30 Marketing Tips to be Successful in 2021

Ideas move mountains, especially in turbulent times - Kevin Roberts

[20 minutes read]

Introduction

TL:DR: 30 marketing trends, tips and tricks below!

Three hours per day. A total of more than 100.

Over the course of the past month(s), you have found daily (digital) marketing trends, tips and tricks on my profile - this article is combining all of them.

The three lines below are the only three lines in which I will talk about myself - all other content is completely for you.

To improve your sales, improve your brand, improve your marketing strategy and adopt new practices. So stay with me!

For me the journey (so far) has been:

• An amazing learning experience (reading more than three hours every day) in the field of (digital) marketing, technology, innovation, ...
• More than 1,000 new followers, weekly visitors and loads of new amazing people I talk to on a daily basis
• A couple of way better 'informed bets' on the stock market (which you could find in the posts)

But, it was mostly about making you think, getting better at digital marketing, seeing new perspectives, learning new trends and for some of you to have a good laugh with daily posts (believe me, I received a lot of 'hate' but also loads of positive feedback - thank you).

To make it all easier, I have bundled all of these posts in one article (this one) and in three main buckets:

1. Better You
2. Better Marketing
3. Better Brand

1. Better You

The first series of tips are about creating a better platform, better user experience and a more helpful company when it comes down to generating leads and driving people to your company. 

We will look how user experience is key to generating more revenue, why you should remove silos in your company and how you can follow your audience

A good user experience will enhance your revenue

Tip 1: It takes people less than 0.05 seconds to judge your website

Work on website speed, web design (based on cultural preferences) and easiness to find information. It takes people about 5 milliseconds to form an opinion about your website, on a very saturated internet it matters to stand out.

Make sure to get rid of snap judgements and start improving your website today (focus on mobile).

Which website would you like to visit?

#webdesign #firstimpression #mobilefirst

Tip 2: 80% of users hate pop-ups, because you don't use them correctly

80% of internet users indicate they hate pop-ups - but you can't blame them. It's important to A/B test pop-ups on your website: include discounts, time them better and work on their design. Pop-ups are attention grabbing, straightforward and could lead to more conversions.

It's all about adding the right value at the right time.

#popups #abtest

Tip 3: Remove friction to prevent losing conversions on your website

In January 2021, SendMyBag.com (an international shipping company) lost $400 in sales because I had to fill out lengthy forms, didn't enable me to go the previous page without losing data and didn't offer me the right payment option.

Walk a mile in the shoes of your customers and see how easy it is to go from 'landing on your website' to actually 'buying a product'.

#customerexperience #uxdesign #userexperience

Tip 4: Offering free shipping is the new $0.99

Clients don't like surprises about the costs of products they are buying - period. 61% of shopping cart abandoners indicate unexpected fees as main reason.

Everyone likes free stuff - the same goes for free shipping. It's better to let customers pay a bit more and reward them with free shipping, than unexpectedly adding shipping prices at the end of the check-out process. Again - it's all about removing friction.

#freeshipping #shoppingcart #abandoners

Remove internal silos for a better customer journey picture

Tip 5: Customer Journeys are the lifeblood of your brand

Experience your customers' journey from time to time. Think about all the touch points in the marketing funnel. (Potential) customers are influenced (awareness, consideration, purchase, care) across multiple channels (search, social, tv, email, offline).

It's important to remove collaborative barriers at your company and map out different customer journeys to understand how customers are going from getting to know you to eventually buying a product at your company.

To help you, I have created the following diagram (Connect + PM for link):

#customerjourney #channels #media

Tip 6: No one will come to your store, if they don't know you are open

More than 70% of in-store traffic is impacted online by people researching to buy a product (mostly on mobile devices). Offline visits are tremendously influenced by this online information - and you don't need coding experience or a full website to be online.

Using Google My Business, you can be shown organically when people are looking for the products you are selling. They will be able to find you on Google Search/Maps and you can tell them you are open, not far from them and happy to help them further.

It's completely free - here you can find how to optimise your profile:

#omnichannel #googlemybusiness

Follow your audience

Tip 7: Data management is key to a successful audience strategy

Too many brainstorms are still about creating personas based on assumptions. Start combining data sources to get a better view on your audiences.

• You know what people buy at your store
• Amazon knows what people buy across stores
• Facebook knows what people aspire to be
• Google knows what people are searching for
• LinkedIn knows what jobs people are looking for
• Publishers know what people are reading

Those are just examples of how much data you can combine about your customers, similar (potential) customers and total target market. 

Having a good data management platform combining all those sources and your own customers across different channels is crucial to effectively target in a digital world.

#datamangement #personas #targeting

Tip 8: Follow your audience and the channel they are using

Tom Brady became the best football player in history - but last month's Super Bowl was the worst one since 2017. Overall viewership dropped 5.5%, TV audience dropped 9% while the streaming audience was up 65% on CBS.

Since the pandemic, the way we consume content and watch sport has changed. It’s important for brands to follow their audience and rethink where to put their effort and money - this goes for sport brands, but also overall for many other players in the market.

#sports #channels #audience

2. Better Marketing

Now we have covered 'the basics' of user experience and audiences, we will deep dive into marketing. Marketing has many aspects, we will be looking at new innovations, social media, better creatives and using more measurable data in your marketing approach.

Embrace new technologies: AR, VR, Voice and Chatbots

Tip 9: In-video shopping and Shoppable streaming are the next big thing

Selling products online? Start investing time in understanding social eCommerce and Shoppable Streaming. In their last equity rounds, DroppTv raised $7.5M, HapYak $3.5M - this is a huge disrupting market.

A month ago, I said TikTok will lead this space, followed by other big social media (including YouTube). Big disruption would come from Snap Inc. going all-in, enabling these services on AR and VR. Bambuser will deliver the technology.

I invested 'big' on the two later options 1.5 months ago. Snap Inc. is +32% and Bambuser skyrocketed 70% closing deals with Samsung and Bestseller.

#videoshopping #shoppablestreaming

Tip 10: It's time to Metaverse your brand

In April 2020, millions attended a Fornite concert of Travis Scott. Ten million others did the same at one of Diplo. The event space will partly shift further to those digital experiences - and brands can hitchhike this revolution.

Make a Metaversal Self - or brand - which will allow you to participate in these events and engage with millions of people attending them. Major festivals have already moved experiences online and also after COVID19 they will be doing so. Here again, Snap Inc. (Lenses) will play a major role in this evolution.

#metaverse #gaming #virtualreality

Tip 11: Make more money using Chatbots

One of out three individuals doesn't recognise they are not talking to a real person. Chatbots can save you up to 30% in terms of customer support costs.

They can also generate money for your business. Use them to:

• Welcome new customers
• Recommend them products
• Help users select the perfect gift
• Provide customers with different pricing models

#chatbots #savings #revenue

Tip 12: The rise of voice will impact your SEO strategy

More than a third of the US population is already using a personal voice assistant. To reach those searches, we have to rethink our content. Here are five tips to optimise for voice search:

• Focus on being conversational and natural language
• Write FAQ pages with full length conversational questions
• Incorporate long-tail keywords in your content (which we normally leave out typing a question in ‘code’ when searching on a search engine)
• Prioritise question words: who, what, where, when, what, how
• Be relevant and act like a user to understand them

#voicesearch #personalassistant #homespeakers #seo

Tip 13: Allow customers to try products at home via Augmented Reality

During COVID19 in-store visits became more difficult and brands are looking for solutions. Augmented Reality can allow your customers to try different products on - lipstick colours, a brand new pair of shoes or even how a car would look in their garage. According to Nielsen, 51% of customers are willing to use AR to test products.

Previous marketing campaigns have already shown promising results:

7x more engagement and 94% higher conversion rates than campaigns without AR.

Augmented Reality is definitely becoming more than catching Pokémon.

#augmentedreality #ar #fashion #retail

Creatives are not fluffy, they are a science

Tip 14: The most perfect creative is imperfect

More than 70% of people say they don't trust advertisements as they tend to shine light on only the best things, use styling and photoshop, without building trust and integrity.

Over the past months, imperfection is on the rise. Instead of looking at perfect creative, more people searched for authenticity and escapism than in the previous years. Stop making overly produced advertisements that are not relatable.

One way to do this, is by adopting user generated content into your creative. Your products look better and more authentic on real people that are and represent your customers.

The below advertisement is already 10 years old - and it’s still my favourite. Why? It’s successfully humanising a web browser. 

#humanize #imperfect #creative 

Tip 15: Lose the Cinderella story arc - go full digital

It’s wrong to think the same advertisement on both TV and digital will perform the same. On digital people can skip the advertisement after a couple of seconds, hence a different story arc is necessary.

TV is a full video format where traditional ‘Cinderella’ story lines are working as viewers are forced to view the full ad. On digital, people can decide themselves if they want to see it. Make sure the first 6 seconds capture their attention.

Adopt best practices:

• High pace
• Capturing music
• Multiple frames and shorts
• Surprise the viewer

Below you can see twice the same advertisement, one time for digital, one time for TV. Which one do you prefer?

#videocreative #storyarcs #dior

Tip 16: There is quantifiable data on creatives, start using it

Creatives are not a blackbox. You can find data on how well they are performing - start looking beyond CPV, CTR, CPM and CVR to learn from your campaigns. One way: audience retention graphs.

YouTube offers you to see engagement and retention at every single second of a video. You can see when people engaged with your content and when viewers decided to leave. Use this to A/B test and improve your creatives.

#audienceretention #engagement #measurement

How to use Social Media in a smart way

Tip 17: Live video is the new big thing on social media

1 out of 5 videos on social media in 2019 were live videos - and the volume grew tremendously over the course of 2020. Live video is one of the ‘new’ ways to engage with your customers and brings loads of benefits:

• Reduces costs (per second) as the format is less produced than traditional advertisements. Companies can have in-house products and reach is higher than for example live events such as product launches.
• Audience interaction grows. Questions can be answered during the sessions which allows you to tell your brand story better.
• Higher authenticity. Conversational marketing is the future and no conversation is possible with one-to-many advertising. Live streaming offers a solution to break open the conversation.

#livestreaming #streaming #live

Tip 18: Pick micro influencers over those with millions of followers

You don’t need millions of followers to be an ‘influencer’. Brands are looking for natural interaction via engagement which is a better strategy than purely focusing on costly reach. Start using micro influencers. It’s the magic of digital advertising: better targeting, measurement and performance. You know who you want to reach and you can limit exposure to only those profiles by selecting the right influencer. 

I, for example, follow Andreas Klinger on Twitter and Taylor Offer, Jacob Wasserman, Terry Rice, Rebecca Brown, Joe Gannon, Rebecca Brooks, Ish Verduzco, Dylan Whitman on LinkedIn - as their content is tailored to what I love to read every single day.

#influencers #micro #targeting

Tip 19: FOMO-marketing can bring you free value

People love data about themselves and like to feel the sense of belonging, surfing trends and are more ‘past’ than future focused. Brands can get free advertising from their users and individuals with huge followings.

Spotify’s Wrapped is a brilliant example of marketing that makes non-users feel like the ‘one kid that wasn’t invited to the party’. In 2020 more brands than ever adopted this strategy:

• Twitch is showing you how many minutes you streamed
• Spotify tells you your top artists and music
• Bolt explains your contribution to the environment
• Revolut displays what you are spending your money on

#fomo #spotifywrapped #usermarketing

Tip 20: Diversify your ideas on Social Media - watch out for in-group bias

Diversify who you follow on social to get more diverse ideas for your marketing strategy and yourself. The world needs a new social medium - 2021 will bring one, but it might not be the one we need. 

One of the biggest issues with social media is the subtle danger of ‘in-group bias’. The algorithms are made in such a way that they provide content you would ‘like’ to see based on previous interactions. This will hide the ‘other side of the world’ for you.

Diversifying what you read will tackle issues like fake news, allow you to do more diverse hiring, marketing and in general enhance your knowledge.

Someone should create a social medium where you are forced to follow an ‘opposite’ to have a more in depth view on the world and prevent one sided information.

#diversify #socialmedia #bias

Tip 21: Deep fakes are scary but can be used to do good things too

This is NOT David Beckham. Not all advertisements are what they look like. Synthetic media and content through deep fakes will become more and more prominent in our day to day society and advertising, as it often has the image of being used for only bad things, I am posting this video: an example of how it can have a positive impact on society.

#deepfakes #davidbeckham #syntheticmedia

Everything is a marketing opportunity

Tip 22: A carton shipping box is a free media

A carton box is a FREE medium. Unboxing videos grew 160% Y/Y. It’s a great opportunity to gain (viral) traction at a low cost. Facilitate the documentation of unboxing videos for your brand, putting customers and product first. 

Simplify your boxes and put a call to action on them to document and share the unboxing experience.

#unboxing #video #freemedium

Tip 23: Use memes to drive organic traffic 

Never leave the opportunity to link your brand to a meme topic if there is a good fit - but follow these best practices.

Remember the size of the PS5 getting mocked on the internet? And now this brilliant advertisement of IKEA (made by a Greek agency not commissioned by IKEA but still well received!)

55% of 13-35y olds are sending memes to each other every week. Brands can successfully claim a big part of this hype and actually ‘own it’. 

Nevertheless, this isn't without risk. Make sure to:

• Monitor your brand logo (for example via Talkwalker)
• Make sure to engage with the audience as a brand, ‘laugh’ with yourself if you are in the center of the joke (people will like you)
• Reshare content made by users
• Check copyright issues and regulations

#memes #organic #traffic

Tip 24: Easter Eggs on your website will increase your reach

Drive engagement and brand favourability using easter eggs on your website.

Have you ever Googled “Askew”, “Do a Barrel Roll” or “Atari Breakout”? Do it! 

Easter Eggs can be amazing to drive traffic, engagement, retention and brand favourability. They are especially good for tech savvy audiences and for showing that you are not only about sales. Easter Eggs are humanising your website: 

• Google’s “Party Like It's 1998” brings you down memory lane.
• CoolBlue changes your check-out basket icon based on the amount of items you have added to the cart. Also try to search for ‘Vibrator’ - don’t worry, it’s not NSFW.
• YouTube search “Seinfield without People” - the top result will have no title or description.
• Even the Wikipedia for Easter Egg has an actual Easter Egg.

#eastereggs #favourability #doabarrelroll

3. Better Brand

Lastly, I will offer you a couple of trends, tricks and tips on how to build a good local, sustainable, diverse brand. 

A lot of these trends are related to the global pandemic and how to act during crises and trying to give you guidance in how to deal with your brand in different situations!

Build a local, sustainable and diversity-embracing brand

Tip 25: Embrace sustainability at a service

Don’t pose sustainability for marketing PR purposes, be sustainable as a service. Loads of brands are playing the ‘short-term game’ of being ‘fake’ sustainable and it might backfire in the future. Brands should play the long game and inform clients about impact while teaching them how to adopt best practices.

Services like Kitche (a food expiration date tracking tool to prevent waste) and Doconomy (a fintech company that allows you to track carbon impact of your purchases with Mastercard and others - forcing you to set a monthly carbon limit) are tackling the core of the issue by re-educating people.

There are many other options to combine sustainability and marketing: reward schemes, cashbacks, communication, single-use bans, transparency, packaging, stopping printing full catalogues (QR/AR instead) and many more. 

#sustainability #brandequity #environment

Tip 26: Make your global brand locally relevant

From research in the UK, 41% of people feel more connected to their neighbours than pre-covid. 46% of US customers feel that giving back to the community or helping others is one of their top five values.

Physical distance is currently bigger than ever before but we are still feeling more connected in certain ways. Brands can elevate their positioning by:

• Quality engagement: reaffirm customers identities
• Celebrate your audience: their heritage, values, and lifestyle
• Allow to give back: give back as a company but also let your clients give back to their community, focus on local charity, brands and products
• Personalisation: be more personal in communication - make people feel they authentically matter

The right communication is currently crucial: giving back to your community is more than words or money. It’s about empathy and not about sympathy. Contribute to local jobs, suppliers, sellers etc. and you will have long lasting benefits.

Burger King lost some short term revenue, but won love in the UK.

#burgerking #connect #local #community

Tip 27: Don’t cast DE&I, built it into the fabric of your brand

Support diversity, equity and inclusion in your marketing approach. It’s not enough to cast DE&I, it needs to be built into the fabric of your brand. Customers are expecting this approach and it is how it should be.

The advertisement below is 50 years old - there are no excuses.

As humans we are bad with our own cognitive biases, while we should think in terms of absolute terms, we often don't do this - using relative benchmarks for social comparison means we need a representative pool - it will make us all feel better and enhance mental health.

#diversity #inclusion #equity

Tip 28: Build a brand during crisis to have long-term benefits

Build a positive brand during crisis. 79% of people recalled instances of brands positively responding to COVID-19 to help their customers, workforces and communities. Building a positive brand during difficult times has a long-lasting impact.

A negative reaction during these times is less often noticed (66%), but when it is, it has longer lasting negative effects: more people change their perception (31%) and their purchase behaviour (26%) in a negative way.

Investing now in sharing the amazing work you have been doing for customers, employees or overall society can result in more than 19% additional purchases over time and a positive impact on your brand (23%).

#brand #building #crisis

Don't over-engineer it, stay true to your brand, always

Tip 29: Your name and logo isn't the most important in starting a business

Facts:

• Nike’s logo was created by a student for $35
• Coca-Cola’s logo was created by their bookkeeper
• Google was a spelling mistake

All of these brands are in the top 15 most valued brands in the world. The next time you are thinking about starting a business, spend more time on creating your product and the unique value proposition instead of the name and brand. 

Both are still important over time, but will only become valuable if your offer does first. 

Just make sure it’s meaningful (this can be done by making your product so), distinctive, accessible, protectable, future-proof, visual and make sure you can claim all properties (website, social etc.).

#name #logo #brand

Tip 30: Stay true to your brand, always

Last month, Robinhood disabled transactions in $GME, $AMC and others, which probably has killed their brand for the unforeseen future because they didn’t stay true to their brand.

Why?

• Brandname: it goes against their brand name, Robinhood is supposed to ‘steal’ from the rich and redistribute to the poor.
• Slogan: “We're on a mission to democratise finance for all” is the slogan of the company, which is kinda painful for a company disabling trades from the ‘the public’ to protect ‘the institutions’ (or at least this is the perception of their audience).
• Audience: their audience are ‘a new generation’ of internet natives, that are looking for a quick, efficient and cheap broker platform. This is exactly a big chunk of the audience on Reddit who started the whole ‘fight’ against the funds. 

Result:

#robinhood #true #brand

That's a wrap!

Feel free to leave a comment below, share your addition and your feedback!

Disclaimer: all content above is my own personal opinion, advice and observations. None of it is linked to an employer and/or sponsored by any company. Keep in mind no one can predict the future and the only constant in life is change.