How home isolation affected marketing?

If you do not rely on automation tools in 2020, we bet your campaigns are not as productive as you want them to be. Modern marketing and communication platforms enable entire teams to synchronize campaigns and maximize efficiency, which is particularly significant in the lockdown era. 

You should pick tools based on your strategy, but we definitely suggest checking out the following platforms: 

• VBOUT for all-encompassing marketing automation focused on lead management, email campaigns, landing page builder, social media networking, and analytics
• Zoom for online communication
• Hootsuite for social media marketing
• Pardot for B2B marketing automation
• Marketo for customer-based marketing
• HubSpot for inbound marketing campaigns
• BuzzStream for link building

At the same time, every business and marketing agency must make sure to educate employees in case they are facing new and unknown technologies. The good thing is that most of these tools have a short learning curve, which makes it easier to keep working without any major interruptions.

Marketing in the coronavirus era is changing because the businesses as such are forced to take a different turn. This means that almost every marketing team out there has to answer the challenge by rethinking the current marketing strategy. How does it function?

The main goal for marketers is to understand internal processes and learn how their companies evolved in the meantime. For instance, most companies have shifted their focus on the Internet and eCommerce in an attempt to save their customer base. After that, it is vital to establish the corresponding narrative and send marketing messages that suit the new business reality. 

But many other questions are left unanswered:

• Where can we find our customers now?
• How does my portfolio suit the changing consumer behavior? 
• Should we be adding new services to respond to the clients’ needs?

Once again, it is almost impossible to answer all these – and many other – questions without marketing automation platforms. These tools can dig deep into the data hole, so you can identify changing trends and find where your clients really are these days. 

We already mentioned that business operations changed in 2020, but marketing departments are in charge of communicating changes and keeping the prospects and customers informed about everything. There is a whole set of questions to answer here:

• Are your brick and mortar stores still open? If yes, are there any changes to the usual work hours? If not, how do you plan to continue delivering your services? 
• Do you offer online sales channels? Are there any channels your target group is already familiar with?
• Can your company keep the same level of efficiency? Will there be any interruptions or possible delays?

Your audience is interested in these and other similar questions, so it’s quintessential to answer and communicate each one precisely and timely. And here’s the extra suggestion for you – feel free to deploy the chatbot technology and let your prospects get all the information they need instantly.

Marketing is a broad concept that includes both offline and online activities, but work from home forced almost every company out there to concentrate on digital marketing and increase online promo campaigns. 

According to the report, COVID-19 has seen time spent on social media spike in recent months. As your followers keep spending more time online, the only reasonable reaction is to strengthen your digital marketing efforts by publishing more content. 

And we are not talking about social media exclusively. On the contrary, consumers expect brands to be active across all channels, including websites, guest blogs, advertising, email, and so on.

If there is anything good about the pandemic, it must be the fact that it reunited people and inspired a fresh wave of support and collaboration. This goes for marketing teams as well because online communication platforms help teammates stay in touch and work in close cooperation. 

Another trend comes in the form of goal-driven work. Now that marketers work far away from each other, they need to define objectives clearly and embrace a goal-oriented mindset, which in turn leads to better business results.

Of course, marketers are expected to pay attention to the most important topic of our era and that is COVID-19. It seems like every company is publishing health-related news coming from trustworthy sources such as the World Health Organization. 

You should do the same thing, but keep in mind to double-check facts before going live with your posts. It will make your content sound credible and save you from a possible reputation crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic disturbed the global business and forced marketing units to adjust and adapt on the go. Some teams use their own ways to get through the mess intact, but most organizations are taking advantage of the trends we discussed above. Which ones do you find to be the most useful?