Evolving Your Marketing Strategy for After the Pandemic

The COVID-19 outbreak has brought about many changes, including how businesses and retail stores should approach marketing. Especially as we are fast approaching 2022, it is almost certain that we will not be reverting to the old normal. That’s why for marketers, it’s time to think about how you can evolve your marketing strategy for the future. 

What does the post-pandemic situation mean for businesses and your marketing? If anything, there are a few ideas you can take away from the whole pandemic situation. Here are some practical marketing tips and strategies you can adopt to let your company grow faster.

Building Multiple Touch Points for Buyers

The buyer’s journey is no longer the same. Businesses and brands now have to embrace a hybrid experience combining online and physical marketing to keep up with consumer expectations. Your goal should be to simplify the customer’s shopping experience and make it a more intuitive process. 

According to Google, the new customer journey involves many more touchpoints and interactions before a prospect becomes a buyer. The search engine shared an example of a woman who spent 73 days and made over 250 actions, including reading blogs, visiting sales pages, and watching video reviews before purchasing a pair of jeans. 

With the pandemic accelerating digital adoption and getting people to shop online, many are moving from the linear path of discovery and purchase to using the internet to research items and compare brand offerings before making their final purchase decision. 

For businesses, this should mean building an omnichannel marketing approach and managing your online presence. Even if you are a retailer, you should have a business website, Google My Business profile, and also appear on social media channels where prospects are.

Additionally, you would also want to boost your online rankings on Google to appear higher for relevant keywords. There are now many professional services adept with internet marketing tactics that can help you retain brand consistency while putting you in front of more target audiences.

Being More Agile in Customer Experience

If anything, the pandemic outbreak has strengthened the ability of businesses and their teams to become more agile and flexible in the face of severe market pressure and disruptions.

Many resilient businesses have pivoted successfully and efficiently to stay afloat. For instance, retailers and supermarkets have opened new e-commerce platforms and websites to meet the demand of online shopping during the pandemic.

Then again, the shift to online shopping has also changed customer experience, which called for higher demands and expectations from customers. In both B2B and B2C contexts, consumers today expect their experience to be quicker, frictionless and connected. 

For business, this means offering live chat or 24/7 support that will ensure your customer can get their issue resolved no matter what day or time it is. But of course, this would be taxing for your team, and we advise you to have enough staffing and a compelling rotational roster to meet the need.

Otherwise, employing chatbots can also help your team and customers achieve their goals faster. Build custom AI conversations to help screen through your customer’s problems or handle minor issues before arriving at your human personnel. 

Hyper-personalize Your Marketing Approach

Consumer expectations are getting more complex after COVID-19. Besides agility, our digital expectations have also changed as direct-to-consumer companies are conditioning us to expect a level of quality marketing and hyper-personalization.

It is no longer enough to create personalized campaigns that group your customers by personas or segments. But instead, customers expect businesses to understand their needs and adapt swiftly in line with them.

This can be aided as new technology continues to advance. You can use marketing tools to gain your customer information and monitor micro-movement behaviors to gain a deeper, more relevant understanding of your customer.

Then, use these information to build a data-driven strategy across all channels to help each individual buyer across their unique journeys.

Build Relationships and Solicit Trust

It goes without saying that it is vital to build relationships and trust with customers no matter if it is online or offline. Every purchase for example, is made based on a brand promise, and it then falls to the product, service, and customer experience to deliver on that promise.

But COVID-19 has placed a new emphasis on relationships. Faced with a virtual sales environment, sales that capitalize on the strength of prior bonds might be jeopardize. In contrast, prospecting for new customers has required an evolved set of skills focused on selling solutions, not products.

Still, trust and integrity are fundamental to driving your marketing and sales. To drive relationships in this new world of online interactions, it will rely much less on charm and more on building trust through your online marketing messages, customer comments, as well as your actual solution.

Ultimately, trust will be built by and rewarded to those that listen to customer needs and then craft solutions to meet those needs.