Digital Marketing / Inbound Marketing

Driving digital transformation 2020

By Diya Singh
July 17, 2020

The year 2020 has brought along a fresh wave of changes across a diverse range of spectrums of our lifestyle, be it the way we work, how we communicate, how we shop, or even how we consume entertainment. The influence and impact of the pandemic on these basic elements of our lives have been under the spotlight for the past few months now, with this effect to remain for the foreseeable future. After a sustained period of adaptation and on-the-fly decision making, organizations/brands across the globe have slowly come to terms with the ‘new normal’ with evolved strategies and thinking. Most of the conversation revolving around digital transformation was dominated by terms such as ‘Artificial Intelligence’, ‘Machine Learning’, ‘Cloud Computing’, and even ‘The Internet of Things’. However, the second half of 2020 is all set to bring about a fresh set of trends. Ban of Tiktok Can Change The Way Forward A key factor driving the popularity of Tiktok as a platform for content consumption was entertainment. The app garnered a huge audience in India - a total of 611 million downloads - 30.3% of the global total. (source : deccan chronicle) With such a wide and diverse audience, it's no surprise that brands were quick to target leading content creators on the platform. The recent ban will force past Tik-tok content creators to hone and evolve their content for the bigger influencer platforms like Instagram, Youtube, and Facebook. For example, Instagram has been quick to reveal a new feature - Reels. This feature is extremely similar to the model of Tiktok and essentially inculcates the essence of it onto the Instagram app as well. Facebook, which had found a clout among the tier-2 and tier-3 cities, was having to share its audience with Tiktok. This ban can be incredibly beneficial for this social media platform and can see an increase in the time people spend on Facebook. Aside from this, new-age platforms like Funimate, Roposo, and Sharechat are slowly gaining popularity and benefiting from the ban of Tiktok. Content Webification Will Become Inevitable Offline content is not just outdated and out of style, it is quite lifeless in this innovation-driven world of today. Marketers must strive to continuously create eye-catching user interface (UI) and user experiences (UX) along with informative yet quirky content to attract attention. Ancient PDFs and powerpoints simply do not make the cut anymore. A prominent example of content webification in recent times is the transformation of the content of a PPT/PDF into a dynamic website/microsite. This helps curate experiences that grab your buyer’s attention and actually require them to engage. Content Webification also helps brands track and observe user patterns as opposed to traditional offline content. Ads Will Be Different In recent times, paid advertisements on social media & entertainment platforms along with search engines have been much more specific and directed towards the user’s actual needs. Brands are keen to take advantage of these paid ads to highlight how their solutions and business/service offerings can be put to good use especially during the plight of the pandemic and the situation it has led to. Having said that, in the current situation, brands are being very careful in creating the content for their ads. Right now, words that would, in any other event, be perfectly appropriate to use, maybe perceived differently. Google recommends being careful with terms like “checkup” or “protection” as they can be deemed to be inappropriate in the current scenario. Google also suggests that brands evaluate their assets thoroughly. For example, brands need to check the suitability of images and videos depicting social gatherings of people. (source: google ads help) A few industries that have especially performed exceptionally well in the COVID era when it comes to search ads, and are expected to keep up this performance are -

Nonprofits and Charities

Health and Medical

Business management

Finance

Beauty and Personal Care

Online Gifting

Rebirth of Email Marketing Brands, e-commerce platforms, organizations, educational institutions - all have adopted Email Marketing as a reliable communication platform to reach their audiences in these uncertain times. This has, in turn, led to individuals accessing and using their email IDs much more compared to earlier. Average opens are up across the board for March and April, despite the marked rise in send volume between February and March (email sends were up by 19% from February 2020 to March 2020). (Source: Campaign Monitor) A reason why brands are putting emails on the frontlines of their communication strategy in times of crisis is that people tend to trust the information received through email more than they trust other channels. Aside from this, the emails are also observed to sound more helpful and supportive. However, in order to make the emails more effective and relatable, brands are making sure that their messages express an appropriate sentiment. Another thing that is being widely observed and will probably become the norm in H2 is asking for subscriber feedback. Needless to say, we are currently in the midst of an incredibly new experience and in such a situation, it never hurts to get feedback. Many emails are now coming with a closing note, asking people to share their opinion on whether or not they would like to hear more about the subject. Agile Marketing Will Become More Important Than Ever If there’s anything that we have learned from this crisis situation is that it is incredibly critical to be agile in adapting to change. This brought one thing to the forefront - the current one-size-fits-all outlook to digital marketing is not feasible. This is where Mar-Tech will be significant in leading the way for the future of digital marketing. New-age marketers are adapting to more real-time marketing technologies where data-driven, dynamic techniques allow immediate changes to the content being pushed out to all marketing channels. The post – COVID era will definitely be driven by online experiences and the marketeers need to be agile in leveraging this beforehand and accommodate the shift in consumer behaviors. Marketers will rely more on AI-driven models that will help generate the targeted ROI for the spends on Media. These trends make one thing clear, now marketers will have to rethink their strategies and get ready to embrace a whole new world of digital transformation.

Digital Marketing / Inbound Marketing

Driving digital transformation 2020

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