The Facebook Papers first released by The Wall Street Journal (and recently made public by Gizmodo) revealed a company crippled by its own success. An organization that had become far too bloated, struggling under a management structure completely unsuited for its size. A business defined by questionable business ethics and poor technology management.
Just a day after The Facebook Papers were released, the social network suffered one of its worst outages in history, which CNBC reported may have cost upwards of $100 million.
Who are your customers? Why are they your customers? What do you offer that your competitors do not?
More importantly, what sort of content is your audience interested in? What do they enjoy, and what do they find compelling? What questions do they want you to answer, and what topics do they want to learn about?
These are among the most important questions that you need to address. Understanding your audience is critical to your content marketing efforts. Without this knowledge, you cannot effectively target your content.
When someone mentions search engine optimization (SEO), what’s the first thing you think about? Chances are good that if you’re like most people, it’s Google — or rather, its parent company, Alphabet. That’s not surprising.
While Google certainly didn’t invent the search engine market, it has, for more than a decade, defined it. Half of SEO amounts to trying to figure out what Google’s algorithms are doing, and what sort of content they want. Other search engines rarely, if ever, even enter into the equation.
And if they do, they’re almost always playing second string to Google.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth ten times that. Modern audiences are intensely visual. It’s not surprising, then, that the streaming video market has grown positively titanic over the past few years. Per research aggregator Statista, digital advertising revenue is expected to top $11 billion by next year.
On the video streaming front, meanwhile, marketing agency Allied Market Research reports that the video streaming market will reach $149.3 billion by 2026. With the massive shift towards digital and the upturn in streaming due to the coronavirus — news publication.
Variety reports a significant increase in video streaming subscriptions — the prominence of video will only increase. From a marketing perspective, this means that there’s a great deal of value in video, provided you can leverage it effectively.
Some people can turn creativity on and off like a faucet, accessing an endless well of inspiration and imagination with ease. We’d be lying if we said we weren’t at least a little jealous. See, for most of us, creativity tends to be a fickle, fleeting thing, coming and going more or less as it pleases.
Most often, this manifests as a lack of inspiration in the brainstorming phase, the inability to come up with compelling content even in spite of knowing what your readers are interested in. The bad news is that there’s no way to avoid this kind of thing entirely. The good news is that if you know where to look, you can overcome this roadblock when it surfaces.
To say that we’re living in a time of great cultural upheaval would be putting it lightly. The world feels tense. The coronavirus pandemic happened. George Floyd died. Civil unrest followed. Months have been difficult. Not surprisingly, this has had a considerable impact on multiple industries, marketing included.
The current outlook for digital marketing now looks very different from what we all expected last year. This is understandable, though. There’s no way we could have predicted any of what’s transpired this year.
What we can do, however, is consider how it will influence the marketing space moving forward. First as reported by Forbes we’ve seen a shift in consumer attitudes towards fully-digital marketing and social good. Expect to see an upturn in curated experiences supported by artificial intelligence.
At this moment in time, no one is entirely certain when the coronavirus pandemic will end. Even as some regions look to reopen, businesses and people alike are still struggling with the isolation of remote work, the economic challenges of lock down, and the emotional stress of the virus’s spread. It’s a difficult and trying situation for almost everyone involved.
That’s why it’s so important for customer-facing brands to engage with it.
People are exhausted right now. They’re tired, stressed, and afraid. They face an uncertain economic future, one marred by prolonged isolation and civil unrest.
Many of them are going to look at your business for comfort. They’re going to turn to you not just for a sense of normalcy, but for the assurance that things will ultimately turn out okay. It’s your job to give them that.
Owing at least in part to the coronavirus pandemic, mental health is at the fore of everyone’s minds. It’s no secret that people are struggling right now. We are stressed, fearful, and worn down by all the chaos and civil unrest.
“Mental health repercussions regarding what is happening during this pandemic for people, today and beyond, will really be a problem in general,” explains neurologist Dr. Konstantinos Petsanis, speaking to the WHO. “Unless we act now to address the mental health needs associated with the pandemic, there will be enormous long-term consequences for families, communities, and societies.”
Marketing and politics can no longer be kept separate from one another. Maybe they never could. Either way, brands have woken up to the fact that modern consumers desire more than simply a product.
They want a brand that actually has principles and values. In a recent report by PR agency 5WPR, 83 percent of millennial respondents want companies whose values align with their own, and 76 percent believe executives should speak out on issues they care about.
Moreover, a further 65 percent said they have boycotted a brand that didn’t share their beliefs on an issue, while 62 percent favor products that allow them to show off these beliefs.
Avoiding Branding Wokewash!
Millennials now have the greatest buying power of any generation.
Combined with Generation Z, which shares many of their values, the total spending power of millennials, according to real estate firm Coldwell Banker, will top $68 trillion by 2030. In short, it’s a generation you want to learn how to market to if your business is going to thrive.
However, you need to be careful that when you adopt a particular stance on an issue, your business’s behavior actually aligns with that stance. You cannot, for instance, support Pride Month if your business allows franchise owners to discriminate against transgender individuals. You cannot claim to support movements such as Black Lives Matter if your hiring practices and internal culture aren’t supportive of black people.
Most businesses are impacted by changing seasons. People are less likely to buy products such as sunscreen during winter, for instance. There likely won’t be much interest in Christmas during Spring.
For some organizations, however, the seasons almost entirely dictate their profits, and ultimately their success or failure. Airlines and hotels, for instance, see a significant boost during vacation times, and many tourist agencies are suffering greatly as a result of the novel coronavirus. It’s important to understand where you fall on this scale.
Are there certain times of the year during which you experience a huge boom, whilst others are much slower? Or do you manage to bring in plenty of business year-round? Armed with this understanding, you should create a marketing strategy that capitalizes on the time of year, leveraging imagery that resonates with your audience and tapping into your busiest seasons.
