The last decade has witnessed a significant shift when it comes to brands’ social media presence. Now, brands no longer wish to present themselves as polished and formal on social media and are striving to attain a more human-like and personalised image. The objective now is to boost following by leveraging relatable and entertaining content that resonates with their audience. This has taken shape as a response to a very significant problem - how to showcase your products or services to the audience who gets repelled by ads? This relatable content with a subtle integration of the brand works well in this scenario and makes your content more shareable amongst your audience. This is why brands are understanding that memes are more than just topicality and making them a considerable part of their ongoing marketing budgets. One of the most effective ways to do this is through memes. Meme marketing is a subset of viral marketing and has evolved as one of the most successful modes of advertising, communication, and engaging with the target audiences without seeming salesy. Also, as we have seen in the past, memes drive everything that goes viral, be it the #IceBucketChallenge #TheSuccessKid, or the latest one to hop on to the bandwagon, #BINOD. Leveraging memes on social media has now become an integral part of marketing budgets for brands to appear relevant online. Brands are also using popular meme pages across social media platforms to garner a relevant audience.

Be Mem(e)orable

Memes have proven their effectiveness as a marketing tool by emerging as the most viral creative format. Millennials are somewhat averse to overtly promotional content and ads. Brands who are depending on these groups for the majority of their sales can find themselves at an impasse if they pursue the traditional forms of content marketing to try and appeal to this particular demographic. Memes, on the other hand, have carved a special place for themselves in the lives of millennials. In fact, an average millennial look and twenty to thirty memes in a day and also tends to share them with their friend groups. Another thing that makes memes an excellent marketing tool is a provision of leveraging meme pages and reaching out to a wider audience base. It’s not surprising that 38% of millennials  follow meme accounts on social media. After all, memes have become the catalyst for all the things that millennials stand for. Another advantage of using memes is that they are much more cost-effective than a variety of other means of advertising.  Meme marketing can be up to sixty percent cheaper than influencer marketing making them a high- ROI yielding option. Moreover, paid memes garner engagement rates of about 30% across Facebook and Instagram, far above the rates of 1%-15% seen for an influencer or branded content posts, making them a win-win choice.

Current meme trends

1. The 2020 Challenge, aka, Reese Witherspoon Challenge charts out the emotional journey over the past 8-9 months. 2. My Plans // 2020 highlights what you thought your year was going to be in a photo, followed by how it turned out. 3. Binod trend originated with a person named "Binod Thakur” commenting his name "Binod" under YouTube comments.

Brands riding the meme wave 

Many major brands have hopped on the bandwagon of meme marketing. To put this statement into context, here are three of the major propagators of meme marketing that have carried out this strategy in stride. 1. Netflix India turned a clip from their trending show Indian Matchmaking into a relatable meme. 2. Fevicol used subtle humour for creating a brand connect with a meme. 3. Prime Video promoted its show with a relatable meme on avoiding spoilers.

Get started with memes

The first step to getting started with meme marketing is identifying and analysing your target audience. Known for their catchy & self relatable humour, memes help establish emotional connection with the audience. Moreover, memes help in amplifying your message organically without force-feeding an advertisement to your target audience. However, to be able to do that, you need to be aware of the kind of content that sparks interest in your audience and identify the kind of memes that they’ll enjoy. One way to jump on board is through Memejacking. Memejacking refers to the practice of reusing or hijacking popular memes while integrating your brand message. However, this can be a tricky business and requires caution. To leverage an existing meme effectively, you need to keep an open eye to know what’s trending. This can incite shares, reach a wider audience, and help build advocacy for the brand. A few other effective options include starting a viral meme or reacting to ongoing moment trends and formats. Popularity for memes as a marketing tool goes up significantly ahead of festive seasons and other topical days making them an excellent tool for moment marketing. Another essential thing to note is that memes can have a limited lifespan. This is why it is important to stay updated with the latest trends and use trending hashtags to make the most of the limited life span of memes. Aside from this, it is advisable to utilise digital native lingo to make these memes more relatable to the younger audience who is more likely to interact with them.

Maintain brand connect

Having said this, one thing you must keep in mind while leveraging memes in your social marketing strategy is that no matter what, they should be in sync with your brand values, brand elements, and brand aura. While it is important to follow the trends while leveraging meme marketing, you must not deviate from the value your brand stands for. Needless to say, since these memes are reaching out to the audience your brand caters to, it is essential that the memes are constructed understanding the target audiences’ psyche, thought process & tolerance levels. This will help in creating memes that they will enjoy seeing. While adopting an already trending meme, it is not advisable to deviate much from the template aesthetics to ensure relatability. However, this should be done keeping the brand value system in mind.

Missteps to avoid

While memes are the current big thing in the digital marketing world, it can be very easy to go wrong with them. However, there are a few missteps that brands can steer clear off, to ensure smooth sailing for their meme marketing strategy. The first thing to ensure is that you’re creating memes in good taste by avoiding destructive criticism or below the belt digs, attacks on gender, or race. In other words, your strategy must be inclusive and considerate towards the sentiments of not just your audience but the larger community. Aside from this, you need to ensure that your memes aren’t overly promotional or contain ‘in-your-face’ branded communications. What makes memes unique and more effective than conventional ads is their very sharable nature. Making memes overly promotional will strip them off this very property. Meme wars have become incredibly popular in this day and age. While it can be harmless to indulge in a healthy meme war, brands must be careful not to hurt customer sentiments.

Effective Distribution

Effective and appropriate distribution is incredibly important for the success of your meme marketing strategy. The most popular and effective distribution channels these days are meme pages. These pages can be utilised to enhance the reach of your meme marketing campaign. They have a loyal and active audience that is ready to consume the kind of content that is produced by those pages. Having a subtle integration of your brand on the memes shared on these pages can significantly increase the reach of your campaign. Memes are also becoming a seamless part of influencer marketing and can be used to create the perfect social media cocktail & strengthen the influencer campaign. Aside from this, memes are also being used extensively in omnichannel marketing, making them popular amongst all demographics. They are also the go-to tool for viral marketing considering the humor and simplicity that encompasses memes. Memes have undoubtedly become an inseparable part of social media. With their sharable properties and simple yet humorous characteristics, memes have established a unique and indispensable space for themselves. By following the above-mentioned steps and leveraging these insights, brands can ideate, create, and distribute memes effectively and accelerate their social media efforts with the help of meme marketing. Download the PDF version

A $2 Billion industry, influencer marketing has undoubtedly changed the social media game for brands.  With the influencer landscape estimated to grow to a whopping $5-10 billion industry by the coming year, it’s undoubtedly a marketing force that isn’t expected to go anywhere. This growth is not at all shocking, considering the valuable benefits brands can yield with the help of influencer marketing.

One of the ways in which influencer marketing takes the lead over conventional advertising is that it helps brands reach out to their audience in a way that appears much more credible and authentic. Aside from this, influencers have a loyal follower base that shares many aspects of their lives with them and, this is why if an influencer recommends something, their followers tend to buy it. It is almost as if the recommendation is coming from their friends.

Here, we look at seven trends that brands must know in order to use influencer marketing in the best way possible in the post-pandemic world.

The Dawn of AI

AI is contributing to effective influencer marketing in a number of ways. AI has made the

process of identifying the right influencers much more convenient and time effective. Moreover, with the help of AI, it is possible to identify those influencers who garner better engagement and have fewer fake followers. This can positively impact your ROI.

Aside from this, with the help of AI it is possible to analyze a large number of image and video attributes, study comment sentiment to understand the kind of posts that resonate with your users, helping you to generate more relevant content.

Another great contribution of AI to influencer marketing is the onset of CGI influencers. Last year, India saw the first Indian CGI influencer, called Rajiv. These influencers are created by CGI or Computer Generated Imagery and learn to act like humans with the help of AI. Globally, CGI influencers have been regular at people’s instagram feeds. From Lil Micquela to Shudu, there are a number of AI powered influencers who are becoming immensely popular on social media.

No Visible Likes Would Mean New Metrics

Loyalty > Likes - The removal of likes will make it important for brands to see if an influencer has a loyal and trustworthy audience or not.

The quality of the content will take up greater significance. People are influenced by authentic and relatable content, and brands will have to identify influencers that produce this kind of content.

Comments will become significant as they showcase the conversations built up by influencers with their audience and help in tracking the engagement with them.Brands will need to work with influencers with a steady follower growth.

Insight on the increase in followers over a period of time can give a fair idea of how well the audience is willing to interact and engage with a particular influencer.

The Growth Of Nano Influencers

A nano influencer is an individual who has as few as 1,000 to 5000 followers.

While they might be ‘ordinary people,’ they have exceptional social media skills and a natural ability to influence.

Brands are now recognizing the close-knit and hence valuable bond nano influencers have with their audience. This can be incredibly powerful as opposed to micro and macro influencers who create content for large followings, but often little engagement.

Another benefit is that these influencers have a highly specific audience base and can be excellent for campaigns designed for a particular niche group. For instance, nano influencers are perfect for geolocated campaigns. Most of them have a strong follower base in their local area or region.

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to influencer marketing is we can never be certain about which influencer has bots for followers. However, nano influencers offer more credibility. More often than not, they are not driven by economic profit and have developed their following by sharing quality content.

Influencer Marketing is becoming an always on strategy

Influencer marketing is no longer a one-off strategy. In fact, researches suggest that marketers spend at least 25% of their digital marketing budget on influencer marketing because it is more authentic and has proven to generate better results. Moreover, influencers who regularly promote a particular product or brand appear to be more genuine and authentic This is why we are seeing brands collaborate with influencers on an ongoing basis, making them the ambassador of the brand.

In addition to this, an ‘always-on’ influencer marketing campaign helps brands build an extension to their in-house content marketing team and regularly highlight their own existing narrative in a new way, so as to reinforce the communication they want to convey to their audience.

Another excellent benefit of having an ‘always-on’ influencer campaign is that it helps you enhance your brand recall value. If a brand is visible on social feeds for a few weeks and then suddenly disappears it will have a hard time making a long lasting impression in the memory of the audience. With continuity, a brand builds a greater recall value in the minds of the audience - who will remember the brand because they are reminded of it constantly by their idol.

Data-Driven Influencer Campaigns

According to bigcommerce.com, 65% of brands are planning to increase their spending on influencer marketing. This has undoubtedly increased the need for a data-driven approach.

The purpose of a data-driven strategy is to evaluate and measure the performance of influencers and keep a check on how the campaign is going. These insights are used to increase the effectiveness of your campaign and in turn, lead to an increase in the ROI. In simple words, data-driven influencer marketing refers to estimating the ROI generated through the campaign based on the relevant statistics and data.

These data-driven campaigns work around a defined goal and are planned, keeping the precise outcome in mind. Based on these objectives, one can decide the platforms, influencers, and content. For instance, if the objective of the campaign is to increase brand awareness, it needs to drive brand mentions and product reviews. On the other hand, if the campaign objective is to generate more sales, a good idea could be to provide coupon codes and special discounts for influencers’ followers.

Aside from this, in order to optimize the marketing campaign, an excellent method is to bifurcate the project into parts and periodically measure the relevant metrics. One highly effective way to do this is through the AIDA sales funnel model. AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action, and proposes different metrics that need to be considered through every step of the funnel.

Video content and influencer marketing work hand in hand

There’s no doubt that video marketing and influencer marketing go hand in hand. This is highly beneficial for brands since 72% of customers have stated that they would prefer to learn about a product through a video.  Secondly, video content is also highly favored by the algorithm of most social platforms, making it possible for it to garner higher engagement levels.

Small, bite-sized videos with more collaborative and interactive content work better with the attention span of the current generation, and IGTV and Instagram Reels provide the best platform for this. Influencers are aggressively leveraging these platforms to create different kinds of video content, including branded videos. These videos are widely consumed by their audience owing to the absence of distractions such as ads.

Employees and Customers  Double Up As Influencers

A brand’s two largest groups of advocates are likely to be satisfied customers and employees. However, many brands often ignore the benefits that can be yielded by leveraging their online presence. In fact, according to research conducted by MSL Group, brand messages reached 561% further when shared by employees vs. when the same messages were shared via official brand social channels.

These loyal advocates—whether its employees or customers help formulate a community and attract like-minded people to buy into the ideology of the brand.

Businesses now need to recognize that although these people may not have large scale followings, their familiarity and knowledge about the company's products or services can more than makeup for their smaller reach.

Employee and customer posted content not only generates more reach and response, but it's also seen as more authentic, and therefore, more likely to inspire action.

There are advocacy platforms like SOCXO that enable brands to leverage their stakeholders and transform them into brand advocates. #ARM Worldwide specializes in these tools and can help brands spread the voice of their most loyal advocates and transform them into influencers.

So these were our picks for the best influencer marketing trends that are dominating the landscape in 2020. These trends are easy to accommodate in your influencer marketing campaign but can lead to impressive results.

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In the coming months, businesses are going to see an increased dependency on their digital strategy to make it through to the post-COVID era. The unprecedented decline of live events and conferences, and other related channels, along with enhanced barriers of face-to-face business, pose an enormous challenge that can only be resolved with the help of technology.  We currently live in a world where there is a technological aid available to make practically everything more effective, convenient, and accurate. Our digital marketing efforts are no exception to this. In addition to this, for a small business, where every penny counts, it is all the more important to leverage these technological aids to make their digital marketing strategy more profitable and cost-effective.  Here we have devised a digital marketing toolkit that is ideal for SMEs and can help device effective digital strategies that are time and cost-effective. 

Adopt an automated email marketing tool 

With an automated email marketing tool, you can build and nurture strategies to reach out to a large number of stakeholders. These automation tools can get linked to your website analytics and target consumers based on their past behaviors and consumer patterns. This can help in creating highly personalized messaging in your emails and increase the impact of your email marketing strategy.  Let’s look at a few more benefits of an automated email marketing tool. 

Enhance the customer retention rate 

It’s a known fact that reselling to an existing customer is much easier than selling to a completely new one. This makes customer retention incredibly important. Automated email marketing can make this task much easier and more effective.   With an automated emailing system, you can schedule your emails to reach your customer on a regular basis so that they don’t go too long without hearing from you.  Aside from this, you can even use the data devised from their buying or consuming patterns to identify their need gaps and craft copies that target these particular need gaps. 

Makes Your Email Marketing Strategy Scalable 

One of the biggest advantages of automating an email marketing strategy is that it can make the campaign significantly more scalable and reduce human effort.  Once the guidelines are set-up, you no longer need a resource to be aligned to set up an email each time someone signs up.  Some great email marketing tools that can help you leverage these benefits are - 

• SendInBlue 
• Drip
• ConvertKit
• Mailchimp

Elevate The Performance Of Your  Social Media Efforts 

Social Media is as close as brands can get to a direct face-to-face interaction. As the opportunity for direct communication is currently limited, small businesses should take to social media to reach their customers.  However, If you are serious about getting your social channels in shape in 2020, you seriously can’t ignore social media tools. Let’s discuss a few social media tools and why every small or medium business needs to have these in their arsenal. 

• Scheduling tools 

One of the biggest advantages of having a social media scheduling tool is that it can help save time. Every social marketer would agree that it can be incredibly taxing, juggling between every social media platform, multiply this by the number of posts you make in a day.  Scheduling tools can help track and manage each social media message across different platforms and save a considerable amount of time and effort. 

• Analytics Tools 

With the help of analytics tools, you can track the performance of all your social media properties in a single place. These tools also let you analyze and report the performance of your social media campaigns and identify what’s working and what’s not.  These tools provide actionable insights that can be very useful in enhancing your social presence. 

• Engagement Tools

Engagement tools can make it easier to engage with your audience in the most effective way. One of the biggest advantages of engagement tools is that it creates a singular inbox and helps you respond to communications across platforms. 

• Listening Tools

Listening tools can help analyze the general sentiment of social media users around a trending topic. In addition to this, listening tools can also help track trending formats in your industry before they become widespread.  Some excellent social media tools are - 

• Buffer 

• Buzzsumo

• Hootsuite

• Zapier

Technologically Enhanced Content Marketing 

We are in an age where information has become one of the most important commodities. This is why quality content always comes out a winner. Creating well-written content that is powered by SEO can be highly advantageous for your business.  However, one of the biggest mistakes brands can do in content marketing is not being strategic about it. As per a study conducted by Content Marketing Institute, a major factor that sets apart efficient content marketers from the less efficient ones is their content-tech proficiency.  Another research shows that a way in which efficient marketers garner high content marketing ROI is to use tools that automate or simplify content creation, curation, and distribution. These factors are not exactly shocking as content marketing tools can be exceptionally useful in getting the most out of your time and energy. Here are a few benefits of utilizing content marketing tools. 

Analyze and identify  trending topics 

These tools let you garner useful insights by giving you an accurate window into the type of content that was shared most across networks. 

Helps in mapping competition 

Content marketing tools help you analyze how the competition’s content is performing and compare the performance with your own content. 

Measure the success of your content strategy

Once you've created your content marketing strategy, these tools also analyze it in terms of sales and overall performance. A few must-have tools in every content marketer’s arsenal - 

• Hubspot 
• Contentools
• Google Keyword Planner
• Wordpress

Use Technology To Simplify Video Marketing

Video marketing has undoubtedly become one of the biggest components of digital marketing. It has become nearly imperative to have video content in your content strategy, and a number of video marketing tools make this a fairly simple task.  Video marketing tools can help you at every stage of the process and help you ideate, plan, produce, edit, & distribute videos effectively.  Some tools can also be used to create a scene by scene script and project it in a series of index cards, making it incredibly feasible to produce a video.  A few tools also let you embed videos to your websites and other marketing campaigns with just a few clicks. All you need to do is upload your video to these tools, and they’ll be ready and optimized for sharing.  Some good video marketing tools are - 

• Wideo
• Viewbix
• Slidely
• WeVideo

Collect Data To Identify What’s Working 

Data has always been a marketer’s best friend, and It has only taken a more significant role in the time of upheaval. As an SME you need to analyze this data to measure the success of your marketing campaigns.  Marketing analytics tools can aid SMEs to anticipate market patterns and respond in real-time.  These tools provide solutions that leverage data mining or other statistical processes that can enable businesses to analyze and monitor their performance and identify their strengths and weaknesses. Another exceptional benefit of using analytics tools is that they enable businesses to analyze how different segments of consumers behave differently. This can be incredibly beneficial to predict how they might respond to different offerings.   Some good analytics tools are - 

• Google Analytics 
• SEM Rush
• Zoho Social
• Google Search Console

So these were our picks of useful tools that should be a part of your digital marketing toolkit as a small or medium business owner. Not only will these tools be incredibly useful in saving time and effort, but will also help in increasing the ROI of your marketing strategy.  Download the PDF version

In God we trust, all others must bring data- William Edwards Deming.

One of the most undesirable yet common scenarios in marketing is that brands invest their money and efforts in marketing but fail to get the desired results. When the question of where the money went is posed, most people are left with nothing but blank faces. However, as of right now, the scenario is finally changing since the digital space is offering us tools that can measure the impact of our PR efforts and avoid this situation. Every PR agency should adopt these metrics and use data to analyse their PR efforts. It is a better choice for not only them but also the brands they are working for, as they both can monitor the results of PR campaigns and move ahead with a clear picture in mind. We are living in a digital era, and as PR professionals, we need to understand how relevant data is in the contemporary world to get better and impactful results. No matter what you do – be it converting leads or improving your social media strategy – data holds the key. It is the insights that are derived from data that shape up the entire marketing scenario itself in today’s day and age. There are people in the industry who doubt the value of PR and consider it to be a waste of money and resources. To nullify that school of thought, PR needs to tap into the power of data and show more data-driven results. Results, when backed up with data, are more accessible and provide a clear direction on how to move ahead. Here, we list down three ways on how PR can explore the importance of data. Note: We should have limited expectations from PR, you can't measure the strength of media relation, you can't measure how positive journalist are for your brand, you can't directly measure the impact of media rounds but with the evolution of digital platforms you can map the results on organic growth of the business. #1 There is more to data than just coverage tracking When it comes to data, the number of impressions and the hits they have is not the only thing that matters. You should look beyond them from a bigger perspective. Analyse the news that interests the audience through the hits they get, then try and target this niche by publishing content and gauging the engagement. Figure out the news outlets that cover your content the most, along with the ones with whom you need to build better relationships. It will help you redefine your goals – after all, the ultimate aim of a PR professional is to create a landscape that helps them give their best. #2 Be more curious, ask more questions Have a 360-degree approach towards data. Apart from the media coverage you get, what else can you gain through data? What other aspects does a media coverage highlight? Think hard and look at the bigger perspective again; don’t just care about the number of hits, see the quality of hits as well. You should know what is essential. Continually asking questions about things around opens you to new ideas and better ways to engage in business. Analyse the data to understand the working trends in your industry. It can help you draw a better conclusion on the progress you are making against yourself and the competitors in the market. #3 Data validates your work Keep a record of your work in the form of data; The reach every article has, and the goals you achieved through every content piece. When you report to your clients, your data is your true friend. More than your words, your numbers will convince your client of the work you are doing. Today, data drives big decisions and statistics decide whether it will be a yes or no. People will always ask why you took a specific decision? For such questions, your data will be your way. Casestudy: Since last one year we are putting lot of efforts around PR and content marketing for Every time a brand or a business does a PR campaign, they invest a good amount of money and resources to make the PR campaign a huge success. It is necessary to understand how impactful the investment was and in what direction the efforts are going? To evaluate the PR efforts, there are majorly six metrics, and they are as follows:-

1. Audience engagement The objective of PR is not just about communicating a message instead it is also about engaging your audience in striking a communication with them. Initiating audience towards better engagement will help you gain better results in your PR efforts. Audience engagement goes beyond impressions and depends more on the number of clicks, likes, comments a post gets. It is not about getting a large number of followers on your social media handles instead of getting a relevant audience that engages with your posts. Interactions add more meaning to your campaigns, rather than constantly posting content, we need to stop a while and try to focus our efforts on creating engaging content. When I say engaging content, you need to educate your audience entertaining them in the process. The first step towards creating engaging content is to understand your audience, knowing them will help them serve better. The point is people can hack into and buy followers, but engagement is something that is genuine and cannot be hacked.
2. Social media reach In a world that is undergoing digitisation in almost every aspect, the influence of social media has proliferated in our lives. Understanding the social media reach of a campaign helps in understanding the context of the content written and the impact it can create on social media. It also helps in understanding the algorithm of social media platforms and create a campaign that is in sync with them. Calculating the social media reach also helps in understanding the audience and the rate at which they are growing.
3. Sales statistics When the budget dries up for online marketing, you won’t have the option for giving paid online ads but if you had a well-featured article that ran on a major publishing house, you continue to rake in the goodwill. PR may not be directly related to sales, but good PR leads to better brand building, better brand building, in turn, leads to good lead generation, and excellent lead generation, in turn, leads to better sales.  In fact, if a well-executed PR campaign shows zero impact on sales, you need to review your PR and marketing strategy and evaluate what went wrong. Two factors need to be considered when you evaluate sales for a PR campaign, and they are:- Timeframe - Mark a time frame during an ongoing PR campaign in your PR and content marketing calendar and calculate the number of sales that happened in that particular period.  You can break the time frame into days, weeks, and months.Sales channel - When it comes to measuring sales, the channel through which sales happen is of utmost importance. Though omnichannel is the new trend, there are still many brands which operate in multi-channel. Break down the data of every single sales channel, and you can check if the sales are happening more through online platforms or offline retail platforms.
4. Media impressions Media impressions is a common metric used by PR agencies to and measures the number of times people see your content or ad.  If a youtube video is watched more than three times by a particular person, the number of media impressions is three, similar is the case when it comes to a Facebook post or a tweet. The number of times a post is seen amount to the number of media impressions. The power of visibility can never be underestimated- Margaret Chu Media impressions help you in understanding the algorithm and working of a social media platform; it tells you the number of times your post could be seen on a social media platform. Though the general opinion is media impressions don’t make too much of an impact, but media impressions are quite useful when combined with other metrics and help in getting a clearer picture of the impact made through a particular PR campaign.
5. Brand mentions “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about” — Oscar Wilde When a PR campaign is executed well, it leads to a rise in the number of times a brand was mentioned on guest blogs as well as different social media handles. Though the major problem is more than 90% of the people who talk about brands don’t do it on the respective social media handles of the particular brand rather a lot of talks is done on personal social media handles and forums like Reddit and Quora. So, it becomes really essential for brands to monitor all these discussions to understand the opinion of people as well as know the indirect impact a PR campaign had on the visibility of their brand. Monitoring brand mentions on different forums help in finding digital ambassadors of your product or service who can be used to amplify the reach of a PR campaign. When you map the brand mentions you are getting from different social media handles, it helps you in building better relationships and in turn gives you a gateway to approach them every time you have a content piece that needs to be reached out to a maximum number of people.
6. Website traffic Website traffic is a significant metric to understand the impact of a PR campaign. Moreover, website traffic helps in evaluating various demographics of traffic, be it location, time, or age of the audience and these demographics in return help in assessing if the PR campaign is reaching its target audience or not. PR boosts web traffic through published media, and it has a significant impact on organic search rankings as well. Published media helps in earning brand mentions on social media, and if the publications have the link of your website, it automatically leads to visitors from the content source. When you track the traffic of your site, check the sources from where the traffic is being generated. It will give you a better understanding of publications that are generating better traffic for you.

These six metrics when analysed give us a clear picture of how relevant data is in determining the importance of PR. Data analysis is interesting, and the possibilities are many. For PR professionals, data is more than just the number of hits your content piece gets. Its importance goes beyond that. Data gives you the power of analysis and analysis gives you great insights. These insights help you come up with better ideas, leading to better campaigns. Digital era thrives on data, and it is high time PR professionals understand the importance of data.  Whatever a PR does, be it communicating or public relations, it is a data-driven job. And for a PR professional to be right in their field, they need to be good with numbers.

ad:tech 2019 started on a high note with a spirited session from David Freeman, the Executive Vice President of Star India, who spoke about the importance of emotional stakes in the marketing strategies of today. This point was illustrated in an innovative manner when he directed the audience to shake the hand of a person they didn’t know and talk about a unique aspect of their life. This abstract yet enlightening exercise helped put a unique point into context – human beings are capable of something that no other species is capable of; storytelling. It’s the dawn of mankind that has brought about the age of storytelling as we know it, and it’s through these stories that various feelings and emotions are elicited within people. However, storytelling is not a limited aspect. If anything, it’s a broad aspect that can be utilised in a manner that’s become quite popular in the commercial space – marketing. With digital marketing quickly becoming the norm, it’s important to understand that attention spans are dwindling more and more. Therefore, to ensure that little to no problems come in the way of a brand’s marketing initiatives, storytelling should be integrated throughout a particular campaign to maximise engagement and accrue substantial results. We say this because – as discussed above – storytelling is a medium that invokes emotions. Using this strategy in a marketing initiative and induce the appropriate feelings can go a long way in ensuring the runaway success of any marketing campaign. In the simplest terms, stories should provide desirable experiences that make consumers crave a particular product or service. A great way to illustrate this point would be to talk about the success story of Dollar Shave Club. At a glance, the products of a shaving company might not seem all that interesting. This was a challenge for the company – how exactly could they tell a story with something so seemingly pedestrian like male grooming products. Well, here’s how they met this challenge. The company’s offerings itself communicate two crucial messages:

• The name Dollar Shave Club should be enough to hint towards the fact that the products are economical, therefore removing any financial barriers to entry.
• Since these products are delivered to your doorstep with little to no effort, there’s also a level of convenience attached to these offerings.

This messaging is further augmented through their quirky marketing campaign that conveyed the following:

• Everyone relates to comedy, and Dollar Shave Club managed to accomplish precisely that with a marketing campaign kept humour at the forefront of its messaging.
• A brand that’s portrays itself as rebellious will be more appealing to young men – a demographic that Dollar Shave Club targets.
• Michael Dubin – the founder of Dollar Shave Club – portrayed himself as a warm and friendly individual, further helping consumers relate to the brand at large.

Dollar Shave Club is not the only brand that has adopted a story-heavy marketing approach – Nike also took the bold decision of using Colin Kaepernick as a figurehead to carry out a personalised marketing campaign. What does all of this illustrate? It shows that empathy is essential for a brand. Without this aspect, all brands are doing is selling the same-old product or service that won’t resonate with the consumer. It’s only when consumers can attach a sense of emotion to these offerings through a story-driven marketing campaign that brands can improve the results they accrue through these strategies.

PR, just like nearly every function of promotion, has had multiple faces since its inception. It is a field which has evolved into new forms multiple times and will continue to do so in the near future. Nowadays, PR is heavily linked with other functions, specifically in new-age marketing, such as content marketing, SEO, and even facets such as design. As the field expands, so do the ways in which brands and agencies approach journalists and publications in this contemporary world of PR.

Evolution of Public Relations

Traditional PR and traditional advertising went hand-in-hand. Back in the days, advertisers often swore by the ‘spray and pray’ approach - the notion of promoting your offerings anywhere and everywhere and praying that your target audience views it. Simultaneously, PR professionals were hired to ‘smile and dial’ - cold calling with the hope of securing leads. These concepts often boded well with the way the general public interacted with media (television, print, radio). With these forms of media, it was impossible to filter through content as per your convenience. With promotions being a key feature of all these mediums - you had no choice but to sit through all television ads, nor did you ever want to risk skipping a few pages in the newspaper. Today, the way the general public accesses and consumes content is evolving with each passing day, which has brought along a shift in the media industry as well. A clear element driving this change is technology - in the form of new-age content, and concepts like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. New-age technology offers brands an ability to increase revenue and reduce costs through more intelligent automation and machine-powered predictions. The future of Media will also see pitches that have new-age content formats like images, infographics, mixed media, data visualizations, and videos, as the preferred formats by journalists, since it holds and engrosses them with the ideas shared in the pitch.  However, while digital PR has gained immense popularity as online media is rapidly overtaking traditional print media, you must understand that there is still a place for traditional PR strategies. You must regularly scrutinise the differences between traditional vs. digital PR to ensure you’re utilising each to their full capacity.

A Shift Towards Inbound PR

Creating Customer-Centric Narratives The first step towards an inbound PR strategy is creating a narrative your consumers care about. While it is critical to impress the journalists, forgetting about your consumer is a blunder you cannot afford to make. Instead of crafting releases or blog posts with the sole purpose of pleasing the journalists, ensure they resonate with your buyer persona. Thinking Outside The Box For businesses big and small, huge product announcements are not the only purposes of a press release. Think out of the box, analyse your business from top-to-bottom and ask yourself - What are we doing that is truly remarkable? Not every story has to be apt for Forbes, but it can be enough to keep your loyal followers intrigued and fascinated. For starters, here are a few ideas to kickstart conversations and leverage your company as a thought leader - 

• Use new-age content formats and creativity to your advantage
• Instead of emailing journalists telling them the leaders of your brands are experts on a given topic, have them publish a blog on the topic first and then pitch, so they know their take is relevant. 
• Map the sentiments towards the brand via discussions happening on social media and weighing it with your brand’s ideas and thoughts. 

Create Content that Counts We often forget that journalists are humans, and 99.9% humans prefer quirky, interesting, and dynamic content over the usual ‘who, what, where, when, why’ - which is often bland. When drafting a release, feel free to focus on what is unique, different and narrative-driven rather than stick to the set traditional template. 

The Role of PR in Marketing 

Ideating your own content through a website blog is not only a great way to build identity, but also drive traffic. A great alternative to traditional pitching is to craft high-quality guest posts for industry blogs in your space.  Search engines value quality over quantity as well now, so invest the time and energy to develop thoughtful guest posts for consideration on blogs in your space. This will result in the benefits of SEO as well as potential media coverage. In terms of ROI, utilising cost-per-click data to estimate the equivalent advertising value is a key factor. No matter where you choose to put your marketing efforts, your CPC efforts will have a large impact on how much you spend on those efforts. Evaluating this data can give you an accurate estimate of how your organic PR is performing. If you are receiving a click-through organic search as opposed to advertising, then you can conclude this click can be attributed to your PR efforts. 

Marketing Meets Journalism 

In the volatile and viral world of social media today, time is scarce when it comes to journalism, which is why it is essential to help journalists operate at a lightning-fast speed by ensuring they have access to all information at their fingertips at the right time.  Decoding About Us Page A lot of people write their ‘About Us’ pages with ambiguous language. Make sure the description of your brand is crystal clear to the journalists. It is important to invest time and effort in perfecting such sections of your website. Adding Social Sharing Icons Embedding Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn sharing icons on your press page and each press release will help ignite social media discussions about conversations you wish to drive. Offering Helpful Industry Data Offering industry data and information that relates to topics journalists might be interested in helps you stand out and catch their attention since it provides a context to the release. This increases the likelihood of your brand sticking in their memory.

Building Relationships With Media

The first and foremost step towards building and maintaining relationships with the media is to respect them and their job. A journalist’s job is not to promote your product/service/idea. It is to tell an intriguing story or capture fascinating news that is relevant to their outlet. By respecting their role and craft, not only will you drive better results for yourself, but also hone long-lasting and fruitful relationships. The next step towards building a list of media relations is to do your basic homework. Collating the journalist’s information such as links to recent coverage, context from his/her twitter bio, social media handles, and contact information is a good starting point. You can even leverage social media to facilitate seamless communication with your media friends and find out what keeps them engaged on a daily basis, and use this information to ideate future content considerations. For example, If you see reporters constantly discussing a particular industry occurrence, consider creating a blog post directed at it and send them the link instead of waiting for them to reach out to you. Lastly, media communication should be a two-way street. Find ways to add value to your reporter’s daily lives as well. You can share and promote their content even when it’s not related to you, offer genuine and honest feedback/inputs, or even potentially provide them opportunities to explore your business, your approach, or meet with your team. It is important to understand how technological innovations and automation have transformed the media industry. These concepts must be embraced to elevate your PR strategies - such as a systematic focus on Inbound PR or the synergy between PR and marketing. As you familiarise yourself with these concepts, the key is to integrate them with the traditional role and responsibilities of journalists and not discount the importance of fruitful and genuine interaction in the process. Download the PDF version

Companies constantly need to update skilling programs for their employess to remain relevant and cutting edge.The Indian start-ups space is evolving exponentially. The growth has been largely contributed by newly arrived technology cycle which has brought new requirements and hence rapidly changes the existing skills in the labor market. A specialized or diverse skill set is expected out of employees to be relevant in this rapidly changing digital environment. The advancement of technology and automation has brought us to the brink of an unanticipated catastrophe when it comes to manpower employability. The fast-paced technological progress is giving way to new developments; however, reskilling has become the most essential ingredient to create the workforce of the future.

Re-skilling, by definition, means �teach� (a person, especially an unemployed person) new skills. In the current scenario, there is a strange skepticism on the ability to cater to the change in technology by the present skill sets of employees. It arises from the fact that the workforce is not equipped enough to adapt to the rapidly changing technological advances. The world has moved almost overnight to new forms of technologies involving blockchain, AI, Machine learning technology which is forecasted to make lot of workforce redundant. Banking has seen a dash of technological change through use of blockchain and automation of analytics by AI and Machine learning augmentation. Industrial automation has seen a surge on manufacturing sector organizations moving to low human resource intensive processes. Automobile companies saves almost 90% cost of manual testing efforts by implementing industrial design, robust governance, and strong process flow through automation of processes. In the light of almost a renaissance happening in the technology world, it has become vital to �re-skill� to stay on pace with the automation of processes. In the ever-changing landscape currently, by the time companies manage to set up a full-fledged team, the technology becomes obsolete. Therefore, it is very important to equip the native employees with resources and provide a congenial agile work framework for quick adoption. Re-skilling is critical in a startup or a digital marketing space because it gives a competitive advantage in the long run and is much better than hiring skilled workers. Invest in people you already have and build on their strengths. Average age of the employees is another factor which gives reskilling an encouragement in mid-size businesses. A major chunk of today�s workforce starts from 20 and ranges till 35 which makes it easier for companies to reskill them. They are flexible and carry an open mind to change and adopt new roles and opportunities coming their way. There is an efficient way to build and gear a team to campaign their way to the top of the chain, and that�s by empowering employees with reskilling. Re-skilling is critical in a startup or a digital marketing space because it gives a competitive advantage in the long run and is much better than hiring skilled workers. Invest in people you already have and build on their strengths. Average age of the employees is another factor which gives reskilling an encouragement in mid-size businesses. A major chunk of today�s workforce starts from 20 and ranges till 35 which makes it easier for companies to reskill them. They are flexible and carry an open mind to change and adopt new roles and opportunities coming their way. There is an efficient way to build and gear a team to campaign their way to the top of the chain, and that�s by empowering employees with reskilling. Employees need to combine excellent digital specialist skills with deep functional business knowledge. They should be comfortable with short delivery cycles and be able to operate across silos and within cross-functional teams. Today, the ability to collect and analyze data to derive insights about a business or about the domain is the differentiating factor that separates companies at the top of the business from their competition. This is where the concept of �reskilling� comes into place � where companies constantly need to update skilling programs for their employees to remain relevant and cutting-edge. We often see that those companies who are at the top of their game, highly prioritize learning and development goals for their employees.

Processes are changing and getting upgraded continuously, hence concrete steps need to be taken in this context. There are some pointers that needs to be considered while upskilling employees �

1. Regular training programme

Engaging employees in multiple training programs by inviting experts to the organization to share their learning and experiences can always help the workforce gain knowledge. Listening and learning from the masters of the field gives a sense of trust to the employees that upskilling is an option to a better future. This further encourages employees to learn and reskill themselves. This is possible only if they get access to Flexi-learning, allowing them to learn at their own pace alongside their busy work commitments.

2. Easy access to training material

Employees should have access to learning. They need to be able to study anywhere anytime at their own convenience. Technology allows for easy access of study material across any device through flexible Learning Management Systems, even while on the go. The online courses are typical of shorter durations allowing the students to upskill quickly within a short period of time.

3. What company leaders can do

Assess the skills and capabilities of the current workforce against the capabilities one will want in the future, not what is needed currently. The goal is to identify gaps so that the leaders can help individuals focus on specific areas to reskill or upskill. Create a real-time system that helps monitor progress over time.

4. Taking ownership

For any organization to be successful, it�s important that its employees succeed and adopt a continuous learning mindset. A proactive engagement to learn new skill set will help them succeed in future. As LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman says, �embrace a start-up of your mentality��which means adopting a more entrepreneurial approach and carving your own path through the new world of work. Majority of workers appear to understand this already. According to a survey, 74 percent say they believe it�s their own responsibility to update their skills rather than relying on any employer. We can take the case of American multinational conglomerate AT&T Inc. which choose to rapidly re-skill more than a hundred thousand of its current employees. AT&T has been strong in its conviction to give its employees�those who have built the brand over the past decades�the opportunity to ensure the continued marketability of their skills through wholesale reskilling. Re-skilling builds an atmosphere where people can pay attention to jobs of the different kind that demands thinking and creativity which helps an individual grow. The procedure may sound intimidating, but this is the only way to survive in this technologically evolving space. Help can be taken from academic institutions to help revise curriculums and create opportunities for lifelong learning. At the same time, individuals within themselves have to develop that zeal for learning, take the charge of reskilling oneself rather than relying on some third party.

Together companies and employees can prepare the manpower for tomorrow.

Originally published at https://bit.ly/2pi61eA on September 16, 2018.

As technology evolves with each passing day, it becomes more and more integrated into our daily lives. With each innovation that takes place in technology, the lines between our online and real lives become increasingly blurred.  Needless to say, this has led to a significant change in the way we consume content. Today, we are dependent on multiple gadgets and interact with many different digital devices on a daily basis. This shift in consumer behaviour has opened many doors for marketers and has given way to a need to consider and pursue a more holistic approach to digital marketing. This holistic approach is what has come to be known as the omnichannel approach to marketing.  In a nutshell, an omnichannel approach to marketing allows marketers to account for each channel a consumer uses to interact with content and allows them to enhance their marketing efforts.  In today’s times, omnichannel marketing can be an incredibly valuable tool in the arsenal of marketers. Let’s discuss this in more detail. Leads To Better Brand Recognition And Sales Millennial shoppers have shown a preference for brands that have an omnichannel presence.  An omnichannel marketing strategy implies that the consumers get a consistent and cohesive experience each time they experience your brand and are urged to pass each step of the sales funnel without any hiccups.  Omnichannel Marketing is also excellent for brand recognition as it helps brands reach out to different audiences and establish a presence in the minds of consumers of all demographics. Different kinds of users use different kinds of platforms, by being present on all these platforms you can easily increase your reach. These strategies are exceptionally useful for startups as well, who are in the beginning stages of understanding their target audience and can benefit from having a more universal presence.  OTT platforms displace cable TV  The advent of OTT platforms changed the landscape for all the involved stakeholders, including marketers. As Netflix and other streaming services became popular, they redefined the way people “watched TV” and made it inevitable for marketers to shift to an omnichannel approach to retain their engagement with these consumers.  It’s not surprising that today, four out of five smartphone owners in India subscribe to at least one of these OTT platforms. This is in addition to the free UGC platforms like Youtube. Now, as more and more viewers become accustomed to these new-age digital streaming services, TV commercials are no longer as promising as they used to be. In fact, as per a report by KPMG, many Indians will soon consider cutting-off their cable TV subscription since their entertainment needs are being met by these platforms.  Marketers need to look past conventional TV and enhance their media budgets to leverage these upcoming OTT channels with more prominent audience segmentation and measurement capacities. Moving to an omnichannel approach will empower them to gain a more significant ROI and guarantee that target customers are not missed as their TV watching propensities change. The best part about OTT platforms is its potential to allow omnichannel video marketing. Consumers today watch video content over different gadgets throughout the day. What this implies for marketers is the chance to draw viewers all the more adequately over various direct, on-request and live streaming gadgets. Customer Segmentation At Your Fingertips Today, the market has become so swarmed, that mass marketing alone doesn't work with regards to drawing in and retaining customers. Additionally, spoiled for choice, customers have become all the more demanding and expect increasingly customised marketing messages. This is why it gets imperative to segment customers and give applicable and personalised information to win and retain them.  Omnichannel marketing works on segmenting and personalisation of messages. Segmenting the audience into categories makes it simpler to deliver the right message to them. Categorisation can be done based on the audience profile (demographics, age, gender, area, and so forth), engagement levels (how much a particular person interacts with the channels), and shopping intent.  Automation can also be set up to send relevant messages to the correct audience at the right time and through proper channels. New-age strategies like location-specific mobile advertising could also be applied to get ideal results. Soaring Engagements  Omnichannel marketing enables marketers to orchestrate moments that refine the customer experience with the brand leading to better engagement. With an omnichannel approach brands can maintain a presence across channels and connect with customers in a more robust fashion.  Brands can also make use of a multi-channel sales approach to provide customers with an integrated shopping experience and make it easier for consumers to pass through the sales funnel.  Brands are also using omnichannel platforms to provide real-time solutions and create a positive brand image. In fact, marketers using an omnichannel approach to marketing, enjoy an engagement rate that is up to 250% higher than single-channel campaigns.  Brands have also been using AI bots to interact with customers through their mobile devices acting as a shop assistant, hence improving customer experience. Let’s recap all the benefits of leveraging an omnichannel marketing strategy. 

• Leads To Better Brand Recognition
• The shift to OTT platforms has made it increasingly crucial for brands to leverage Omnichannel marketing to avoid missing out on prospective customers
• Customer segmentation becomes incredibly convenient with Omnichannel marketing
• Omnichannel marketing strategies have shown to generate better AOV

 Your guide to omnichannel strategies  Now, these are the kind of benefits that we can not afford to ignore. So what are the things that we should keep in mind while designing our omnichannel marketing strategy? Here are a few recommendations that can help.  Get In Your Customer’s Shoes:   Regularly audit the experience your clients go through to research, buy, and interact with your campaign. Test the experience by placing orders, interacting with every accessible channel. If possible, these tests should be performed by both external and internal analysers. Measure The Performance Measuring the performance of your omnichannel campaign is incredibly important as it lets you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your efforts.  Focus On Customer Centricity  In the current scenario, your omnichannel campaign must be based on the client experience. Start by making sense of your clients' most favoured channels. If you don't have an idea about where they spend their time, how might you hope to serve them? Develop a Uniform Brand Presence  It’s important to help your customers become familiar with your brand. After all, familiarity creates trust.  Leverage The Right Tools Organizations that need to offer their clients a start to finish customer experience across all channels face a couple of technical difficulties. Although these difficulties can easily be countered with the help of the right tools. Closing Note  With new-age consumers now consuming content across a wide array of devices in numerous situations, the only way a marketer can win is by offering a cohesive experience to customers. That’s the only way to stay relevant in the current scenario.  Download the PDF version

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. 

The global pandemic has brought a plethora of changes in basic day-to-day activities and functions, be it the way we work, shop, communicate, or even entertain ourselves. This shift in lifestyle has led to a clear transformation of consumer behaviour and patterns. It is quite clear individuals are spending more of their time online, with various facets of digital platforms becoming widely popular. Brands must leverage this opportunity to come up with engaging and impactful content to leave lasting impressions on their consumers through digital channels. Through the power of words and visuals, content can be used to connect with audiences and build a community of like-minded people.

Creators, Culture & Content

A digital channel and its wide array of functions is a great way to help cultivate brand image and awareness through content. You can position your brand by talking about what really matters to the consumers through relevant content. If your brand is strongly involved with positive causes or initiatives for the betterment of society, do not hesitate in to stand up for a cause that’s integral to the brand’s purpose. It is quite likely that this sentiment would resonate with your target audience, and in turn, build a sense of community and belongingness. Now is the time to drive engagement and active participation of your audiences. You must build on ideas (campaigns, competitions) that help energize social communities as well as bring people together on one common platform.

Creative Playbook 

Building brand identity & persona through communication design is an easy yet effective way to help create an online presence. Design capabilities are at an all-time high, with no signs of slowing down in the near future, so building consistent visual language with colour & typography is a great way to start. Branded content creators have been around for a while now, across nearly all social media and content platforms. Brands can further enhance their content creativity by investing even more time and resources in these specialised content creators and further exploring remote production. Social media platforms evolve at a rapid pace and missing out in these developments designed to augment your content is quite risky. For example, Facebook playable ads are a jump from the ordinary - a quirky and engaging way to advertise to users. 

Ad(ding) Value 

Winning the social media game revolves all-around maximising a users experience when they open their app & adding some value to their time spent browsing. This will help you stand out from the plethora of content a single user consumes in one session. As already explained, Facebook playable ads are a unique form of advertising online and help give users a chance to interact and participate with the brand. Playable ads can also be leveraged keeping in mind the recent shift towards online mobile gaming. Like playable ads, there are a variety of different social media elements that can be utilised to add value to user experience, including native content such as Instagram feed ads.

Feel It, Reel It

The importance of staying up-to-date with the latest elements of social media, and using them to enhance your content curation capabilities, simply cannot be stated enough. Instagram Reels is here to add an entirely new dimension to the platform. The feature follows a 15-second video format with its own set of creative editing tools like a countdown timer, speed adjustment & more. Unlike stories, Reels can be shared in the explore section & viewed by everyone on the platform. It is even possible for multiple reels to be recorded at once & different effects can be added to each clip. The feature also includes some quirky and innovative AR effects to help users add a unique touch to their videos.  With the recent ban of Tiktok, it is no surprise to see Instagram leverage this new feature to capture that entire user segment. While prior to the bane, Tiktok content creators strictly restricted themselves to that platform, now we will see a much wider and diverse segment using Instagram.  Simply due to the wide functions and capabilities of digital mediums now, the chances to engage and connect with users through innovative content are on the rise. Accurate targeting functions allow you the option to engage with relevant consumers, while new-age data insights and analysis give you a clear picture of how your content is resonating with users.