“Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but about the stories you tell”–Seth Godin.
There’s no doubt that 2020 is one of the craziest years in more than a century. And, among the uncertainty and chaos brought by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many industries, including marketing, have changed to adapt to the new normal.
With the year nearing its twilight, marketers are now better prepared, and 2021 is likely to bring changes in marketing methodology.
You have to think and create marketing ideas that resonate with the situation.
For example, during COVID-19, Gold Gym promoted their home work out services using a simple yet creative ad, as shown below:
What the company did right was tweaking its marketing idea to fit the current situation.
Marketers can no longer wait for the world to get a green light for returning to everyday life. To survive and thrive again, you need to be aware of and adapt to new marketing trends that will shape the marketing briefcase of 2021.
We’ve chalked out a roadmap for navigating the year ahead without facing any roadblocks.
Table of Contents
5 Business Boosting Marketing Ideas for 2021
To ramp up your marketing strategies, we’re sharing five marketing ideas to boost your business in the New Year.
1. Create engaging presentations
With 63% of attendees remembering stories after a presentation and only 5% remember statistics, creating engaging presentations sends the right message across to the target audience. Bad visuals, unprofessional layout, and uncreative presentations make your business look confusing and messy.
That’s why you require free presentation software.
The presentation software creates a presentation without giving a ‘standard template vibe.’ It lets you convey the message by striking the right chord through stories and exciting narration. Even in the coming year, presentations will be an excellent way to connect with customers and collaboratively define solutions in an engaging and presentable manner.
Additional tips: Forget slides, tell stories. A story is common to everyone, builds interest, and is easy to follow.
2. Start a referral or customer loyalty program
The likelihood of selling a product to an existing customer is 60-70%, whereas it comes down to 5-20% for a new customer.
These statistics should get you started as customer retention is inevitable and has a long-term effect on your profit. Increasing customer retention by 5% increases profit by 25-95%. Today, customer retention is all about customer loyalty, and these customers mean repeat business and referrals to other customers.
Unlike other years, 2021 will be the year to become customer-centric, balancing the economies of referral programs for delivering unparalleled value to customers.
Ways of creating a customer loyalty program:
- Create a point system, and make it simple
- Offers killer incentives for referrals
- Provide tiered rewards –higher tier = better rewards
- Offer discounts to every new customer who buys through referral
The referral program from Casper is engaging, creative, and offers a killer incentive. From cheeky headline to a personal referral link creation – Casper completely nails its referral program.
Additional tip: Similar to Amazon Prime, you can ask customers to pay an upfront fee for additional benefits.
3. Optimize for voice search
The massive success of Alexa, Siri, and Google Home has made people dependent upon voice search for every single task. According to research, 33.8% of the US population uses some voice assistant. With growing technology, the number will only increase in 2021, which is why it’s essential to optimize your SEO strategies for voice search.
While most text-based searches have 1-4 words, voice searches average close to 5-10 words, making it imperative to change keywords for better SERP results.
One of the best ways of ensuring search results is optimizing for voice search through an updated Google My Business (GMB) page. When a customer uses voice search in Google, it shows companies’ results with a GMB presence.
Additional tip: Usually, voice searches are about specific questions. You can also boost your business by expanding the FAQ page to make your company more visible in search results.
4. Focus on video marketing
Most of the out-of-home options are living a quarantined life resulting in people consuming videos more than ever.
With YouTube influencers seeing a 20-30% increase in their views and engagement, it’s the right time to embrace video marketing. From Instagram to Facebook, the world is demanding more video content, and its importance for boosting your business is increasing every passing day.
Video marketing allows a brand to connect at a personal level and fosters more communication. Its power lies in communicating information faster and simultaneously at three levels: video, audio, and emotional. Apart from making your target audience SEE your brand, it lets them HEAR your brand as well.
Videos that can boost business in 2021 are:
- Live videos
- Shoppable videos
- 360-degrees video explainer
- Interactive videos
- Animated videos
- Whiteboard marketing videos
- Webinars
Additional tip: You can repurpose your existing content as a video, and you don’t have to start at square one. Also, optimize videos you upload with relevant keywords to increase web traffic and views.
5. Brand activism
What happens when a brand and customer don’t share the same values or ethics?
Customers move to brands, which share the same values and ethics.
With nine-in-10 Millennial switching brands to one associated with a cause, it leaves brands with no choice than aligning their values with customers. As a result, brands have become vocal about their values.
Netflix supported the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2020; other brands went a step further and funneled the support in their branding and products. Brands such as Twitter, Adidas, and Nike showed their strong stand.
Brand activism shows customers that brands are committed to issues that people care about most.
Ways to encourage brand activisms:
- Making public announcement
- Donating money to a specific group
- Volunteering for a cause
- Making statements through the marketing campaigns
Additional tip: You need to choose the right issue to support; otherwise, your campaign or efforts can meet a similar fate as that of Starbucks’s Race Together campaign.
Conclusion
While these marketing ideas don’t represent an exhaustive list, these are a great place to start when planning your marketing strategy for 2021.
Though these ideas are new and the change would require effort, but when implemented correctly, it could be the difference between success and failure. To make changes run smoothly, invest in a knowledge base that works as a repository for documenting every marketing change. Using a knowledge base template helps in ensuring your marketing team is up-to-date on information. It allows them to take critical marketing decisions without wasting time searching for information.
Apart from the above marketing ideas, be wary of data compliance laws as non-adherence to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can attract hefty penalties. Whenever you harness your customers’ data online, you’ve got to make sure you protect it. This means that every social media conversion falls under GDPR laws, so ensuring that your team knows what is GDPR compliance is of key importance. Mathematics for compliance is simple:
more customer trust = more business.
Data compliance laws build customer trust, and they don’t shy away from sharing their personal information.
With the right marketing ideas, plans, and adherence to laws, you can reduce stress without losing potential customers and sales.
