Wow – 2020 sure is one for the books! There has been no rest the entire year, with constant pivoting and adjustments to work within regulations and safety. Your company’s mindset has been in high gear all year and where do you even begin to start off the New Year implementing fresh ideas; but what does 2021 have in store for marketers? Are there specific tactics and practices that might be best to use to drive traffic and increase audience engagement?

New Year, New Strategy?

There is no telling how the rest of 2020 will end, or how 2021 will begin in our new reality. We do know, that after the holiday season is over – consumers retreat. Necessities to a family are in the front of minds and the pocket books are closed tightly, if they have not been held tight leading in to the holiday season.

Seasonal campaigns bring in high traffic and working on the next seasonal campaign is essential, but with the dead of winter and a possible new wave of virus cases, many are overcome with cabin fever, overwhelmed from quarantine or remote work (learning) and need an outlet – that’s where your brand can enter. How do you feed the beast from the consumer exhaustion and discouragement?

Social movements and issues can be a great time to innovate and present information about your company, which can be scheduled within your campaign calendar for the year. Do you take advantage of National Puppy Day or National Chocolate Day? What reflects best on the offerings of your company to make the most of during the year?

Being able to mix in your company’s main brand strategies and mission with different opportunities are worth putting in to a calendar to understand the true lulls of the year with the high priority campaigns, while taking in to consideration the compassion that is needed for your consumers during a year that has hit millions hard.

Marketing Tactics for 2021

Through the seasonal campaigns you can distinctly identify consumers that will be interested in your brand and certain products or services. How can that continue through the rest of the calendar year? Do you switch tactics all together from the outcome of 2020 or reuse what was never done in 2020?

In 2021, marketing tactics that can be concentrated in use are:

1) Fully integrated interactive content marketing.

By incorporating complete comprehensive marketing in each campaign, you are able to speak to your consumer through every channel and at every interest level.

This will include video, shareable content, quizzes, surveys, and highly engaged visuals – such as infographics. Your audience will still want to be engaged and educated, as there is not much to do in quarantine. If you can incorporate both in to interactive marketing pieces that hold your audience’s attention for more than the average 7-second span, then the likelihood of converting is higher. As heard many times, video will only continue to grow as a main form of interaction with your consumer base as everyone will watch at least one video a day and are more likely to interact with that brand through video.

The great piece about interactive marketing, is that it has the opportunity to be extremely fun, innovative and educational about your brand. This can be a great piece of your campaign as transparency and communication during an intense year is crucial for many. The variety of video formats alone allow for your brand to create great content on a daily basis – from short to long-form, live, interview, animated, etc., the possibilities are there!

2) Analytics in the driver’s seat

Free tools such as Google Analytics are great to see traffic and the consumer journey, especially during the peaks and valley of the remaining months of 2020 that can continue to be useful in to 2021. However, with so many options and routes that a user can take to get to a webpage and convert are becoming increasingly more intertwined and unable to see clearly in Google Analytics.

Companies will be moving towards holistic business intelligence tools that can become a hub to see all your data in a centralized location to digest. Google Data Studio is a great free tool that will help your company integrate a business intelligence solution with interactive and visual dashboards and reports that will communicate important data of campaigns and overall performance of the company.

3) Automation

With the continuing need to quickly change direction, adjust language and creative, and audience segments, implementing and incorporating automation software in your businesses practices and processes will be instrumentally in the success of your company. For instance, Google Ads software allows for complete optimization of your digital ads. The updates will allow for increased computerized learning in order to automatically adjust your bids – giving several new abilities to maximize conversions, including:

• Ability to choose conversion action at the campaign level
• Set bids to change automatically when sales increase or decrease
• Ability to augment bids over multiple campaigns with presets on consumer conversion actions

4) Customer experience and personalization

This tactic should always be consider in your marketing pieces and campaigns, as the consumer is increasingly becoming engaged with companies they feel connected to. How can exceedingly personalized marketing pieces be accomplished? Segment your data!

Personalization doesn’t have to mean adding the consumers name in the email, it also means adding specialized messages that can still be sent out to a larger group by segmenting your data. This allows for multiple versions of one email to be sent to several different groups easily pending on you slice the data.

Adding data variables within your copy is another example of to achieve personalization without having to create thousands of individual emails. Provided you have the right email platform to help you achieve such personalization. If not, and this aspect is important and needed to your overall marketing strategy, then looking in to new vendors should be high on action items in early 2020.

5) SERP Positioning

SEO will still be very important in 2021, but the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) positioning is important as well, as the first listing on the results page isn’t the best, its position zero. Meaning the result with the snippet of the article showcased is the prime location.

Tips that can help achieve your company’s information is in position zero, is by reviewing your current SEO strategy and cleaning the code and tagging that the search engine can easily understand. The content on the page but also be clear and answer the question that is placed in the search bar and understanding that more people are using full sentence search queries instead of a simple keywords, such as “What?” “How?” “Where?” etc.

4) Voice Search

Having your brand optimized for voice search will be needed in 2021. With the use of Alexa, Echo, etc. within everyone’s home, keywords are being replaced by longer more conversational queries that your brand needs to be optimized for. Also, having the information prepared on your site that these devices can pull from in a conversational tone will be highly beneficial in how users are receiving their information.

Conclusion

2020 is and will finish as one of (if not the) hardest year for your company. But, you can start to form one large question that companies will be asking themselves – How do we mesh basic marketing tactics and available technology in a human way that personalizes the experience for our consumer while providing optimal results for the company? 2021 may be a “let’s see how it goes” year because 2020 has thrown so many curve balls at society to rely on one simple tactic.

When determining your branding and marketing efforts for your 2021 campaigns, contact Colleen Eakins Design to set up a consultation to learn how we can best support you.