Three marketing trends to explore during COVID-19

A majority of marketers across most industries find themselves making difficult decisions in an uncertain future as they adapt to their new environment. This uncertainty is understandable. Nonetheless, “this too shall pass”. 

As consumer behaviour changes, marketing strategies follow suit. It makes no sense for marketers to advertise where they have no audience. The sudden increase in people being indoors has led to a change in lifestyle. With lockdowns and social distancing, out-of-home and offline advertising have shrunk, and the focus has shifted to digital. 

Don't forget to seize the opportunities as these are new times for brands and consumers alike. It is essential to adapt to changes but not to lose track of the long-term possibilities. 

Having a reliable and robust online presence has never been more critical as it is today. Understanding who your target audience is and their customer's journey is vital when it comes to incorporating more digital touchpoints based on their new lifestyle changes.

At &How Intelligence, we have outlined three trends that we feel are worth exploring during these times and implementing into your marketing and sales strategy:

• Conversational marketing
• Personalisation across the customer journey
• Social commerce

Conversational marketing

Consumers today have access to all the information they may need at their fingertips when interacting with a brand. They want a real-time and immediate response from brands. 

Conversational marketing is a feedback-oriented approach that uses chatbots, live chat, and targeted messaging to foster genuine conversations and deliver value across channels.

This has gone on to enhance customer experience, drive customer engagement, and develop customer loyalty.

The aim is for brands to create and build long-lasting relationships with their consumers by building trust through conversations. Messaging as a channel is not only fast but creates an impression of a conversation.

Benefits of conversational marketing include: 

• Engage and qualify more leads
• Provides insights about consumers
• Better experience for consumers
• Builds stronger relationships

Personalisation across the customer journey

Personalisation is all about improving the customer experience, which leads to higher conversion rates. Personalised marketing has several definitions:

It is the implementation of a strategy by which companies deliver individualized content to recipients through data collection, analysis, and the use of automation technology. It’s advertising that is targeted at a consumer based on data analytics. 

It sounds like an easy concept to implement, and you can hit the ground running. Yet, many brands continue to fail. The goal here is to engage with consumers at their level by communicating with them as individuals and not a segment.

There are three types of brands that you should not become:

• The overexcited: Too personal is too much
• Generic & boring: Adding your name to all communications
• Confused/ scared: They don’t even want to try 

Consumers have been tuning out of traditional marketing for some time. The pandemic has only accelerated the want by consumers for relevant marketing rather than generalised and irrelevant marketing messages directed at them.

Every consumer today expects you to know their every want and need. At every touchpoint throughout their journey, you also need to understand what a consumer would want at this step or what they need. Consumers expect to be remembered and treated as an individual. It frustrates someone when they see an ad for a product they just bought.

Your personalisation strategy should be cross-device and cross-channel. This will allow you to anticipate their future needs. If you have the ability to have an accurate image of the customer journey of a consumer as they interact with you as a brand, you have the power to predict what’s coming next. 

There are multiple advantages of personalised marketing for both brands and consumers when implemented successfully:

• Improved customer experience
• New and increased revenue generation
• Increased brand loyalty and retention
• Consistency across all channels

Social commerce

Finally, social commerce is when social media platforms are used to make a more personalised and targeted in-app experience shopping experience for customers.

Simply put, it brings eCommerce functionality into social media networks. It’s a far more streamlined process than eCommerce, as it allows purchases to be just a handful of clicks on social networks. 

Social commerce is a more natural and quicker way for people to complete the purchase of the products they want and need. Most online purchase journeys require a consumer to be redirected from one platform to another. 

Often referred to as the future of digital sales, social commerce is being integrated on all major social networks, who are experimenting with solutions that best fit within their platform, and meet their users' needs. Currently, it is not an average consumer's first choice, but this is changing quickly. 

Social commerce offers brands a continuously growing audience. For brands that are active with a social commerce initiative, they can improve their following and revenue growth. This initiative encourages consumers to connect with a brand through social network chat functions and engage directly.

Key benefits of social commerce:

• Consistent growing audience
• Customer loyalty and retention
• Higher SEO ranking
• Authentic engagement and traffic
• Business metrics from social

Social commerce will only have a positive impact on your brand if done right. You need to have the right strategy in place, and you will also have to invest time and resources into growing the channel.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that the pandemic has left its mark on consumer behaviour and marketing. Attempting to predict how things will continue to change will be a never-ending process. Marketers today need to adapt and evolve with the change. 

Taking a risk to implement new initiatives into a marketing strategy will only benefit a brand because even if it fails, you will still gain valuable learning lessons. More digital solutions need to be considered as consumers become more digital-savvy.

“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old” –Peter F. Drucker.

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&How Intelligence is a specialized consulting house that provides a strategic advisory role to our clients and the operational experience and knowledge required from ideation to implementation.

We help empower corporations to be the next market disruptor by understanding their data, enabling them to change the future.

&How Intelligence — andhowintelligence.com

Written by Toshak Jethwani