8 Ways to Rethink Your Marketing Strategy in 2021

Year end is always a good time to review your marketing strategy. For most businesses, 2020 was all about reacting quickly and trying to stay afloat. We know the pandemic will continue into 2021 which makes building a marketing strategy more of a challenge. We’ve compiled this list of eight tips to help you position your business for growth in 2021.

1. Apply What You Learned in 2020

Your business probably had to pivot your 2020 marketing plans when the pandemic hit. For many companies, that meant relying more on digital advertising. For others, temporary signage became a necessity. Whatever ideas you tried, now is the time to analyze what tactics worked best and which messages resonated most with your audiences. Those are the trends you’ll want to implement in early 2021.

2. Refresh Your Branding

Even in a normal year, your brand identity can shift as your business changes and grows. With all the chaos and uncertainty of 2020, your brand likely evolved more quickly than usual. Take a look at your branding to see if it still represents your business and determine how you’ll need to tweak or refresh your brand moving forward.  That strategy will pay off by keeping your brand fresh and relevant.

3. Revisit Your Target Audiences

Your target audience may have changed, expanded or retracted throughout 2020. If you’ve started offering new products or services, you may be trying to reach an entirely new customer base. If you’ve altered the way you do business (by adding online services), you may need to rethink who your ideal customer is. Identify who your messages need to reach so you can adjust your marketing accordingly.

4. Focus on Building Trust

Trust is the foundation of customer loyalty, now more than ever. Strengthening relationships with customers is the key to success in 2021. Content marketing offers an opportunity to continue building trust. Providing content that educates, entertains, inspires or offers needed solutions helps you connect to customers on a deeper level and demonstrate your brand’s value.

5. Personalize Your Campaigns

Personalization isn’t just a matter of including someone’s name on marketing collateral. It involves getting a relevant message in front of your audience. Leverage your customer data to develop content that aligns with the needs and interests of your audience.

6. Create Brand Experiences

Marketing is no longer a one-way conversation. There are so many ways to engage with customers and customers have come to expect brands to be responsive. Not sure how to engage? Here are a few techniques to try in 2021: • Develop interactive contests, quizzes or games • Spark conversation by asking open-ended questions • Encourage participation & acknowledge responses • Curate user-generated content such as photos • Create immersive experiences with experiential marketing

7. Incorporate Print into Your Marketing Strategy

The new year presents an opportunity to re-examine the value of print marketing for your business. Print can help you create memorable touchpoints in the customer journey and it helps you sidestep the challenge of digital fatigue. Print can drive traffic to your website and social media as well as providing tangible marketing opportunities that digital advertising can’t.

8. Ramp Up Your Online Presence

Your website is still one of the best marketing tools for any business. Social media channels are great for engagement, but your website is still the place consumers go to learn more about your business and to make purchases. Websites must be optimized for search engines so it can be found. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an ongoing process. Regularly evaluating and updating your content can improve your search rankings.

Stay Agile

The most important take-away from 2020 is the need to stay flexible and to have contingency plans. We can’t predict the future, but businesses that stay adaptable and nimble have a better chance of surviving whatever crisis may come their way.