To say that we’re living in a time of great cultural upheaval would be putting it lightly. From the coronavirus pandemic to the civil unrest surrounding George Floyd’s death, the world feels as though it’s existed on a razor’s edge for months. Not surprisingly, this has had a considerable impact on multiple industries, marketing included.

The current outlook for digital marketing now looks very different from what we all expected last year. This is understandable, though. There’s no way we could have predicted any of what’s transpired this year. 

What we can do, however, is consider how it will influence the marketing space moving forward. First, as reported by Forbes, we’ve seen a shift in consumer attitudes towards fully-digital marketing and social good. Expect to see an upturn in curated experiences supported by artificial intelligence. 

Consumers will also put a great deal more thought and deliberation into their purchase decisions, offering both capital and loyalty exclusively to businesses they feel they can trust.

In many ways, this is simply a ramping up of a trend we’ve already seen in the marketing space for quite some time. COVID-19 has simply supercharged it. For years, we’ve seen growing evidence that social responsibility and authenticity are critical cornerstones of effective branding. In the wake of the pandemic, their importance is now indisputable. 

Campaigns focused around self-love and body positivity will become more important as well, as noted by marketing agency Marvil56. Consumers were already growing tired of constant societal pressure to look flawless, to think, feel, and act a particular way.  By the time 2021 rolls around, it seems likely that these expectations and pressures will be a thing of the past.

Instead, people will be encouraged to take pride in who they are, to love both themselves and their imperfections while still striving to improve. Again, this is a marketing trend that is helped along by current events. Positivity is in short supply these days, and people are desperately seeking it wherever they can. 

Last, but not least, we’re going to see a greater focus on accuracy where marketing metrics are concerned, coupled with an emphasis on greater flexibility and foresight. The pandemic caught everyone off guard. None of us were prepared for it.

How could we? 

It’s been a strange year, and if current events are any indication, it will only get stranger before it ends. At this point, it seems safe to say that even the predictions we’ve made today may not still hold true in a few months. All we can do is ride out the storm, and hope we’ve made the right preparations. 

At this moment in time, no one is entirely certain when the coronavirus pandemic will end. Even as some regions look to reopen, businesses and people alike are still struggling with the isolation of remote work, the economic challenges of lockdown, and the emotional stress of the virus’s spread. It’s a difficult and trying situation for almost everyone involved.

That’s why it’s so important for customer-facing brands to engage with it.

People are exhausted right now. They’re tired, stressed, and afraid. They face an uncertain economic future, one marred by prolonged isolation and civil unrest.

Many of them are going to look at your business for comfort. They’re going to turn to you not just for a sense of normalcy, but for the assurance that things will ultimately turn out okay. It’s your job to give them that.

But what does that mean, exactly?

Per a Twitter survey released in April, a few things. 

First, 64 percent of consumers expressed the belief that brands should continue advertising products as normal. While it’s advisable to stay away from tone-deaf ad campaigns that involve travel or appeal to negative emotions, seeing products advertised as they usually would be offers some degree of comfort to 52 percent of users. There’s also one other caveat.

While people want the illusion of normalcy, they understand that our current situation is anything but normal. They expect businesses to acknowledge that. In that regard, you’ll want to take a more humanitarian approach in your business’s branding.

According to 82 percent of respondents, brands should look to support frontline health staff wherever possible, while 86 percent indicated that they should support vulnerable people within their communities. Reliability and authenticity are also extremely important, as is support for local communities and employees. 

This is where your website comes in. 

It’s highly advisable to publish a small statement on your frontpage about the novel coronavirus, and what measures your brand is taking to protect employees and customers from it. This statement, positioned at the top of each page on your site, only needs to be a few sentences at most. 

The initial statement should simply establish that you’re aware these are difficult times, and you’re doing everything you can to ease the impact on everyone. It should link to a page where you further explain your approach to COVID. On that page, you should explain the following. 

• How COVID has impacted the customer experience. This could include changes in hours, changes in delivery times, or changes in pricing. 
• What you’re doing to keep your employees safe.
• What additional measures you’re taking to safeguard customers. 
• How long you’ll be implementing all of the above measures.

These are difficult times for almost everyone. It’s up to you to do your part to ease everyone’s anxieties. And know that at the end of the day, we’ll get through this, and we’ll do it together. 

Owing at least in part to the coronavirus pandemic, mental health is at the fore of everyone’s minds. It’s no secret that people are struggling right now. We are stressed, fearful, and worn down by all the chaos and civil unrest. 

It’s wearing on us. As reported by the World Health Organization, the coronavirus pandemic has created significant mental health fallout. And it’s only going to get worse.

“Mental health repercussions regarding what is happening during this pandemic for people, today and beyond, will really be a problem in general,” explains neurologist Dr. Konstantinos Petsanis, speaking to the WHO. “Unless we act now to address the mental health needs associated with the pandemic, there will be enormous long-term consequences for families, communities, and societies.” 

Your business plays an extremely important role in this response. First and foremost, it’s imperative that you destigmatize conversations around mental health as part of your organizational culture. Employees should feel comfortable discussing their struggles with mental illness in a work environment, and medication and treatment for these illnesses should be covered by their health plans. 

Beyond that, however, there’s another way you can contribute —through your marketing. 

Perhaps the best example of this in practice is Bell Let’s Talk. First created in 2011 by Canadian telecommunications corporation Bell, its premise is simple. One day each year, Bell donates five cents for every message and call that includes #BellLetsTalk. 

The initiative has, over the course of its lifetime, raised over $100 million for mental health. Perhaps more importantly, however, it kicked off a series of incredibly important conversations about mental health. Although it hasn’t single-handedly destigmatized mental illness in Canada, it’s gone a long way towards helping people open up to the ideas of talking about their struggles with issues like anxiety and depression. 

There are a few key things you can learn from Bell Let’s Talk to apply to your brand’s own mental health marketing efforts.

• First, understand that this isn’t about you or your business. You are using your brand to promote a worthy cause. To help both customers and employees who may be struggling with mental illness. Don’t treat it as a sales opportunity, but instead focus on education. 
• Second, your marketing materials should align with a mental-health-positive corporate culture. Mental illness should not be presented as something horrible or shameful, but rather a disability that many people struggle with. 
• Finally, if you can find a way to wrap your campaign in with some sort of cause or nonprofit, do so. Awareness only goes so far. Action can go farther.

We’ve made great strides in eliminating the stigma around mental health. However, we still have a long way to go. Starting conversations around mental health via your marketing channels is one critical way your business can, and should, contribute.

Especially right now.  

Marketing and politics can no longer be kept separate from one another. Maybe they never could. Either way, brands have woken up to the fact that modern consumers desire more than simply a product.

They want a brand that actually has principles and values. In a recent report by PR agency 5WPR, 83 percent of millennial respondents want companies whose values align with their own, and 76 percent believe executives should speak out on issues they care about. 

Moreover, a further 65 percent said they have boycotted a brand that didn’t share their beliefs on an issue, while 62 percent favor products that allow them to show off these beliefs. 

Millennials now have the greatest buying power of any generation. Combined with Generation Z, which shares many of their values, the total spending power of millennials, according to real estate firm Coldwell Banker, will top $68 trillion by 2030. In short, it’s a generation you want to learn how to market to if your business is going to thrive.

However, you need to be careful that when you adopt a particular stance on an issue, your business’s behavior actually aligns with that stance. You cannot, for instance, support Pride Month if your business allows franchise owners to discriminate against transgender individuals. You cannot claim to support movements such as Black Lives Matter if your hiring practices and internal culture aren’t supportive of black people. 

There’s a term for this lack of alignment —for the cognitive dissonance created by a business that says one thing and does another. Wokewashing. At its most basic, it’s when a brand treats a sociopolitical issue as a marketing opportunity without actually supporting it. 

As reported by The Guardian, it happens a lot. We see it in major brands that release Pride-themed products one month of the year, and then promptly forget that the LGBTQIA+ community exists, even openly operating in markets that openly hate homosexuality. We see it in businesses that challenge misogyny while maintaining a toxic workplace culture that doesn’t provide paid maternity leave. 

The good news is that it’s relatively easy to avoid this pitfall. Simply fall the old adage practice what you preach. If you’re going to support a cause, actually do it. Don’t just treat it as a marketing opportunity or a singular advertising campaign.

Seek partnerships with charitable organizations. Have serious conversations with people within your business who have direct stakes in the cause you’re supporting. In other words, make an active effort to be better. 

At the end of the day, social good should never be treated solely as a means of selling more products and services. Your business and its people need to want to do good. Because if you don’t, every effort you make will come across as hollow. 

In case you haven’t already heard of it, pay per click advertising is an ad model where a business only pays if a customer clicks on one of their ads. It’s most popularly known through the Google Ads platform, which distributes advertisements across Google’s myriad properties. How it works is fairly simple.

First, an advertiser determines what keywords they want to target, based on what’s likeliest to bring in qualified leads. They can also add negative keywords so they aren’t paying for clicks from people who aren’t sales prospects. You then bid against other competing advertisers on your keywords – whoever puts in more money per click gets a higher placement and, consequently, more clicks. 

It seems pretty simple, right? 

Unfortunately…it’s not. There’s actually a fairly steep learning curve in PPC advertising, a wealth of pitfalls that can see you wasting a ton of money for relatively little gain. 

Bad Bidding

Not every pay per click campaign receives the number of views you hope for. In part, this could be caused by disconnected, offensive, or simply bad advertising. However, you might also not be bidding effectively on your keywords.

If your ads seem to be reaching the correct audience but you’re not getting enough pageviews or clickthroughs, you might consider raising your bid. While this means you’ll be paying more per click, it might also bring in more traffic (and therefore more conversions).

Unfortunately, this isn’t an exact science. If raising your bid doesn’t seem to have an observable effect on your success rate, this may signify there’s some deeper problem at play. You may be making one of the other mistakes on the list. 

Failure to Split Test

A split test is a simple means of measuring the effectiveness of a particular advertisement. How it works is relatively simple. You take an ad, change one relatively small aspect of it, then target both the modified ad and the original to different segments of your audience. This allows you to track how much impact one small modification has on your ad’s success – better yet, if the modified ad performs better than the original, you’ve managed to further optimize your campaign.

Via split-testing, you can eliminate much of the guesswork involved in setting up a new campaign, instead of taking a more focused and data-driven approach. It helps you determine if a particular ad is worth the cost without losing too much money in the process, while also making and measuring small optimizations over the course of a campaign. Just be certain that leading platforms can sometimes make tracking clicks a bit difficult – and that you need to make sure ads are evenly-distributed and measured over a long enough period to ensure accuracy. 

Inaccurate Targeting

If you don’t know your audience, then you’re throwing money away. You need to know who your intended customer is before you even start doing keyword research. Who they are, what they’re interested in, and what style of advertisement will be most impactful to them.

Create a few simple buyer personas that allow you to reliably categorize each segment of your audience, including age, occupation, hobbies, general desires and values, and what influences them. You can shift to a more focused approach later.

For now, what’s important is that you know, in general terms, what will catch your audience’s attention.

You’ll also want to pay attention to what targeting options are available to you, and how they work for the various different PPC platforms. Different mediums require a different approach, after all, and offer you different tools for targeting and advertising. Take the time to learn each medium before you start bidding on ads in order to better-guarantee efficient spending. 

In Closing

A well-targeted PPC advertisement can be immensely beneficial to your organization. However, targeting is only the first step here. It’s important that, in addition to understanding the fundamentals of PPC, you also have a solid grasp of marketing and advertising’s other elements, particularly where psychology is concerned.

You need, in other words, to understand your audience, your industry, and your platform all at once – because if you don’t, then it doesn’t matter how well-targeted your ads are. 

Authenticity is a critical driver of modern marketing. 

When a brand makes an effort to be transparent in everything it does, people notice. They appreciate a business that they feel they can trust, and direct their spending and loyalty accordingly. By that same vein, if it turns out that authenticity is in any way not genuine? 

There will be backlash, and it will be significant.

As noted in the 2020 Gustavson Brand Trust Index, consumer trust in brands is now at an all-time low. People are more skeptical than they’ve ever been. They simply do not believe that businesses have their best interests in mind any longer.

Trust, in other words, is hard one. And once lost, it’s nearly impossible to regain. This is in no way helped by the constant barrage of high-profile data breaches and privacy violations in the media – from questionable data management practices to downright unethical activities, many businesses are being cast in an extremely unflattering light.

The good news is that it’s not difficult for your brand to differentiate itself. 

Own up to your mistakes. Be honest, be humble, and be proactive in fixing the things you’ve done wrong. Even if you’ve done something wrong, people will notice that you’re making a genuine attempt to fix it. Your sincerity will shine through, and prospective customers will notice.

If, on the other hand, you attempt to cover up your mistakes or shift the blame? People are going to notice that, too. Unless your business provides an absolutely essential product or service for which there’s no feasible competition, they’re going to cast you aside in favor of a competitor they believe to be more trustworthy.

Online reviews are the area in which you can most frequently put this into practice. Offer customers genuine thanks for any positive reviews of your products and services, highlighting them on your website and social media channels where appropriate. Demonstrate to them that you appreciate their business, and moreover, that you appreciate them. 

As for negative reviews, reach out to the people who left them. Respond by offering them an olive branch – a chance to fix whatever issues they had with your brand. By reacting with haste and making a real effort to address people’s complaints, you can easily transform a negative review into a positive one, potentially even turning a dissatisfied customer into a brand advocate.

There are a few things you should remember when responding, however.

• Listen to what they have to say. Read between the lines, and make an effort to understand every facet of their complaint. 
• Acknowledge that there is a problem. Apologize. Do not attempt to pretend the fault lies with the customer, and do not attempt to deflect blame. 
• Ask the customer what you can do to fix their issue. Provide them several options through which they might reach out to you. 
• Do not get defensive. 

As an addendum to the above, it should go without saying that you should never pay for reviews, nor should you attempt to bolster your product listing with fake reviews. Customers are increasingly savvy, and most people are able to tell the difference between a real person and a paid shill. They know the difference between genuine and misleading tactics. 

It’s not always easy to connect to your customers. Authenticity and sincerity are at the core of your brand’s marketing, and should be reflected in every facet of your business. Show people that you have integrity, and that you care about more than just making a sale.

The coronavirus has changed the world in unprecedented ways. Schools have closed. Graduation ceremonies are canceled. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs, homes, and even loved ones. The global economy sits in an uncertain, and unpredictable place

Even if you believe the pandemic is over and we can begin reopening, we’re still going to be recovering from the financial and emotional impact of the pandemic for a very long time. That, more than anything, seems to be the thing businesses are forgetting. As a result, many marketing campaigns are reacting to 

We’re seeing too many otherwise well-meaning brands are treating the pandemic as more of a marketing opportunity than a global crisis. Each one is, in broad strokes, making similar mistakes both in their messaging and their overall approach. These are the mistakes your organization cannot afford to make itself.

Lack of Sincerity

Take a look at your inbox. How many emails have you received from businesses that claim they ‘care about you’ and are ‘sticking with you during this difficult time?’ If you’re like most of us, the answer is too many. 

Brands are attempting to hop on the bandwagon and demonstrate to customers that they care, but they’re doing so in a way that comes off as completely insincere. Instead of actually focusing on empathy and understanding and making an effort to provide customers with the things they need, they spout empty platitudes.

You need to demonstrate that you’re addressing the developing situation responsibly. Create an interim landing page for your business. Provide special offers like free trials and discounts to help people along.

Don’t just say you care, show it. 

And if you do decide to release messaging about the pandemic, whether it’s a blog post, an email, or an update to your site copy, review it with other people in your organization. Your goal here is to answer two questions as directly and concisely as you can: 

• What is your response to the pandemic? 
• How will you allocate your people and resources to help others? 

Trying to Force Business as Usual

On the opposite end of the spectrum, too many businesses are trying to pretend nothing’s wrong at all. Customers are receiving flashy ads about hot summer sales, all-inclusive resort deals, and cheap flight offers. These are, to be blunt, utterly tone-deaf, and have the potential to cause significant damage to your brand’s reputation.

Just as people don’t want to be flooded with messaging about COVID-19, they also don’t want businesses to act like things are completely normal. They aren’t. Maybe they never will be again.

People are looking for the care of neighbors, the comfort of family, and the support of friends and colleagues. Your simple, essential job, is to respond to the crisis at hand. Take what business you can into the digital realm, scale back your marketing, and focus on helping your own employees get through their day-to-day. 

Trying to Be an Authority

Unless you are an infectious disease expert, government authority, or representative of a public health organization, don’t go overboard with details about COVID-19. Stick to your wheelhouse, and link only to trusted sources for details and updates. Larger brands especially hold some degree of moral authority in the public eye, so it’s important that you don’t use your reach to spread misinformation. 

Do not try to mandate how people should be spending their time during the pandemic. Do not guilt people about struggling, and don’t try to come across as a medical expert if you aren’t one. Be supportive, not overbearing. 

You need to be more than a public face for your business. Listen. Reassure. Respond.

Most importantly, acknowledge that these are difficult and uncertain times. Marketing plays an important role in helping customers get through them. Understand that, and do your part, even if it may not be immediately profitable.