5 Essentials for a Digital Marketing World After Covid-19
Is Digitial Marketing Strategic or Necessary?
Today, in a world post-lockdowns and a pandemic still present, most of our content consumption tends to happen digitally. To keep up along with technology, marketing has gone digital as well. This shift generally requires your brand to have a digital presence. Therefore, a solid digital marketing strategy is necessary to establish a successful digital presence for your brand.
So, what are the five things I, as a marketer, will want my potential client to know before creating a digital marketing strategy? That is easy, keep it classy and approachable with Email Marketing, have a rememberable User Experience (UX), have a presence in Social Media, SEO (researched thoroughly), and always have good and authentic content. Nevertheless, I have learned that they are nonexistent without data and research.
Email Marketing (It’s not obsolete)
Digital marketing technologies can promote a company’s products and services, but they must be integrated with other media to be truly successful. In addition, many detailed tactics need to be considered for effective marketing, such as dynamic content for email automation.
Email marketing is an effective tool for acquiring, engaging, and retaining customers. And having a clean email list is essential. The most popular types of email marketing campaigns are:
- Email Newsletters: add value to your customers and keep them up to date with the brand’s direction—for example, new products and services.
- Acquisition Emails: helps acquire customer information and convert a client to an active customer.
- Retention Emails: helps get customers’ feedback.
- Promotional Emails: offers to keep customers engaged.
UX — User Experience.. make them remember you.
Modern customers expect a smooth, seamless, and engaging online experience, and in 2021, this experience has been based on speed and personalization. Unfortunately, this pandemic leaves many questions and unknowns for UXers. Two trends are emerging in user experience: socially conscious buying and remote work.
Remote work has become the new standard for many companies in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and may prompt a change in the geography of work. In addition, remote work is changing the way UXers work, affecting what products they design. As the demand for digital products increases, the need for those who develop them also increases.
A pandemic and resulting events have changed overall consumer habits and shifted toward more socially responsible spending and brand stands. In the world of UX design, inclusive design means considering customer values when designing products. So, we need to ask ourselves who are our potential customers and how will we help them as customers?
Social Media
First, assess your current digital marketing presence. Then, to maximize the returns on social media, marketers should consider the changes in the marketing landscape and plan accordingly. Marketers must test new brand messaging, advertisements, and offerings and use social media to receive feedback.
Social media marketing needs to integrate seamlessly with the firm’s broader marketing strategy. Covid-19 has shown that the social media landscape can change quickly. Therefore, CMOs should ensure that their social media strategy is agile to capitalize on these sudden changes.
Brands should harness the power of influencers and creators, invest in influencer training, and establish mutually beneficial relationships to build trust and relationships with followers that may end up being paying customers. Consider the right platforms for your brand. Privacy and hate speech policies affect consumers’ confidence in your brand.
To reduce animosity between social media and e-commerce platforms, social media managers must collaborate with the development team when developing new digital tools. For example, always have matching messages across digital campaigns and channels. In addition, as the Covid-19 pandemic pushes people online, marketers must invest in social media management to adapt to the new landscape.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
COVID-19 has forced businesses to make massive changes to their online presence, and as a result, consumers are now shopping with new brands and discovering new brands online. In addition, Digital channels give brands more control over the customer experience and will continue to be a priority as the COVID-19 pandemic closes many in-person shopping opportunities. SEO and Content Marketing are the critical aspects of digital marketing, and each is looked at in turn to get results.
SEO is a strategy that helps to improve a website’s position in search engine results pages and provides targeted traffic in higher volumes. Marketers must research their competitors and their market to be successful with SEO. To steer web traffic to one site or another, search engines use specific algorithms and KPIs. Such tools allow for hyper-specific targeted keywords and creativity in keywords to suit your particular niche.
When developing content, the importance of SEO cannot be overstated; it must be appropriately optimized.
Good Content (Authentic)
Many marketing trends will affect small businesses in 2021, but they can learn a lot from the trends more prominent firms are using. For example, it has been known that there is an increase in authentic content marketing, more widespread use of voice search, more widespread use of social media marketing, and a greater focus on data analytics.
For example, this past month, it has been all about Taylor Swift re-recording albums. Many brands were approaching “swifties” by promoting themselves as Taylor’s version, ex TikTok, Kansas City Chiefs, Sour Patch Kids, etc. But how do you become different and authentic, how do you resonate overall from others. Starbucks approached it by teaming up directly with her and creating a unique drink using the “Taylor’s Version” on their name, along with using puns of their songs, and of course, Swift herself promoting the drink.
I have learned from Joanne Tombrakos that adding a blog to their website is a great way to establish brand loyalty and create brand awareness for small businesses and personal brands. Provide your followers with content they’re interested in and boost interest and engagement. So how will we create high-quality content, who will do it, and what will it be?
A Little Extra Data
So, I always want a client to know all of these five elemental things. Along with how essential to learn from the past and the story told by numbers. What has worked in the past and whatnot? What can we learn from it? Brands use data analytics to understand their consumers better, but they still have a way to go.
Data analytics can provide valuable information about your customers, and you can use that information to develop a more powerful marketing strategy. Small businesses need to ask the four questions of their audience, their business gaps, their technology needs, and their resources before implementing new technology.
But most important of them all, before implementing any major marketing trends, first take a good hard look at the business and which trends genuinely benefit you and your customers.
