Mediaboss Marketing

Saying that 2020 has been a tough one is stating the obvious. Its a year we will most definitely tell the kids about when we are grey and old. What has been most interesting, however, is the shift in advertising and social media. Strategies have done a 180 degree turn overnight, annual marketing calendars thrown into disarray and a focus on consumer behaviour has taken centre stage.

Consumers have been interacting with brands and consuming content in new ways, meaning trends that no one could have predicted have emerged and are here to stay. Audiences are also keen to be engaged and take on a creative challenge set by brands, but they also want more in return. They want to know that brands actually care and in return for this proof they will pay you with their loyalty.

With brand building being more tightly wound with brand purpose than ever before, we have taken a look at whats to come for 2021 and how brands have the opportunity to flourish in this space if they act fast.

Remixing is where user-generated content takes existing formats, ideas or templates and recreates them to express a users own personality or ideas. If you didnt at least attempt a TikTok remixing trend this year then what were you doing?

Heba Sayed, strategy leader at IBM Cloud and AI, has predicted that: User-generated content will be the crown jewel for great brands in 2021. The best pieces of content will be the ones marketers dont create, but instead facilitate. At a time where consumers lives have changed dramatically, they look to people, not brands, for inspiration about products and services that fit within their new lifestyles post Covid-19.

With TikTok and now Instagram Reels on the rise, there is a big opportunity for brands to provide audiences with the tools to chime in and create content under branded hashtags. By getting content creators to influence the consumer with a fun and engaging challenge, brands embed themselves within the creative.

As Covid really started to hit home, we saw an influx of nostalgic content. Naturally, people wanted to remember better times and connecting with positive memories helps people disconnect from their current struggles. When brands connect with that positive memory, they are then able to build an emotional relationship with the consumer. This is because when the audience feels good, they will then associate your brand with that feeling.

According to a recent study completed by Talkwalker and Hubspot, mentions of keywords on social media related to nostalgia increased from around 13m to 24.4m; an 88% increase.

A perfect example of how to do this effectively is Guccis 2020 Christmas Gift campaign. It imagines a holiday party in an office with a retro 90s setting. This example presents an event which is unfortunately nonexistent this year but still allows the consumer to feel a sense of normality with a luxurious twist. Its playful and entertaining, which currently audiences desire.

Going into 2021, brands should look to use nostalgia and emotion to engage audiences but strategies need to work around uplighting memories or escapism. Adding in loneliness or a well meet again song to the mix will not send out the message you think it will.

Socially conscious marketing will be key for 2021 and brands will have to engage more with topics such as mental health, inclusivity and justice. If they dont, they run the risk of becoming irrelevant.

Vikas Chawla, co-founder of Social Beat, DigiGrad and Influencer.in, stated: With an increased focus on well-being of self and society, the relevance of brands giving back to society and environment has never been higher. Audiences are also connecting more with brands that have a cause or stand for initiatives that they relate to and this trend is going to grow even further in 2021.

Messaging will need to focus on the brand's mission statement to really gain consumer loyalty and this will need to be delivered with authenticity to effectively connect with younger audiences.

Overall, its clear that consumers care and are starting to be a lot more vocal about their wants and needs from brands. Brands need to go above and beyond to make an impact moving forward and based on a poll by Forbes in 2019, 88% of consumers want to support brands that have social causes aligned with their end product or service.

According to GWIs Connecting the Dots report, 72% of consumers said companies behaving sustainably was more important to them because of Covid-19. The pandemic really put brand purpose to the test and consumers expect more than just large donations or prosaic statements. Consumers want to see that brands actually care. Therefore, businesses looking to grow need to align with their customers values in ways that are authentic and sustainable.

A brand that really stuck out this year was KFC and the quick U-turn it had to make after the pandemic butchered its original campaign idea. After months of working on a 2020 strategy, the whole thing was scrapped because of its slogan, Finger Lickin Good. Unfortunately, that message in 2020 was just not going to do. The iconic slogan was replaced with a tongue-in-cheek strategy that gave the creative an uplifting twist thanks to messages like: That thing we always say? Ignore it. For now. And: Wash fingers thoroughly before lickin.

It even set audiences a challenge through influencers, asking them to come up with a temporary replacement. What was so great about this activation was that no matter where you were in the world the message still applied, unifying everyone. Brands are expected to think fast in order to avoid backlash and this will still be expected moving forward. Consumers are looking for that support from brands through these tough times.

With January creeping up on us there is a clear understanding that the consumer is king. Tacky I know, but with a looming mental health crisis and 31% feeling like they are able to turn to social media for help with their mental wellbeing (GWI), brands need to think about the type of message they are putting out in the world more than ever. And as KFC has proved, the strategy might change but there is a serious opportunity to rise above the rest and build loyalty like never before.

Ellie Owen, strategy manager at Tailify.

The rest is here:
The trends that will dominate the social space in 2021 - The Drum

After a rough year for the tech industry, things are starting to look up.

In Q1 2021, tech businesses are likely to see a slow movement back towards normal levels of demand but maybe not full economic recovery. Your business will likely still have to cope with lower levels of consumer and business confidence, a weakened economy and the knock-on effects of a strained supply chain, making tech sales more challenging.

In IT, for example, Gartner predicts sales growth over 2020 but still a lot less demand compared to what we saw in 2019.

These eight tips will help any business improve their tech sales in Q1 ahead of the full recovery that economists continue to predict will start sometime in early or mid-2021.

Old strategies of B2B marketing cold-calling, networking events and impersonal email blasts arent as effective as they used to be. Now is the time to take advantage of virtual sales processes wherever you can.

Taking an omnichannel approach to sales prospecting and using all the data you have at your disposal can provide you with a real competitive advantage.

Right now, B2B customers, just like consumers in general, want marketing that is more personalized and more tailored to their particular needs and tastes and a major portion of B2B marketers believe theyre not doing enough to personalize their marketing efforts.

Adopting sales strategies like email campaigns that take into account client preferences, targeted advertising and digital events may be necessary if you want to find success in 2021.

With resources tight, inefficient processes can be a major pain point for B2B clients. Tools that help clients and individual customers get more done may be especially appealing right now.

When advertising, it may be a good strategy to emphasize how your products can boost customer efficiency allowing them to do more with less.

What businesses dont have right now is a lot of slack. With demand down and the labor market unpredictable, many companies are working with limited staff who may still be adjusting to team collaboration in the era of working from home (WFH).

The pandemic isnt going to last forever but shifts in business workflows and consumer preferences tend to stick around well after a crisis ends. There are already some signs that businesses will continue to offer work-from-home options and that workers who transitioned to remote work earlier in the year may continue to work from home, even once its safe to return to the office.

Improving support for remote collaboration may be a solid long-term strategy even if lockdown measures are lifted in just a few months.

The new year means a fresh start and a great opportunity to take another look at your pricing structure.

During Q1, you may want to take quick stock of your sales data and see if your current pricing model works for your customers. You can use metrics like plan-by-plan conversion rates to see which plans are selling and which ones dont grab the interest of potential customers.

If your clients tend to gravitate towards one plan, leaving others behind, that may be a sign that you should reorganize or simplify how you price your services.

Maybe customers pick your cheapest or most expensive service, with just a handful opting for middle-tier options. Simplifying your pricing structure could help make the buying process a little smoother without limiting customers options.

You may also find that it makes more sense to price based on use, charging by how much support or resources a client needs.

The right changes can go a long way in helping customers find the plan that fits their needs.

Your business can also take advantage of new sales automation tech to improve internal workflows.

Chatbots and various new sales automation tools can make it easier for your sales reps and customer service agents to handle requests potentially giving them more time to spend on the complex problems that require full attention and creative thinking.

Even simpler robotic process automation (RPA) software can go a long way in managing repetitive tasks and freeing up your administrative staff for work that requires a human touch.

Business growth doesnt always mean new customers. Current clients are just as important to growing revenue as new clients and because you already have an existing relationship with them, it can be more efficient to sell new products directly to them.

Depending on the product range you sell, it may be better to focus on cross-selling to existing clients in some cases, rather than pursuing new clients.

No matter how slow your Q4 was, marketing will continue to be key to business success. You may not necessarily want to increase marketing spending, but you definitely dont want to cut your current ad budget.

If you find that your current marketing spend isnt helping your business grow, its a better idea to optimize rather than reallocate funds. Adopting new marketing methods that have proven effective during the pandemic like social marketing, word-of-mouth marketing and even influencer marketing may be a good strategy for optimizing your budget and boosting sales.

As companies move more and more of their data to the cloud, cybersecurity has become an even more important topic for tech businesses.

If youre holding on to customer data or helping companies manage transitions to the cloud, you and your sales reps should be able to answer some basic questions about data security. If prompted, its good to be able to tell customers what youre doing to ensure data is protected from hackers and cybercriminals.

2021 is likely to be a lot more normal than 2020. However, tech businesses may still be in for a few rough months.

Companies wanting to boost sales in Q1 should play to the challenges of the moment. If your products can solve pain points related to business productivity and work-from-home woes, you may have a real valuable selling point to lean on.

Updates to pricing structures and the use of efficiency-boosting sales tech can also help you drum up some additional revenue and build stronger relationships with clients.

The rest is here:
How to Improve Your Tech Sales in Q1 2021 - TechSpective

You have just raised your first funding round and you have to spend a part of it on marketing. Defining the right marketing strategy, identifying the most effective tactical activities and communication channels is not easy, but the choices you make will have a crucial impact on the future of your startup.

As a marketing professional with a hands-on experience in B2B and B2C, I have observed many startups that make a lot of marketing mistakes right from the start. While these companies were from various industries, ranging from ecommerce to digital health, they often share common pitfalls.

Learning about these missteps can help you better navigate your business activity and guide your team during the uncertainty associated with the early days of the startups scaling so lets take a closer look.

It is crucial to set well-defined business goals that you want to accomplish by implementing certain marketing activities. These goals should be specific to a particular startup, with an explicitly-stated timeline, and have achievable metrics.

Some founders, especially those coming from an engineering background, are often confused about connecting the dots between the precise features of a technical product and intangible creative ideas.

They spend the majority of their time building a product, launch it by putting a significant budget into multiple promotional activities, and realize that they dont know how to evaluate their effectiveness.

Thats why getting marketing advice in advance becomes tremendously important.

As a founder, discuss the value offering with a marketing expert, identify the way you will communicate this value to your target audience, and prepare an actionable plan to deliver it. While it may seem a bit challenging to do at first, the derived plan will give your startup colossal leverage in the long run.

One mistake I often see in early-stage startups is zeroing in on two or three marketing activities. For example, promoting a startup on social media and obsessing over SEO.

While digital communication channels are important, especially with the soaring importance of digital marketing accelerated by lockdowns and social distancing measures, you should keep in mind that marketing is a combination of many aspects advertising, PR, sponsorships, just to name a few so dont fixate on a couple of them.

Overall, the reasons for this mistake are diverse. Sometimes, chosen activities are the most familiar and/or the easiest to implement if a startup doesnt have a full-time marketing employee. Another explanation is that some founders rush to repeat the activities which are successfully pursued by their competitors. Either way, becoming attached to a limited set of actions is not the best approach.

To avoid this and to make sure that you arent wasting your marketing budget on irrelevant activities, try to conduct profound research beforehand, and get a diverse set of opinions relevant to your unique situation.

I often hear from entrepreneurs that they just need help with marketing but cant state precisely what exactly they need help with.

Is it writing an annual marketing plan with a detailed description of all activities throughout the year? Or is it running digital marketing campaigns? Or maybe, its overseeing the whole marketing function: from brand building to performance in digital channels?

Thats why identifying the underlying goal and writing a job description for a marketing position with regards to this goal is vital. For example, hiring a social media manager and expecting them to do everything related to marketing is destined to fail.

On the flip side, hiring a huge team of marketing professionals can be too costly for an early-stage company with a limited budget. Startups can mitigate this either by recruiting an experienced marketer with a diverse experience or by outsourcing particular marketing activities to external contractors.

I often witness two diametrically opposed situations. In the first case, founders do not want to hire young people with little experience, but cant afford prominent experts. In this case, I recommend looking not only at the resume but also at the potential of an applicant. Sometimes young marketers strive to grow and can bring fresh ideas to the company that is not visible from the inside.

In the second case, founders hire very qualified and well-known marketers, often from international corporations who are used to working in a completely different environment.

Diverse functionality in marketing, lack of clear guidelines, myriads of challenges that a startup encounters all of this can cause a panic for people who are used to corporate processes. In this situation, you should discuss with the candidate whether she or he is ready for a radical change in their working rhythm and functionality.

In fact, if you want to work with a particular marketer, you can try to invite her or him as an external expert and advisor.

Some founders are strongly convinced that they understand what is needed to be done by marketing people. As a result, they state the required plans and metrics without an objective assessment and a preliminary discussion with marketers.

However, marketing professionals should be involved as early as possible and actively participate during every stage of the startup lifestyle. Ideally, contact marketers even before building an MVP because they can help better understand the needs and wants of your potential customers, identify the strengths of a product or service, and point out its weaknesses.

By conducting market research, in-depth interviews, and customer surveys, marketers can find possible ways to enhance a prototype, prepare a set of best-suited measures to launch a product or service, as well as provide active support in subsequent promotion, aligning the latter with a business development strategy.

Ive encountered situations when there is a ready-to-launch product and founders want to advertise it, so they hire a marketer. However, when they start to analyze the situation, hidden drawbacks become visible. They can be diverse: from identifying the wrong target market, to the unclear positioning and value proposition.

Well, a marketer can deliver a project they were hired for, but the underlying issue will remain untreated and eventually negate the short-term gains from the project implementation. So, in order to save resources, time, and energy, you should talk to marketers early on.

Finally, it is vital to put marketing as one of the core functions, not merely a supporting one. The stakes and expectations are high for early-stage companies. Every wrong step can make a drastic negative consequence on your business.

By avoiding these mistakes and putting time and effort into building the right marketing, you can leverage the level up in the playing field and streamline startup growth.

Published December 15, 2020 07:00 UTC

Read more from the original source:
4 marketing mistakes early-stage startups make and how to avoid them - The Next Web

Coming out of what maywell be the greatest year of self-reflection for all of society, the ad industry had a huge opportunity -- and it blew it. Instead of learning the lesson of what makes a brand most relevant in thethroes of an existential crisis like a global pandemic, the industry has chosen not to think about the impact on its customers, but on itself.

How do I know this? Because the Association ofNational Advertisers this morning announced that -- according to results of an annual poll of its members -- the "Marketing Word-of-the-Year" for 2020 is "pivot."

While that's a powerful businessterm for early-stage businesses, and one normally associated with startups that failed to deliver on their initial "product/market fit" and pivot to a different one in order to find a new pathway tosuccess -- or at least another round of funding -- it's not one that should sum up how the world's greatest marketers reflected on one of the world's greatest existential threats.

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On the plusside, it shows that Madison Avenue has embraced some of the positive attributes of Silicon Valley, especially the concept of "agility," which, along with "resiliency" and "virtual," were runners-upfor 2020's marketing word-of-the-year.

On the downside, it shows that the world's leading marketers are far more introspective than I would have thought, and that they failed to identify themost important element of 2020 from a consumer perspective: the need to show how and why brands care for their customers -- not themselves -- during an existential crisis.

Frankly, I'm alittle surprised by this, because over the past nine months I've seen and reported on reams of marketing research and consumer polls showing that very thing -- from Ipsos to Mindshare to Kantar toNielsen to Wavemaker to you-just-about-name it. They all identified that what consumers most wanted during this unprecedented time was for brands to show customers they care about what they weregoing through and how they could help, even if it was just offering words of support, diversionary content -- or even better, some solutions to the problems they were coping with.

Pandemic andeconomic crisis aside, it was also a year of self-reflection for marketers grappling with responses to an outpouring of racial injustice and their own role in responding to it, as well as diversity intheir organizations and marketing programs.

That's why I was eagerly awaiting the ANA's annual release -- and even made a little side bet with myself to see if they would "get" it -- andidentify that the most important marketing word of the year for 2020 was "empathy."

That's the word I heard most from marketers, agencies and some of the best consumer researchers in the worldexpress as their takeaway from 2020. While it's not always an easy one to deliver on, it is the word that should focus everything organizations do during, and coming out of, a global pandemic.

In fact, it is a word that came up time and time again, while MediaPost went through our annual exercise of reviewing and considering candidates for our annual agency, client and suppliers of theyear for 2020. I will tell you it was an important factor for picking several of them.

While I applaud the ad industry's ability to adapt, be flexible, find new product/market fits, and yes,pivot, during unprecedented times, all of those business maneuvers should be at the service of the people they serve -- including their own organizations, those of their partners, and especiallycustomers, which are the reason for their very existence in the first place.

Link:
What The Marketing Word of the Year Should Be, For Those Who Care 12/14/2020 - MediaPost Communications

Several of the minds behind the design of the much talked-about COVID-19 awareness campaign says theyre happy about the attention it has received.

Kurt Beaudoin of ZGM Modern Marketing Partners in Edmonton says more than 400,000 people have watched the companys two COVID loves ads, which were put out last week.

The ads follow a man with a giant head that looks like the novel coronavirus as he enjoys parties, family gatherings and a Christmas dinner.

The ad company wrote the concept and then the practical Mr. Covid mask was made by hand by Travis Shewchuk, a Fort Saskatchewan-based artist.

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When we heard the kind of pitch [it was] and creating this character in the first place, we were pretty sold on it, Shewchuk, who owns the Ravenous EFX special effects company, said Tuesday.

Beaudoin says that much like COVID-19, the character he calls Mr. Covid or Creepy Uncle Covid is a real shape-shifter and can blend seamlessly into any place where people are gathering.

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Shewchuk worked with the agencys concept and then sculpted the one-off mask entirely by hand in about five days, using various materials like hard plastic, foam, rubber, resin, and paint.

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[The design had to be] not too scary, Shewchuk said. Its gotta be ominous, still kind of mean but yet at the same point kind of PG-ish.

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Its gotta still have a fun element to go with the comedy parts.

Shewchuk added he loved the ad when he finally saw the finished version this week.

It was such a whirlwind to build it that we didnt really get to savour any of it that much, he said. We finally got to see it on the internet, then its popping up on TV and everywhere and then seeing the response, not only across the province but the country.

Everybodys seeing it. So its been exciting in that way.

Beoudoin says Premier Jason Kenneys government had approached his agency to create a relatable campaign for people between 18 and 40 years old.

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He says a couple more ads are coming ahead of Christmas and New Years, and Mr. Covid will be appearing on the video-sharing social media platform TikTok.

With files from The Canadian Press

2020 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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Artist, marketing company behind Albertas Mr. Covid ads say their success means more on the way - Global News