We might not be quite at the end of 2020, but what the last three months can bring that the preceding nine haven’t is too much for anyone to get their head around. So, with all the distractions that have been thrown our way, you may have failed to notice the biggest trends in marketing that could provide a massive boost to your brand awareness.
Have no fear, we have been keeping an eye on the creative, innovative and clever techniques marketers have been using to engage customers and attract leads. They could be just what your company needs to maximise the opportunities in the last quarter of the year.
It’s now widely accepted that your website must be optimised for mobile, so it can adapt to different devices and we create varying content to suit the platforms it will be posted on. But these are not the only marketing assets that need to be flexible – your logo should be too.
A good logo should not only be instantly recognisable in its entirety. Everything from the colours used to the typeface should scream your brand and this gives you the ability to pare it back on certain occasions.
There are times when you want your branding to be visible, but limited space or the need for a light touch means a simpler version of your logo is required. This year, we’ve seen the likes of Nike applying the iconic tick to some of their marketing materials and the interlocking Cs of Chanel giving us a gentle reminder of the name behind the content.
Hashtags are nothing new, but companies are increasingly turning to branded hashtags to make their content stand out from the crowd. Adding these to marketing material helps social media users know which hashtags to apply if they want posts about your products or services to be grouped together and easily searchable.
Developing a hashtag that is used exclusively for your brand also helps to define any grey areas in terms of reposting user generated content. Many company’s social media bios now state that by posting a picture with their official hashtag, you are consenting for them to regram or retweet it.
Another effective way to get your branded hashtag trending is to use it as a way for followers to enter online competitions. Incentivising the use of your hashtag in this way will help to spread it far and wide and the searchability of hashtags will help to keep competition admin to a minimum.
Let’s not ignore the elephant in the room – coronavirus. Right at the beginning of the pandemic and the original lockdown, there was a lag as content took time to catch up with the new and unprecedented situation. It felt jarring to see adverts of people hugging, shaking hands and meeting up in big groups indiscriminately, as we were all told to stay at home.
Slowly, marketing started to catch up with reality and brands focused on the challenges the nation was facing and small acts of kindness. Content now addresses the ways that companies are keeping both their staff and their customers safe, as well as their contributions to the wider crisis.
Whether it’s switching a proportion of manufacturing to create respirators and hand sanitisers or donating a percentage of profits to the NHS, businesses must be seen to be doing their bit. Consumers will remember how companies reacted in the crisis and failing to adapt to the changing circumstances can make them appear tone deaf.
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