Eight Tips to Revive Your Marketing in 2021

Heading into 2020, marketers were riding the wave of tried-and-true strategies that have been successful for years. Then 2020 hit, and things turned upside down in the blink of an eye. Marketing teams were caught off guard with the necessary shifts and adapted as best they could to the changing situation. 

As a result, offices downsized, in-person events ceased to exist and people were genuinely worried about how to keep their businesses afloat amid a pandemic. According to a Yelp! Report released fall 2020, over 60% of small business closures due to the pandemic were permanent. 

Despite all the hardships businesses faced this year, many who survived were able to attribute their success to a common tool: digital marketing. 2020 forced people to evaluate their digital presence and assess if their business would be able to compete against competitors online. What emerged was a universal understanding of the impact that digital marketing can have on a business. 

But, simply acknowledging the importance of digital marketing isn’t enough. To succeed online, you must be continuously learning about new trends and improving your digital footprint. Here are our eight tips for a successful 2021: 

1. Take Inventory of your online presence: 

Before you take on any large initiative for your business, you must know your baseline. If you don’t know what you’re starting with, it can make setting goals and determining initiatives overwhelming and inefficient. Figuring out a starting point, on the other hand, will help you prioritize which marketing initiatives you should take on next. If you’re starting from the ground up, that’s okay too. 

2. (Re) Align your Target Audiences: 

You might think you know who your target audience is and who they aren’t, but do you have any data to back that up? The switch in buying behavior from in-person to online might’ve created an entire audience segment you had no idea about.  Whether you’re conducting market research, sending out a customer survey, or reviewing website visitors, quality marketing relies on identifying your target audiences.  

3. Evaluate Your Messaging: 

Now that you’ve established and validated your target audiences, it’s time to get in their heads. How does this audience segment think? What are their pain points and how does your product solve those pain points? Tailored messaging for each audience becomes important when you activate almost any marketing initiative. Your audience wants to know who you are, what you do, and why they should believe you. Make sure you provide the answers to those questions in your messaging!  

4. Invest in Your Website 

You might’ve sworn that your customers would never really use your website before 2020, but now your website might be the only way for people to contact you, buy your products or refer you to their friends and family. Your website is your opportunity to put your best foot forward and bring in streams of revenue you might not have had before. This means investing in a user-friendly website, social media, digital advertising and more. Remember: this is the primary way people are being exposed to your brand, so you want to make sure you’re staying top of mind.  

5. Align Your Content to Your Channels 

Now that you know what messages resonate with your audience, who they are and how to reach them, you’re ready to start creating content for them to consume. Whether you need SEO help to start creating blogs or videos that tell your brand story for social media, it’s important that your content reflects your brand, values and the channels upon which your content appears. This is your chance to be creative, expressive and communicate key messages about who you are and what you do.  

6. Hit “Send” 

Don’t be afraid to take your website live or launch a campaign. These new initiatives might feel new to you or your brand, but you’re bringing value to your business by establishing brand awareness and creating marketing strategies that support your goals.  

7. Report and Optimize 

Reporting is a crucial part of any digital marketing program because it will validate (or invalidate) your efforts by showing performance metrics. The beauty of digital is that EVERYTHING is measurable. Depending on your measure of success in any given initiative, you can know if you need to tweak a strategy for next quarter or continue capitalizing on a paid social campaign you launched last month. All these initiatives need to have metrics attached to them in order to inform your strategies for the future. And if you don’t know where your performance should be, establish a baseline first and start to tweak strategies from there. 

8. Don’t Do It All Alone! 

The digital marketing landscape is always changing. Things can shift daily, but that’s part of the fun, right? Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Ultimately, if your strong suit involves diving into data, do that. If you enjoy writing content for social media, do that. Don’t expect yourself to be able to handle everything. Bring your team along for the ride. Who knows, you might have a budding content writer on your staff you didn’t know about!