The jury is out. Digital marketing post-pandemic should be a multi-channel, multi-faceted endeavor. Marketing in today’s digital landscape looks vastly different than it did 2½ years ago. The old promise of Digital Advertising was that you could reach exactly who you needed, when you needed to, as often as you wanted. But now, getting your campaigns and content seen is only half the battle.
Here’s why:
- The pandemic forced businesses to digitally transform leading to a huge increase in web traffic competition. The world wide web is now saturated.
- Increased access to a variety of social channels with seemingly endless marketing possibilities. Knowing where to start or which avenues to follow can be mind-boggling.
- Privacy controls are being ratcheted up on every platform, giving marketers less access to consumer data.
- Consumer mindset has changed. Their priorities shifted, along with their sensibilities and needs, thus ultimately changing their digital behavior.
- Attention spans are short and ad fatigue and ad blindness are clear and present dangers to any marketing campaign.
We are here to tell you that all is not lost. If there is one thing we all can agree on, after the pandemic, most businesses and people have become very good at pivoting. And that is just what we are going to do. Marketing is all about pivoting – following the trends, and the data, and meeting consumers where they are. We’ve got some tricks up our sleeves. If you want to thrive in this post-pandemic digital landscape, you need to build an audience, capture their attention and keep them engaged. To accomplish this, you have to prioritize your social media presence and create meaningful content. You must consider the experience of your audience. You are going to have to earn their attention.
- Social Media Strategy. Ariel wants to be where the people are and so should you. Go where they go. Meet them where they are. Be strategic and intentional with every social channel and platform. Be active on the ones you choose to use. Engage, respond, communicate, and keep information up-to-date. Your social media strategy should account for differences between each social media audience. Get out there and use it wisely!
- Content Creation. This is a biggie. And it’s something many businesses struggle to keep up with. But it is one of the best ways to build and engage with your audience. Creating content that feels valuable to consumers is the bridge you will build to lead them to you. This goes beyond social media posts. Email marketing continues to reign supreme, so creating email content with links to Ebooks, blog posts, videos, and podcasts – all of this shows your worth, your value, your consistency, and your credibility. This is showing your audience that with you, they get so much more than a product or service. Here are some ideas to get you started.
- Brand Building. Your brand has to stand out. To say the internet is saturated is an understatement. How saturated? 1.98 billion websites and counting. How many pages are you willing to sift through to find an answer, product, or service? Google is the first destination for consumers in their searches, which handles 8.5 billion web searches per day. For 90% of mobile searches, consumers click on only the first 2 or 3 results and rarely look past the first page. There are other marketing strategies we use to accomplish getting our clients ranking higher. But there is more to building your brand than Google rankings and SEO. You will also inspire engagement with a knock-out logo, visuals, user experience, etc. And you must ignite your audience on an emotional level. Connecting emotionally makes you memorable. And recall gets them back to you over and over again.
- Build Community. Emotional connection. An active social media presence. Consistent engagement with your audience. Building your brand and taking your audience with you on the ride. Giving your audience content that adds value to their lives. All of these things have distinct purposes in a marketing campaign, but what they also do is help you build and foster a sense of community that wasn’t possible before. And building a community that engages with you and each other is a surefire way to keep the attention of your audience. This will undoubtedly draw others in too – no one wants to feel left out!
- Keep Communication Lines Open – Uh oh. You got shadowbanned. Or a niche platform you were using fizzled out. Or you got kicked off a platform entirely. It happens to the best of us. The best way to keep your audience’s attention in the event you lose a line of communication is to create a funnel that gets you into their inboxes. This is where email marketing comes in. Provide irresistible CTA’s to entice your social media followers and website visitors to sign up for emails. You can do this with the valuable content you undoubtedly are creating. Include weekly newsletters, free downloads, or blog post announcements. You can also pull them in with special discount offers or access to limited product releases when they sign up for email. The verdict? Never rely on one channel of audience engagement, and slide into their inboxes early and often.
- Creative Strategy. Did you know that you are exposed to over 6,000 ads per day? Consumers are inundated with messaging, more so than ever before. This means that with any kind of marketing, you need to nail it. The entire user experience needs to be undeniably irresistible – from the ad copy to the visuals to the ad placement. It all has to strike the absolute right chord with your audience to keep their attention, let alone convert. A creative strategy that considers visual trends, consumer psychology, and methodically-crafted content will capture and keep their attention.
- Contextual Targeting – You can only keep an audience’s attention for as long as you serve them what they want. With newer privacy settings creating a scarcity of data for digital marketers, it’s time to think like a traditional marketer. To serve the appropriate ads, we need to know the consumer’s mindset now, not last week. We do this with analytics and Native Advertising, where we consider the platform environment as we create the look, feel, and function of our ads. If an ad does not fit natively into the platform, the target audience is going to scroll right past it. We also see the power of first- and third-party data. Even without cookies, platforms like Facebook can collect data about their users so that marketers can target specific audiences. You can do this through gated content, email marketing, data append services, and even just through plain-old conversation. Having a CRM rich with client data is a powerful business asset that will certainly mature into one of the best investments your business can make in the coming years. Give the people what they want!
- Analysis. Attention metrics are your friend. The more time a consumer pays attention to your content the more likely they are to have better brand awareness and recall. Don’t just leave your ads and other content out there on their own. They need to be checked in on. And you need to know how your time, effort, and money is working to better your business. This is not only going to ensure that you are doing all the right things to increase audience attention but it’s also just good marketing.
This might feel like a lot. It is. But when done right, all of these practices are going to keep your audiences’ attention and engagement and ultimately, convert. In these post-pandemic times, that alone is vital to the health of any business. You have two options.
- Start small. Do a little bit at a time. Start with your social media presence and brand building. Then week by week add something new to the marketing mix. But don’t wait – you don’t have to have all your ducks in a row to jump in.
- Hire a digital marketing company like Site Hub. We can take all of this off your plate. Or if you want to start small, just one or two off the list. Maybe you don’t have time to write blog posts or newsletters. Maybe you need some help figuring out how to reach your target audience. Maybe you don’t know the first thing about creating a visually stunning logo. Maybe your web content needs some zhuzhing. You’ve got marketing needs and we’ve got the tools and talent to fill them. Let’s dive in together!
