Just when you thought you knew what to expect from marketing trends, a global pandemic hit. But with the economy slowly recovering, it’s important to remain on the cusp of the latest trends in marketing so you can continue to grow your business. Continue reading and discover the latest in marketing industry developments.
Online Influencers
Ah, Facebook. While its users grew tired of constant advertising, you can still win hearts and ad conversions thereby making your ad look like a boosted post. Heck, make it a boosted post by engaging the help of online influencers.
Online influencers remain a need and grow in popularity. When they boost their post about your product, you benefit from the advertising.
Brand Ambassadors
Go one beyond online influencers to find brand representatives. These ambassadors represent you online and in person. You will need that soon since the US has begun reopening, and as people get vaccinated, they will resume normal social activities.
Brand ambassadors let you combine word-of-mouth marketing with experiential marketing. Showing potential customers your products sells better than showing them a just photo. You can hold events at state fairs, taste tests, festivals, etc.
The Year of the Outdoor Ad
That leads us to another emerging trend. Outdoor advertising makes a comeback this year. People grew so tired of being cooped up inside that they readily went to flood parks, theme parks, beaches, mountain passes, ski lifts, etc. They’ll soak up every moment and nuance of being outside, so put your ads there. If you never thought you would see the day when billboards made a comeback, you probably never conceived of a global pandemic. None of us expected it, but we will take advantage of it.
Direct Mail Resurfaces
While people spend more time at home, you need to find a way to reach them there. You can do this by using direct mail. Yes, we mean through the postal service, good old-fashioned direct mail sent on paper.
Design Increases in Importance
While consumers look at digital ads less often now, the design of your website has increased in importance. You need a faster load time than the other guy. You need an easier-to-use graphical user interface (GUI). You need to offer a more pleasing aesthetic. Now makes the perfect time for a re-design.
Content Goes Beyond King
The content becomes Emperor of the Universe. You need to say what you need to say and then stop. People have little time on their hands now. Although for the first few months of the pandemic many people floundered without work, they’ve now founded online businesses or side gigs or begun consulting remotely. They remain busy making a go of a new venture that lets them continue to make their bills and put money in the bank. You need to compete with content from new and different sources.
Your content must provide added value. You need to say more than the competitor in fewer words using more keywords and long-tail keywords. In 2020, the trend was to write longer content, but quantity doesn’t matter as much as quality. If you hire content writers that use a journalistic style, the brevity of their words will provide all the needed information in a succinct format. The content your website and blog uses needs to contain all the needed information. Your content should cover aspects that your competitors do and then add to that something new. You provide that extra piece of information that no one else does.
Personalization Grows
In the finance industry, there’s a concept known as Know Your Customer (KYC). It directly refers to confirming the identity of your customer, and the federal government requires it of all banks, credit unions, cryptocurrency, and investment entities. You apply KYC to your customers, not to confirm their identity, but in the sense of really getting to know who they are and what they like. You need to go beyond creating a persona from their amalgamated data to hyper-segmenting your target audience. In order to hyper-segment, you have to get to know your customer.
Track your website visitors’ behaviors and interactions, so you can serve them niche content and ads. You should also segment your target audience by purchase history, user behavior, and customer interactions.
The War of the Live Streams
Everyone started live-streaming in 2020 as part of their methods of keeping in touch during the pandemic. Businesses found live streams a viable way to show products that just came into shops they could not open. Live streams let them show product details and showcase inventory, while links in the video let customers purchase it. Delivery occurred on the same day via third-party services such as Shipt or Postmates or via shipping services. By paying online by credit card, no person needed access to the delivery person, ensuring contactless delivery. Expect live-streaming to ramp up in 2021.
Selling from Social Media
We still run e-commerce shops, but many businesses started selling from their Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. Look for more social media platforms to start enabling sales from within the platform. The latest push seems to be selling from TikTok, although it remains to be seen how successful that platform will become for marketers.
Bake More Pies Helps You Sell
Don’t let these latest trends in marketing elude you. You can leverage them to increase your sales and grow your customer base. Let us help you use the 2021 marketing trends to increase your sales and raise your market share. Contact us, Tampa advertising digital agency today!
We are Bake More Pies, Tampa’s leading full-service digital marketing agency. It is Rocket Science to us and we love it! Marketing fundamentals have stayed the same but all the tactics are shifting. We launch your marketing campaigns using the latest creative, tracking, and transparency to deliver ROIs you can count on and grow with.
