What will you learn in this guide?
If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that there is only one thing we can count on: change. If you’re a marketer, this year has brought on a number of challenges leaving you wondering how to proceed with your brand strategy. Which marketing tactics are most effective in the current climate? How can marketing lead to brand recovery? When exactly is it appropriate to relaunch brand awareness and lead generation campaigns?
How to Adapt Your Marketing Strategy: 10 Pivots for Brand Performance has answers. Dive into our guide and discover how the 2020 events have altered the marketing landscape. Learn the lasting impact on each element of the marketing mix and gain actionable insights on how to strategically proceed with your marketing to ensure your brand is set up for success as we enter this new future together.
Download Now
The 10 Pivots
Our latest LEWIS guide outlines 10 key marketing strategies your business should implement to keep pace with shifting customer needs. Designed to push your brand into a recovery phase poised for growth, these marketing strategies include how to:
- Define your new narrative
- Re-evaluate your stack
- Shift your PR
- Increase organic search with SEO
- Stand out on organic social
- Plan paid media campaigns
- Evolve your website for new demands
- Utilize email marketing for efficiency
- Leverage virtual events
- Prepare for business continuity
Why should you adjust your marketing strategy?
Simply put, if the world is shifting and evolving, so should your marketing. If your target audience’s priorities have changed, so must your marketing. If your potential customer’s perceptions have altered, even in the slightest, so should your marketing.
As 2020 continues to throw its hardest punches, many consumers turn to their favorite brands for direction and solace. This is when your voice as a marketer matters most. No one knows the long-term ripple effects these events will have on the world, but marketers can choose how to respond and how to represent their brand. The more traditional marketing tactics might not be enough. More than ever, consumers are looking for authenticity, empathy and solutions. Does your current strategy cater to your target audience’s new needs? If not, it’s time to evolve.
To meet the needs of consumers as we enter a time of recovery, marketers everywhere will need get back to the drawing board. Reevaluate your ideal buyer persona. How do your marketing tactics need to change to meet your ideal customer’s new needs? The answer to this question will inform the rest of your marketing strategy. After understanding how your buyer persona has changed, you’re able to take a tactical marketing approach and adjust your overall messaging, social media, PR, content creation and more.
How should you adapt your digital marketing strategy to meet your audience’s needs?
With 46% of consumers wanting brands to provide practical information around current events, the internet is now critical for business continuity. As people spend more time at home, they are spending more time digitally connecting with friends, family and their go-to brands. Digital activities, such as reading articles, scrolling through social media and making purchases online are at an all-time high. That being said, your digital marketing strategy requires more attention than ever before.
How are you contributing to the conversation through digital activations in a relevant, empathetic way? Ensure your brand is sharing useful content and only promoting products and services that are valuable to consumers. Again, go back to the drawing board. Start with your content marketing strategy. What should you shift? Every piece of new content that is created, shared across your corporate social media channels, and sent out through your email marketing program needs to be useful. Ask yourself whether your next blog post helps your audience or just adds to the noise. By evaluating each digital marketing tactic through the eyes of your prospective customer and sharing relevant content, your inbound marketing strategy will naturally generate leads and even conversions.
With all this great new content, you need to ensure your website sets your brand up for success. If your website is optimized for desktop and mobile, you’ll receive more eyes on your relevant content and products, decreasing your bounce rate and making a lasting impression. Gain even more of a competitive edge by conducting keyword research to discover the topics your audience is searching and the questions your brand can answer. Taking a data-driven approach to your content with help your brand’s website rank on any given search engine.
How can you shift your public relations strategy without ambulance chasing?
Although people are consuming news more than ever, it’s crucial to be judicious with your PR stories and angles. Just about every type of business and industry has been impacted by this year’s events – emphasizing the importance of not alienating your existing customer base with tone deaf, left field messaging.
It’s critical to understand that today’s newscycle is increasingly unpredictable when incorporating PR into your marketing plan. It is not the time to peddle stories meant to help with brand awareness. This doesn’t mean PR needs to pause, it just has to work harder to peel back the layers for a story that brings value to the conversation.
In short, strategic planning is key. Mistakes are made when comms are more reactive than responsive. To avoid a hasty, reactive approach to your comms, put on your crisis management hat. Protect your brand reputation by always revisiting your crisis comms strategy. Ensure your brand is armed and ready in the face of any uncertainty.
Is it too late to adapt your marketing tactics for the new era?
Of course not! The beauty about marketing is that you can pivot and test marketing efforts as much as needed to reach your desired business outcomes. Strategic planning is certainly key to building a sustainable channel-agnostic marketing machine that adapts to the ebbs and flows of macroeconomic trends and industry disruptions. Good news is it’s never too late to start planning – for both the long term as well as an immediate need. Looking at challenges through a strategic marketing lens will only help optimize each and every marketing tactic used throughout the buyer’s journey to ensure your brand resonates at every touchpoint. At the end of the day it’s all about being relatable, empathetic and authentic, irrespective of what’s happening in the world around us.
So, check out our latest LEWIS guide and understand how to adapt your marketing for the path ahead.
