Key Trends Post 2020
Digital economy - (sales, marketing, promotion, CRM, communication, payments, cloud storage) - naturally soared during the pandemic period to connect people, businesses and commercial ecosystems.
- Social Economy and Commerce: With lockdowns, social distancing and offline disconnects, the digital medium was the natural go-to platform to look at options. This is when social media shopping boomed big time. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and a few others rose to dizzying heights of transactions and are now major shopping destinations globally. How is your piloting your social presence for your business?
- Video Content (Short Form): While video marketing was already big before, the trend shifted to smaller, shorter, crisper, catchy videos just like TV commercials to quickly hook the user to make buying decisions faster. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Insta Videos scaled incredibly. Have you pivoted from long-form explainer videos to shorter value engaging videos?
- Personalization And Centricity: As data grew online, analytics and insights became micro-focussed on individual customer engagement, transaction patterns and online behavior. This helped businesses probe, pivot and pilot their promotions, products and brand strategies effectively. Are you carefully probing your customer behavior online?
What Has Disrupted Since 2020?
The shift to online marketing, rise of conversational AI, and the increasing cost of offline events have significantly changed the marketing landscape.
- Heavy Reliance on Traditional Channels: We are seeing a hard pivot towards online marketing. Offline marketing (though important) seems to be taking a back seat. We however always believe that it's a circle/loop so do not completely shun away traditional means. They will come back later...
- Content Marketing (Informational) Days of creating blogs, articles, web pages providing general information to users is going. Conversational AI has taken over. ChatGPT/Gemini answers your general questions with more than good answers without having to refer you to an external website. As an advertiser, you will be losing traffic here and soon...
- Offline Events: Trade shows, conferences, and in-person product launches are great ways to connect and personalize brands but they are becoming expensive and hence virtual events and webinars are becoming more of a norm.
Looking Ahead - Beyond 2024
AI-powered marketing, voice search optimization, influencer content creation, data security, and the rise of the metaverse and Web3 will shape the future of business and consumer experiences, demanding strategic vision and careful investment planning.
- AI-powered Marketing: ChatGPT has been a game changer already and applications based on it have emerged in all walks of businesses globally. Gemini is ready too (with Google's clout and public data/information repository). Disruptors like Perplexity and others are creating niche experiences for online users and businesses alike.
- Voice Search Optimization: This is turning into a massive opportunity especially with regional content, language, dialects, etc becoming very popular in content creation. Voice complements text brilliantly, and with mobile devices and wearables taking over traditional gadgets, optimizing content for voice search will be crucial. Voice assistants, search and audio content are areas that will gain high prominence.
- Influencer Content Creation: Localization and micro-targeted focus by businesses makes influencer marketing even more prominent leveraging communities, sentiments and trends into business actionables.
- Data Security And Privacy: With hyper-intelligent platforms, apps and systems, data privacy will be a big area for businesses to address especially as regulations and compliances evolve. The concept of throwing content at users irrespective of their choice will be history of the past. The consumer will get to choose what they wish to consume.
- Metaverse & Web3: The metaverse - virtual reality experiences - will see the rise of immersive technologies and media leading to merging of online and offline engagement experiences for buyers at stores and feeling products online.
- Brace for more... as the speed of innovation as well as disruption is going to increase. As a brand, define your short and long term vision carefully and plan your marketing investments accordingly.
What Are The Upcoming Disruptions 2024 Onwards?
User-generated and AI-powered content, increasing demands for engaging social media, and a shift from vanity metrics to meaningful engagement and sentiment will redefine the effectiveness of marketing strategies.
- Stock Content: Content copyright issues will be a thing of the past. As user-generated content and AI-powered content creation tools are taking over, generic stock content might become less effective.
- Generic Social Media: Consumers are becoming extremely demanding of engaging experience and dynamic content from brands to maintain their loyalties. Brands will have to address that real quick.
- Vanity Insights: Metrics like followers, subscribers, viewers will have lesser value as opposed to engagement, sentiment, and customer lifetime value metrics. It's not about how many are watching you, it's about what you are delivering and how they react to it; that will count.