in 2021. It will soon change the ad reports it creates for search phrases that lead to your site, only providing analytics information on search terms with a specific volume of traffic.
This implies that advertisers will no longer be able to see which low-volume keywords are bringing them attention. Google now reserves the right to not display you all of the search phrases that triggered your ad, affecting your keyword optimization and PPC content approach.
This could lead to ad spend leakage in the future, which could be significant in magnitude. Refer back to our projections for search engine marketing from earlier this year. If you’re going to undertake keyword research anyhow, why not combine your PPC approach with an organic search or SEO strategy?
Make Your Content Creation Plan More Diverse
Everyone concerned with their content marketing strategy is concentrating on their blog and their most essential social media assets, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Have you considered enhancing your multimedia content creation capabilities? Now that virtual, social-distance-friendly content has become the norm, it may be time to consider redesigning and repackaging content that reaches your viewers in new ways.
Does this imply that your business must be on TikTok? Certainly not. However, you may have begun to consider new online content items that will engage your clients, such as webinars or podcasts.
Moving forward, video material will become more important. Creating new material in this vein will allow you to expand your reach on Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify, as well as reach new, rapidly increasing communities on group messaging services like Telegram, WhatsApp, and Viber.
If Needed, Restructure Your Website
A beneficial review for you would be repackaging your information and refining its display on your website. The most recent addition to many business owners’ internet portfolios is some new sort of online selling capacity.
In the Philippines, certain retailers concentrating on B2C categories went straight to aggregators such as Lazada, Shopee, and Zalora, while those focused on food and grocery went to FoodPanda and MetroMart.
That hasn’t stopped other businesses from launching their own e-commerce sites, usually with the help of a web design firm, using scalable platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce. You should think about how internet selling fits into your business strategy, and how you can use your online presence to convert customers rather than just raise brand awareness.
In 2020, social media was used to put brands and customer experiences to the test. Many businesses faced tremendous demand for customer service via their social media channels, and not all of them were prepared.
This type of challenge is no longer novel; it’s a given nine months into the lockdown. When it comes to customer service and complaints, there’s no way to avoid it.
More than any other marketing channel, brands’ social media platforms must be prepared for the always-connected customer. Brands must establish new operating hours, reaction times, and turnaround times for client complaints.
Focusing on customer empathy and messaging coordinated by professional social media teams who can handle increasing circumstances with crisis communications abilities is the ideal strategy for social media communications.
Is it necessary to administer social media marketing services in-house? The answer is that it is debatable. It depends on whether you have enough resources to focus on community maintenance, customer issues and follow-ups, and promotional marketing activities all year.
Make Analytics a Part of Your Market Research Strategy
Sales revenues; cost of customer acquisition; online marketing ROI; marketing and sales qualified leads; landing page conversion rates; website traffic to lead generation; customer lifetime values; sales team response times; social media reach and engagement; and email marketing service performance are all metrics that every marketer worth their salt is looking at in some way.
Nonetheless, many businesses – whether B2B, B2C, large or little – still find this a difficult endeavor. When it comes to analytics, where is the value to be discovered, and how much effort should be spent examining the data acquired by one’s chosen analytics tools?
The only way to find a solution is to ask the questions that need to be answered – and to mobilize the company resources that can provide the answers you need. This information will become a valuable strategic tool in your plans, and your marketing and IT departments should prioritize it. Complete your brand strategy by deciding what will be done in-house and what will be outsourced.
Whatever level of digitization or digital transformation your firm is on, one thing is certain: it can no longer be avoided or overlooked. Your digital marketing priorities must be aligned with the needs of the new customers of 2021.
Today’s customer, as previously stated, is always connected and expects a product or service on demand. Decide what resources you believe are required to continue operating strategic marketing functions within the organization when it comes to your marketing plans.
After you’ve decided on a primary focus, consider enlisting the help of a digital marketing services agency to take care of the remainder. If you select the Digital marketing agency partner to collaborate with, you may not need fundamental competence in all elements of your marketing operations to execute an effective digital marketing strategy for 2021.