Nothing could prepare companies for the rapid changes in customers’ needs that struck the world of business with COVID-19. It’s not often we’re affected on such a global scale, and yet here we are, braving these extraordinary and uncertain times.
Creating brand awareness amidst a global pandemic is not often found on a business leader’s to-do list, but rethinking customer priorities has quickly become a task necessary for brands around the world. Determining the content that is worth communicating to consumers, while maintaining your marketing goals and navigating customer empathy, is no mean feat.
Many brands have been wondering if they should be promoting their business at all. The short answer: Absolutely yes! Now is the time to reinvest in your business, adjust your content strategy, build your brand, come out of COVID-19 competitive and be strategic with your messaging.
As we navigate to a post-pandemic phase, new content marketing trends have emerged. Businesses should leverage the opportunity to keep up with the future of marketing. Innovation is no longer an option, but a necessity.
To help you adapt to the future of content marketing, these strategies should be adopted by businesses who are ready to prove their ability to provide valued content:
Give a Stronger Focus on Positive Brand Positioning
How can businesses best adapt to suit the current climate? Any decisions on how to best pivot a business should start with the customer. Over the course of the last few months, we needed to maintain customer empathy, hit the right tone, all the while ensuring our brand isn’t coming across as inconsiderate or opportunistic. For those businesses who have managed to maintain and build their customer relationships by delivering value-driven content, bravo! Boosting online engagement and conversation is now essential to business success.
To support a positive brand image and deliver value, we suggest you:
- Be authentic and empathetic
- Don’t take advantage
- Offer support and help
Embrace the Entrepreneurial Mindset
For business leaders, mindset is everything. By embracing the challenge of adapting to the current circumstances, businesses can analyse new trends and rethink the principles that guide their creative thinking.
As we investigate the success stories that have risen over the last few months, influencers, content creators and bloggers have increased their engagement and produced a subsequent boom in their businesses. By embracing an entrepreneurial mindset, those influencers who were able to create positive & appropriate content and strategies have attracted large audiences. Keeping this in mind, businesses should consider reaching out to these different avenues of marketing that may allow them to cast a bigger net over their customer base.
In the coming future, social media influencer marketing will become all the more mainstream, as businesses embrace influencer advertising and the entrepreneurial mindset.
Maintain the Trust of your Customers
Historically speaking, businesses have given their customers an easy, one-way proposition that includes: The brand produces, the customer consumes. After months of quick and drastic change that will develop the future of content marketing, businesses need to be prepared for a far more consumer-centric, multi-tiered process.
During this time, customers have turned to the businesses, and particularly the brands, that were most trustworthy. By nurturing your audience, telling your story, promoting brand awareness and building relationships with your customers, businesses can maintain customer trust. To recapture and strengthen these relationships, businesses need to keep up with the breakneck speed that is the future of content marketing.
With more resources thrown towards your digital presence and more overall engagement on social media, businesses can expect to be better placed to bounce back as we return to normal.
Get Ready for the Long-Term
As you usher your customers into the brave new world of content marketing, the sea of change continues to roll in. Although it appears to be a natural choice, don’t focus only on the short-term performance of your marketing and sales promotions. Instead of slashing your marketing budget, strategize how to focus it on long-term brand building.
Businesses need to ensure that they are not laying idle as opportunities arise in the digital world. With the shocking and sudden changes that arise from a crisis such as this one, a sea of changed behaviors will also allow new opportunities for businesses to engage their customer and add their value.
Ask us about our TaurusBullseye™ strategy and content creation offerings at [email protected]