Those who leveraged their data, putting it into action with the support of machine learning and smart bidding strategies, were able to generate even deeper relationships with their audience which are set to last beyond a COVID stricken world. And this has definitely held true this year. In digital marketing, everything is connected which means you can gather data at each touchpoint with your customers.
Using this valuable insight, effective strategies can be formed to gain and retain your target audience. If you want to learn more about how data can cut costs and improve your digital marketing , we wrote a whole blog on the topic. At the start of , we presumed it would be like any other year. But as the pandemic took over at a global scale, all aspects of business were affected.
Campaigns were put on hold or dramatically altered, budgets were reviewed, and social media usage saw a staggering rise. One of the best ways to do this is via social media platforms. This year, social media users have grown by more than 10 percent taking the global total to nearly 4 billion users — that means there are now more people using social media around the world than those who are not.
In line with the abrupt changes to our lifestyles, we saw an increase in mobile phone and social media usage as users searched for engaging content to keep them busy and entertained. In fact, people spent more time than ever before scrolling through their feeds with usage hitting an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes a day. Creating a safe haven, consumers used social channels as a way of maintaining a sense of community while staying updated on global news. Instead of hiding in a corner, businesses were expected to re-think the content they were creating, ensuring it was valuable, conscious and in tune with what the audience wanted.
Maintaining this communication between your brand and your audience during such an unsettling time became hugely important. Those who recognised more people were logging on to stay connected delivered content that provided real value to their lives and in turn saw their audience turn to them for their shopping needs.
Last year, we anticipated that visual content would emerge as a leading trend in A powerful element of your content strategy, visual content only became more effective as bricks-and-mortar stores temporarily closed their doors. Unable to enjoy a physical shopping experience, users moved online for inspiration. While browsing social media, users may not be ready to convert right there and then, but they are in an inspiration mindset ready to be entertained and engaged.
Visual platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest are perfect for leveraging this interest, offering relevant content and inspiring images to engage users while they discover new brands and products. As social interaction has risen, so too has influencer marketing with businesses using this tactic to create memorable bonds with their audience.
However, product and service endorsements are always more powerful when the promoter is a genuine fan of the brand. As a result, nano-influencers in particular have grown in popularity as customers seek authenticity from the brands they shop with.
These influencers are everyday people with an average follower count of 1, — 10, who work to create relatable and curated content that is more trustworthy to their audience.
In tune with their followers, nano-influencers are able to engage 8. Social media can positively impact your brand in many ways such as increasing brand awareness, building a loyal following and creating an online community. But one element of social media that we predicted to experience large growth this year was social commerce.
With 60 percent of people saying they discover new products on social channels such as Instagram, brands have the opportunity to share their products with a large network of engaged browsers. Streamlining the customer journey, social commerce has increased the ease of purchase for users allowing them to go from inspiration to conversion fast and with minimal touchpoints.
All of which raises questions about the future of advertising in and beyond. Parallel to the debate about traditional v digital media has been the debate about balancing long-term brand building with short-term sales activation led by Les Binet and Peter Field with the outstanding The Long And The Short of It.
But how will this evolve in a post-digital world? The rise of new digital channels created a raft of specialist skills required to deliver campaigns via different platforms, and people with these skills started specialist agencies.
However, as technology increasingly automates these skills for example, Facebook have significantly reduced the targeting and optimization options in their ad platform, with more decisions being made by algorithms , the skills required of marketers to implement campaigns will shift to those activities that are harder to automate.
Skills such as setting strategic objectives, creativity and integrated channel planning will be far more sought after in the years to come. Planning, executing and measuring campaigns in a holistic way across multiple channels is still a utopia that few brands have achieved due to the walled gardens of data that exist at the big ad platforms.
So solving the challenge of robust multi-touchpoint attribution will be top of mind for many marketers in the years to come. Another by-product of increased automation will be a renewal of the importance of creative.
Research from Data2Decisions suggests that creative execution is ten times more important than targeting in driving advertising profitability, with significant growth in digital video ad formats. But with customer attention increasingly hard to attract , the focus on creating impactful, memorable advertising will become increasingly important to brands.
As seen in many other walks of life, and increasingly pertinent as we emerge from our Covid-induced hibernation, social responsibility will form a key part of many marketing conversations in the future. The WFA World Federation of Marketers recently held their virtual Global Marketing Week event, the themes of which were sustainability, diversity and marketing as part of the solution, highlighting how important these topics are to marketers; clearly the future of performance marketing cannot purely be about maximizing in ROI.
In recent years, the campaign Stop Funding Hate has led to brands like Co-op and Center Parks withdrawing their ad budgets from publications such as The Spectator and The Daily Mail following articles deemed transphobic or homophobic. Finally, we can be fairly certain that whatever shape performance marketing takes in the years to come, the train is unlikely to slow down any time soon.
In , despite store closures and minimal sales growth, retailers increased their digital advertising spend by 8. To hear more from Summit about the future of performance marketing, join their next Summit webinar, Brand vs Performance Marketing: Frenemies for Life , at 11am on June Darren Wright is product strategy director at Summit Media.
We help brands transform their online business, grow their customer base and make more money from retailing online. Marketing can change the world. Register The Drum Plus. Digital Transformation What will marketing look like 10 years from now? Nick Farnhill: There needs to be a balance with human creativity. What makes great creativity looking forward is a mix of convergent thinking, and divergent. Divergent thinking would be more around imagining, creating, challenging, dreaming.
And convergent thinking is going to be much more rational decision-making, testing, judging,. The thing that probably I think about the most in terms of challenges is just, how do.
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