One of the few industries which has fared well this year has been digital marketing. Despite the fact that it has done better than most however, the industry has been forced to constantly evolve in order to stay on top of client and consumer demands. Of course the notion of everyone being stuck at home, tuning into social media and websites 24/7 sounds like a dream for marketeers, but it hasn’t always been quite so easy. Industry insider Bryan Cumby has been speaking of late about just how challenging these last 7 months have been, and how impactful they have been also, on the future of digital marketing.
Importance
Any business which didn’t recognize the importance of an online presence prior to the pandemic, most certainly understands it now. This year has seen more businesses go offline to online and that is of course because it was the best portal through which they could reach their customers.
Switch In Clients
It is easy to say that digital marketing companies did well but that isn’t the case if the majority of its clients were in the leisure and tourism sector. In fact when the pandemic began we saw a very quick shift in focus from marketing agencies who hyper focused on clients within the retail sector, who of course were still going to be investing money in ad dollars. This year has veery much been a lesson in diversification of clients.
Tone of Ads
There is a reason why Corona lager haven’t come out with an ad that makes reference to their uncanny namesake, and that is because it is near impossible to do it with any kind of sensitivity. No matter how much companies could make light of this, the fact is that over a million people have died and if an ad misses the mark even slightly, it will do terrible damage to their brand and their reputation. The tone of the ads this year have had to be very carefully planned.
Instant Buy
Even those companies which were able to still invest ad dollars had to switch things up and this is why we saw many move away from the long term picture, to the short and rather instant method of advertising. There was no time this year for brand building, companies instantly went into survival mode and that meant they needed cash coming in ASAP. Th buy-it-now form of ad very quickly took over.
Pitches
And finally, digital marketing agencies had to completely change the way in which they pitched their services to the clients. Forced to do everything online, this made a huge dent in so many companies which had completely nailed their pitch strategy. This saw unlikely winners and losers with regards to who got the clients, and that of course was based on their ability to get creative with the limited tools at their disposal.
Digital marketing has done well, but it was forced to be more flexible than it realized it could be.
