Ikea says it will stop printing its famous catalogue after almost seven decades.
The booklet is one of the world’s biggest publications every year as the brand showcases its range across the world. It says that customers and turning to their website to browse more and more and the current edition will be the last. The catalogue, with an MK Wing Chair on the cover, was launched in Sweden back in 1951 and had a run of 285,000 copies. At its peak in 2016, 200 million copies were distributed to 50 markets across the world, but this year the run fell to 40 million copies. The brand is aiming to become more digital. In the last 12 months, online sales jumped 45%. Konrad Gruss, Managing Director at franchisor Inter IKEA Systems told Reuters: ‘The number of copies has gone down, but we have also seen that people have much more used our website, apps and social media. The catalogue became less and less important. ‘The interest in the catalogue has come down.’ Back in 2004, the brand admitted that the catalogue made up 70% of it’s annual marketing budget. The brand will produce smaller print publications to provide inspiration but the current format will not be printed again.
It comes after Argos announced it would stop printing its famous catalogue after almost 50 years. It’s first book was published in 1973, with two editions every year. At its height the Argos catalogue was Europe’s most widely printed publication, and was found in three quarters of homes in Britain. Over almost 50 years, one billion copies have been printed.
It’s no surprise that communication is key, and in order for your brand to create meaningful connections, it needs to be clearly heard. Through a set brand voice and tone, your audience can get to know and understand your brand, as you create a dialogue.
It is the chance for business leaders to express their brands’ unique persona and seamlessly build up relationships with the audience. When it comes to presenting your brand, choosing which brand voice and tone to use is crucial. Particularly during the introduction stage, customers instinctively recognize the way they are addressed and spoken to, which then significantly impacts their entire view of a brand. Here are a few ideas that unpack what it means to establish a brand voice and tone, along with their effectiveness.
What’s the difference?
Although brand voice and tone are interconnected with one another, there’s a distinct difference between them. Brand voice revolves around what is being said and remains quite consistent with the communications delivered. By having an unchanging voice, users are able to perceive the brand as being reliable and understandable.
On the other hand, brand tone is focused specifically on the message that’s being conveyed and what it sounds like. In addition, tone can be adjusted depending on the context and the channel that’s been chosen. For instance, the way you provide information through an email regarding serious changes may differ from a social media post announcing a much-awaited product launch. You can cultivate a combination of tones, such as friendly and informative or warm and welcoming, to ensure it best suits the target audience.
How can it help your brand?
Voice and tone reflect your brand’s personality, so naturally, these impact how your entire brand is identified. They both serve the mutual purpose of demonstrating the core values and goals that your brand and founders are striving toward transparently. For staff and consumers, voice and tone can guide them toward understanding your brand’s unique qualities and culture.
When it comes to your brand’s presence, voice and tone can shape the end user’s experience and how the company is remembered. Also, using a variety of tones with different communication styles can highlight your brand’s inclusivity and flexibility.
How can it help gain customers?
Voice and tone collaborate with each other to strengthen your brand’s appeal to consumers. By evaluating the responses received and encouraging ongoing conversation, you can identify the type of audience you’re actively engaging with. The way content is delivered to readers is determined by the voice, tone and language. With authentic connections and increasing organic traffic about your brand, your company’s messages are more likely to be welcomed and happily received.
Customers are only able to communicate openly when they are listened to and in return, may bring in other prospective clients. You can improve the voice and tone you employ by listening to the way your community describes your brand and shares their experiences.
Brands are better able to reach their audiences clearly and pleasantly. Despite the brand voice and tone functioning differently, they are required to work together in order to send out the company’s messages successfully. When communicating, there is a necessary balance for brand voice to bring consistency and tone to create a relatable space. The company’s identity can be demonstrated through the way statements are shared and the characteristics that make them stand out.
Want to improve organic engagement on LinkedIn? Wondering if LinkedIn Stories and Live could work for you?
To explore organic LinkedIn marketing strategies that work today, I interview Michaela Alexis on the Social Media Marketing Podcast.
Michaela is a LinkedIn expert and an official LinkedIn Learning trainer, coach, and consultant who helps businesses master their LinkedIn organic presence. She co-authored Think Video: Smart Video Marketing and Influencing.
You’ll learn what kind of content works best in the LinkedIn feed and how best to use LinkedIn Stories and Live video to engage the people in your network.
Scroll to the end of the article for links to important resources mentioned in this episode.
The reason LinkedIn is important to professionals, especially marketers, comes down to user intent. Michaela notes that while most people spend time on Facebook and Instagram to reconnect with friends and family or to escape, people come to LinkedIn to grow, connect, learn, and meet new people. As a result of the current pandemic and a rise in remote working, people are also turning to LinkedIn to stay in touch and engaged with their colleagues and teams.
When you pair that strong user intent with the platform’s growth over the past year, its place as a global, professional networking space is unquestionable. Almost 700 million people are on LinkedIn, and 45% of internet users who make more than $75,000 a year annually use LinkedIn.
Though it got a good start in 2020, 2021 is the year branded content will truly come into its own according to Ottavio Nava, co-founder and chief executive at We Are Social Italy and Spain. To make a success of the medium, he says marketers should glean lessons from the likes of Ben & Jerry’s, Lavazza and Circles.Life.
Branded content reached new heights in 2020. Long seen as a valuable add-on to marketing campaigns, and particularly effective when combined with traditional paid-for models, we are at now seeing just how powerful the medium can be as a strategic brand building tool.
With all the smartest marketers paying attention, I feel safe predicting that 2021 is going to be a memorable year for this highly creative marketing technique.
The pandemic has forced more people then ever consume content digitally at home, which has let brand content has come into its own in recent months. This shift can be put down to the crisis accelerating a number of important on-going trends, just as much as it can be attributed to brands having access to a more captive audience.
Pre-2020, consumer habits were already changing as a result of the ubiquity of smartphones with content available to read, watch, listen to and interact with via a great choice of applications and in a wider array of different contexts than ever before. Brands, meanwhile, were seeking ways to engage in the face of declining engagement by many viewers in live TV advertising – just one result of growing fatigue with traditional media.
Both of these drivers have been significantly uplifted by behavioural changes spurred by Covid-19. People’s digital activity increased significantly, resulting in more eyeballs coming into contact with more brands online. In turn, this has cemented the increasingly central role branded content is now playing in the advertising ecosystem – a role which – when you consider how peripheral it once was – has now changed significantly and irreversibly.
Here are three lessons learned from those brands who have used branded content most effectively in recent months point to how branded content can, and will, evolve further.
The first is a mindset shift to creating content from the get-go to thrive in a more organic, long-term way, irrespective of platform or format. Ben & Jerry’s is a great example of this. It recently launched ’Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America’ – a podcast series comprising six 30-minute episodes about white supremacy in America, developed in partnership with Vox Media.
The SuperSimpleStuff app for Pfizer, which uses a series of micro games where players can fight coronavirus while finding out the best ways to prevent the virus spreading, is just another example of creative content execution. It’s also proof impactive brand content doesn’t just mean video. Elsewhere, Australian mobile network Circles.Life recently paraded a 1.2m sculpture of a hand giving 2020 the middle finger around Sydney as part of its ’Unfuck 2020’ campaign; showing how paid-for content can be funny, engaging and generate organic headlines of its own.
The second lesson for brands is to think and create like entertainers by embracing the rules of publishers and media companies, instead of simply working to a marketing playbook.
Publishers understand who their audiences are and create a product for them. To make effective branded content, CMOs must do the same. The best marketers understand what kind of brand they have and what needs to happen for it to grow.
The ambition here is to create campaigns on the same level as the entertainment people consume, as we did for Lavazza with Coffee Defenders: A Path from Coca to Coffee, which tells the story of a Colombian farmer from a region devastated by civil war who turns land formerly used to cultivate cocaine into a coffee plantation.
This 30-minute video documentary blends the sustainability and communities work championed by the Lavazza Foundation with top entertainment production values. And it was distributed through a carefully considered strategy built to extend brand reach beyond TV ad audiences by focusing on long-form content platforms.
The third, and final, lesson for brand content’s further evolution lies in the growing use of the ‘creative newsroom’ – an approach that allows a brand to blend brand marketing needs with what’s happening in the world and in pop culture.
For our film for Barilla, The Roof Top Match with Roger Federer, a creative newsroom approach informed the idea of bringing together Roger Federer with two girls from a Ligurian village whose rooftop tennis matches during lockdown had become a viral phenomenon. It also shaped a creative strategy that allowed what happened next to naturally unfold, rather than attempting to control it.
These last two examples of successful branded content, in particular, obeyed another publishing rule. For as well as helping to generate profits and hitting KPIs, both – like the best brand content – add real and tangible value to their audience.
While much of 2020 is best left behind us, this revitalised approach to branded content is something that marketers should embrace longer term.
Feature Image Credit: Australian mobile network Circles. Life recently paraded a 1.2m sculpture of a hand giving 2020 the middle finger around Sydney
Social media has been a key marketing channel since its conception and has increasingly played a role in how people shop. But up until now, shopping behaviour was limited to discovery and consideration, with purchase taking place off-platform on a brand or retailer website.
Today, social platforms look poised to ’close the loop’, meaning users will be able to browse, shop and purchase seamlessly and entirely within one connected social media experience. This development has the potential to fundamentally transform the way we buy online.
Welcome to the future of ‘social commerce’.
To better understand shopper behaviours, attitudes and beliefs in this space, we polled a nationally representative audience of UK shoppers, discovering that nearly two-in-three people would be more likely to purchase from a brand if they could browse and shop entirely within a social media platform.
From this, the evidence is clear: the winners of tomorrow will be the brands that embrace social commerce as a real tool for customer acquisition and retention. For those that fail to act, loss of market share could become a tangible concern. In a social world, learning how to navigate these waters is no longer just a ‘nice to have’.
The rise of social commerce
According to the latest research, social commerce is a market with a remarkable growth trajectory, with analysts projecting it could be worth $600bn in the next seven years.
As we’ve seen in the past year, Covid-19 has accelerated existing trends in shopper behaviour. The latest figures suggest an extra £5.3bn will be spent via e-commerce in the UK alone in 2020 as the fallout from the pandemic has forced more people online than ever before. Early figures suggest this behaviour is set to stay as we emerge from the pandemic.
Although shoppers are flocking online, social commerce is still a fairly nascent market in the UK and US. In fact, studies suggest that only 6% of UK consumers have purchased directly on a social platform, in part due to the lack of in-platform purchasing options in these markets.
In more advanced countries like China, however, social commerce is an integral part of the online shopping experience. Tencent’s WeChat delivered $115bn in social commerce sales in 2019 alone, while Pinduoduo, a group-buying app where friends can purchase together on social media, has grown from an innovative startup to China’s second most valuable online retailer.
As US platforms look to replicate some of this functionality, China provides us with a model of how social will likely evolve for commerce in the west.
Shopper thinking will be crucial to navigate social commerce
Today, brands have more opportunities to interact with people than ever, across an increasing number of digital touchpoints. Digital and social platforms have succeeded at meeting new customer expectations, with values such as convenience, ease of use, customisation and control redefining the shopping experience.
It’s not surprising, then, that social media is uniquely positioned to deliver on these needs. Based on our research, however, social will remain a nuanced and highly intricate channel. Careful consideration of different shopper motivations and barriers, as well as brand experience across the shopper journey, will be key to maximising shoppability across brands’ social media channels.
Consumer behaviour in this channel is anything but homogenous; in fact, our research suggests adoption of social commerce will differ by age. Being able to buy within platform would encourage 75% of 21- to 34-year-olds to purchase with a brand, suggesting that demographic differences will necessitate careful persona planning.
Price also seems to be a determining factor in whether or not someone would purchase on social, with our research suggesting that big-ticket items such as travel and luxury are much less popular than more affordable items.
Different categories also differ in their appeal, with respondents ranking fashion, beauty, wellbeing and grocery as the categories they would most like to shop for on social.
Taken as a whole, these findings are representative of a shift towards social media as a new and growing e-commerce channel, but they also demonstrate a need for smart planning. For brands, understanding where, when and how to activate a social commerce strategy as part of a connected shopper experience will be key as we move into 2021.
Social platforms at different levels of readiness
Another consideration is that the platforms themselves are at different levels of ‘readiness’ when it comes to social commerce.
Instagram, for example, has beta-tested its Checkout feature, which allows users to search and shop directly within the app. The mass rollout of this feature will transform how people shop with brands online, making it more convenient to shop not only directly from a brand’s posts, but from influencer posts too. These platform changes will make the social shopping experience on Instagram feel effortless and seamless – all the way from discovery to purchase.
The rollout of Shops across Facebook, meanwhile, allows brands to create digital storefronts, with links to purchase products either on the retailer’s website or directly within Facebook itself.
Even YouTube and TikTok are experimenting with social commerce. YouTube Shopping allows customers to make purchases directly on-site by browsing through catalogues offered by sellers, while TikTok’s partnership with Shopify allows merchants to create and show shoppable content on the platform.
Even before these functionality considerations, each platform lends itself differently to the shopping experience and users’ openness to brand advertising. Instagram, for example, feels like a natural fit for commerce as its highly visual nature emulates a glossy magazine, where products feel native and premium.
This was validated in our research findings, which showed nearly half of all shoppers (45%) would prefer to shop on Instagram, with Facebook (41%) coming in a close second.
These two platforms appear, at the moment, to be far ahead in terms of delivering on shopper expectations, with YouTube (9%) and TikTok (5%) capturing a much smaller percentage of shopper interest.
The sophisticated targeting options available to brands through Facebook Advertising (which includes Instagram) and Google (YouTube) also present opportunities for personalisation and disruption along the shopper journey.
Moreover, social commerce is a particularly exciting development for brands that sell exclusively through retailers, since it presents an opportunity to provide shoppers with a more personalised experience (in lieu of a true direct-to-consumer offering).
We spoke with Joseph Harper, e-commerce marketing manager at Kellogg Company, who notes: “The way people shop in the future will be totally different – it will be completely interactive and personalised.
“We know that retailers are starting to see themselves as media platforms and media platforms are starting to see themselves as retailers. That, in essence, is the crux of social commerce.”
Creating a connected experience for consumers
For a marketing channel with considerable upside, social commerce looks set to have a significant impact on the way shoppers discover, browse and buy. E-commerce has already lowered the barriers to entry, enabling new digital startups to burst on to the scene while forcing legacy brands to rethink existing strategies.
Social looks set to do the same again, challenging traditional brand and retailer relationships and ways of marketing to consumers.
But for the forward-thinking brand, success will come from more than just taking advantage of new platform innovations. Brands need to build connected experiences across all touchpoints that deliver on the values of a new generation of shoppers.
Whether researching on Amazon, being inspired on Instagram, watching adverts on TV or unpacking an order at home, there’s an ever-expanding ecosystem of places shoppers can engage with brands.
Marketers need to focus on optimising the customer journey and include social commerce as a key touchpoint in this. In doing so, brands can take one step closer to delivering a truly connected omnichannel experience.
Feature Image Credit: Initials advise marketers to better optimise the customer journey using social commerce
The new frontier of ecommerce is full of rapid innovation. As the face of the industry changes, entrepreneurs must change with it.
History has proven that pandemics and outbreaks have pushed forward the evolution of ecommerce.
In 2003, Alibaba had to quarantine almost all its staff due to the positive SARS diagnosis of one staff member. This period became the incubation period where Jack Ma perfected the Taobao website and launched his first C2C eCom platform. The SARS coronavirus pandemic was a buffer for Taobao and Alibaba as a whole, as they registered immense profits.
During pandemics, online transactions become habitual for a large chunk of the world’s population. The Covid-19 pandemic isn’t much different from SARS, they both originated from China and they have both caused a shift in the e-commerce space.
However, 2020 is about much more than Covid-19. The massive shifts in customer behaviour that we have observed go beyond Covid and they are so extensive that they are predicted to become the pillars of the new ecommerce frontier. These are expressions of customer behaviour that every new and old ecommerce entrepreneur should take into account in 2021 and beyond.
1. Video marketing takes centre stage
Ecommerce Marketing once revolved around text and copy, then it gradually became Image-based, now video marketing is taking centre stage as the main medium for on-site marketing for ecommerce businesses.
This was always the destination of on-site marketing and product reviews and in 2021, we just might see it take over the mainstream. Creating the perfect on-site experience is critical to ecommerce businesses’ success and is an important determinant to the final sales numbers.
Product videos are comprehensive in nature without feeling bulky or tedious. They bring storytelling to life while offering a comprehensive view of the product in action and answering customer questions all in one go. When done right Product Videos are a combination of Marketing, Reviews, and Answers to FAQs.
The statistics now tilt overwhelmingly in the favour of video marketing, making it impossible to ignore in the new frontier of ecommerce.
People are 4 times more likely to watch a product video than read a product description
73% of consumers are more likely to go ahead in purchasing a product after watching a video of it in action.
These numbers reveal one clear truth, Video Marketing is going to define ecommerce for this decade and probably beyond.
2. Voice commerce has become a defining force
The increased use of voice-assisted devices like Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa has become a defining feature of many of our lives. In the last 3 years, we have seen the reliance on these systems spread into product searches and even purchase.
This has become increasingly popular, largely due to the increased effectiveness and accuracy of this technology. With Amazon and Google now pushing regional languages, it has led ecommerce businesses to begin to adapt quickly.
The realities of this evolution are clear, ecommerce businesses who have their websites optimized for voice searches will have an increasing chunk of customers fall freely into their conversion funnel.
Ecommerce businesses should begin creating content that increases the probability of appearing in voice searches and should begin offering voice-based in-app and on-site navigation amongst other things. This way, you get your slice of the huge $40 billion pie beginning from 2021.
3. Social shopping and commerce becomes a mainstay
87% of ecommerce shoppers believe that Social Media helps them make a buying decision. This trend is buoyed by the rapid rise in mobile usage and shopping, with 73% of total ecommerce sales predicted to be executed on mobile by the end of 2021.
In 2019 Instagram launched its e-commerce checkout feature. This did not become an instant hit but has gradually grown popular with marketers overtime.
Facebook, Pinterest, and even Tiktok have caught on and are now beginning to integrate or popularize their in-app purchasing capabilities so that customers can buy items without ever leaving the social media app.
4. The rise of AR in ecommerce
If you have used the common silly Snapchat filters or tried to catch a pokemon before, then you have already used Augmented Reality (AR)in some way.
Augmented Reality has existed for a very long time, some even argue before social media, but it is only now coming mainstream and it is likely going to be a defining feature of ecommerce in 2021 and beyond.
A Statista study projects that by 2023, AR technology would have become an $18 billion industry. It also predicts that consumer spending on AR-embedded mobile apps will reach $15 million by 2022.
These are hard numbers, difficult to ignore, especially when we see how it is being used in ecommerce. For example, Sony electronics recently launched the Envision TV AR app as a way to “try before you use.”
One of the major criticisms of ecommerce over the years has been that customers do not get to “experience” the product before purchase. AR will solve that problem.
Ecommerce businesses in the furniture sales space are already launching AR apps or in-app capabilities that allow customers to see a 3D model of the product, check its size, consider the specs , and to fit it in their space and do their interior design virtually before deciding on buying it.
This technology is still evolving in the way it influences ecommerce, but when I consider the speed of its evolution, it’s pretty clear that it is going to trump even Video.
Remember how optimistic we were in January 2020? We expected 2020 to be the year when we started seeing more clearly, eagerly embarking on a fresh decade. But then came March, and what we thought might be a few weeks or months of interruption spiralled into four seasons of fear and loss. For those who were lucky enough to remain employed in the business world and work from the safety and comfort of home, the constant stream of human connection was abruptly reduced to a trickle. According to Gartner, during March of that fateful year 97% of companies cancelled all business trips and 88% moved to WFH.
Of course, taking the hallway to work instead of the highway offers a profusion of benefits, but team cohesion is not one of them. To keep employees engaged and inspired to work together, savvy leaders have been forced to get creative. After all, the valuable unprompted discussions in the company café, informal chats in meeting rooms and general physical proximity to the people we work with has vanished. But with crisis comes innovation and renewal, and inspiring managers have created dynamic new ways to bring the humanity back to business by reaching out to organizations that deliver something much more meaningful than trivia parties or those competitive offsites from the “before times” (paintball and axe-throwing, anyone?).
The best leaders have created special opportunities for connection—everything from shared virtual experiences to transformative conversations. The goal of these experiences is to amp up the fun factor but also help people learn individually about each other while forging with something deeper—giving back to the world by addressing societal challenges that are extra visible right now. And if those challenges can be addressed by group members who have the freedom to bring their true selves to the task, the cohesion will be lasting.
For some departments, especially the ones that are deeply entrenched in sombre tasks, what they really need is an indulgent break. Alex Schrecengost founded Virtual With Us when she saw her husband’s need to remotely connect with colleagues in a relaxing, business casual social environment. She connected her hospitality industry knowledge and expertise with technology to create special experiences with highly curated wines and sommeliers from famous restaurants, like Jennifer Foucher (formerly of Fiola), Joshua Lit (formerly of Gotham Bar & Grill), Brian Long (part-time sommelier at Marea).
Other leaders found ways to celebrate their colleagues as individuals while at the same time creating fun shared experiences to include the whole group. Jude Baliti, Partner Development Lead & Executive Coach at PwC UK, for example, worked with people throughout the firm to create a cookbook where team members could contribute their favourite recipe and share stories of the background or traditions of these recipes. “It was a great way to open up the conversation around culture and ethnicity, celebrate the diversity of the team and find out a more about each other,” Baliti said.
ActiveCampaign, a cloud software platform, put their people in the act—literally. They hosted a variety show featuring employees from throughout the organization. A live MC guided the event from a studio in Chicago, showcasing some of their people’s hidden talents while recognizing their stars for performance and actions in the annual giving contest. Although this was a remote event, participants had the opportunity to interact with entertainment acts and with each other in the chat.
Successful leaders at other organizations have opted for team training programs that serve two big functions—helping their people learn and grow while also helping them get to know each other better. Blended learning programs that combine self-directed knowledge acquisition with live virtual opportunities for team members to get to know each other provide a particularly powerful impact. Topics like emotional intelligence, DEI and personal branding enable deeper connections among participants than training in hard skills.
It may not seem possible to create a team bonding experience that’s fun, educational, connective and at the same time provides an opportunity to give back. But tell that to the folks at Debate Mate. Their Boardroom to Classroom program helps teams of professionals hone their communication, confidence and leadership skills. Then, participants pay it forward by teaching these skills to Debate Mate students. The sessions typically end with a “challenge” where the students and professionals work together to create an innovative solution to a problem affecting their local community. Debate Mate partners with Number 10 Downing Street, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Oxford University. Their clients include Goldman Sachs, BCG, bp, and UBS.
Like everything in the Covid era, boosting the morale of a remote team will take some extra effort. But it’s worth it to find a truly special experience that will spark not just teambuilding but also the reassuring spirit of humanity.
What’s on the horizon for marketers this year? To find out, I sought insight from the following nine tech executives .
We will see fundamental shifts in how organizations approach B2B marketing. Juliette Rizkallah, Chief Marketing Officer, SailPoint
“Standard marketing models will begin to emulate more aggressive and digitally focused B2C marketing approaches, where companies leverage a variety of digital touchpoints to target an individual buyer. B2B marketing will need to adjust the B2C approaches to handle the multi-personae account buying committee and will leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to measure the progression of accounts along the top of the funnel. The second shift will surround events and the role they play in that funnel. Once largely used for high-level awareness, virtual or physical events in 2021 will instead move further down in the funnel and become more targeted to initiate engagement with accounts already active and showing commercial intent.”
In terms of digital fluency, marketers are years ahead of where anyone thought we’d be going into 2021. Alicia Tillman, Global Chief Marketing Officer at SAP
“The technology, the tactics, the flexible mindset – with these tools, disruption is no longer the showstopper it once was. As the world moves forward day by day, marketers are more prepared than ever to be agile and deliver the experiences audiences need, when they need them. Rather than months-long marketing campaigns, brand marketing will more closely mirror the way we’re living our lives as individuals. In the moment, deeply empathetic, and tuned into each other’s needs.”
We will see a stark divide in an organization’s marketing budget spend, followed by consequential impact. Jim Kruger, Chief Marketing Officer, Veeam
“With the unstable economy projected to carry into the new year, there will be a resulting stark divide in marketing budget spend. On one end, companies will look to cut back on marketing budgets because they see it as a variable cost that can be managed up or down fairly easily. On the other end, companies will increase investment in marketing because they see driving demand and building the brand as top priorities. Looking ahead, those organizations pivoting funds away from marketing will ultimately endure longer term impacts. Marketing takes quite some time to build on, and by toggling budgets up and down, past investments will begin to lose momentum. A dip in marketing spend will put these companies well behind others who continue to invest. Those who choose to navigate through this uncertainty and prepare for recovery will be far more successful in the long run.”
Verifying human engagement will be critical for marketer leaders. Dan Lowden, Chief Marketing Officer, White Ops
“In 2021, marketing leaders will be able to confidently verify engagement with real humans as they increasingly become more aware of how sophisticated bots and fraud are infiltrating their marketing spend. Marketers will partner with specialists that can help them accurately gauge if their campaigns are targeting real humans – resulting in better customer experience, ensuring higher engagement, bringing visibility to cleaner data, improving the company’s compliance position and driving stronger ROI across marketing campaigns. Marketers will be given a more critical seat at the executive table because of these insights and actions that help grow the business while ensuring every marketing dollar is effectively spent.”
Recent privacy regulations have given license for walled gardens to raise their walls even higher. Abhay Singhal, CEO, InMobi Marketing Cloud
“This is an extremely uncertain period of time, and CMOs shouldn’t have one roadmap – they should have multiple. For starters, marketing teams will need to be prepared to make the case for why consumers should opt in to data sharing within the app. On the flip side, marketers should also be prepared to potentially not have access to that data and will need to find alternative solutions or tactics to create as much of a consistent ID as possible. Without this, advertisers are at risk of presenting the same ads to consumers over and over, which compromises brand image and user experience. Having contingency plans for both scenarios will be critical, and marketers need to start setting expectations and redefining metrics as soon as possible.”
Company culture will play an even bigger role in recruiting great marketing talent. Amanda Bohne, Chief Marketing Officer at AppNeta
“Now that so many companies have proven that, for many, remote work can be as effective as in-office work, it will be hard for businesses to return to the old ways of doing things if they want to continue to recruit top talent. Top marketers will now be sought after by companies located across the country, enabling them to potentially live somewhere different or more affordable than where their current employer is located. Trying to recruit for a company where in-office work is mandated will start to meaningfully impact your candidate pool, and therefore your ability to attract the best talent.”
No matter what product you sell, what you need to market is trust. Dale Renner CEO, Co-Founder, RedPoint Global
“Consumers want trust in the product quality, trust in the organization handling your data, trust that the organization is doing what is right for the environment and social needs, trust that the organization knows and values you. Trust is ultimately driven through a series of interactions – those brands that are responsible with a consumer’s data and use it to create value for the consumer, those that provide consistent experiences, those that operate at the consumer’s cadence will build that trust. Brands unable to be trustworthy, will experience a dramatic decline in customer loyalty and brand value. ”
B2B marketers will primarily focus on strengthening relationships with existing customers. Elena Filimonova, SVP, Marketing CGS
“Marketers will evaluate their customer base to provide them with unused benefits of their service, while building out business opportunities for the future. By sharing best practices and tips for leveraging existing services with valued customers, Marketers will ensure long-term loyalty with their companies as these customers may be struggling in the current environment.”
Google and Apple have led the industry-wide clapback for transparency and data privacy. Susan Lee, Chief Product Officer, Valassis
“In the new year, it’s reasonable to assume other tech companies will put similar measures in place to further reduce user signals. Fewer precise data points from cookies and mobile device IDs means marketers will engage fewer consumers on a one-to-one or known basis. Instead, marketing teams will need to leverage advanced machine learning models and other probabilistic techniques to reach high-value audiences who look like your known customer base, maximizing scale.”
Omnipresent CX will be a game changer in defining brand loyalty. Colson Hillier, Chief Marketing Officer, Alorica Inc.
“In today’s ‘continuously-connected’ way of life, it’s not enough that brands respond to customers through multiple channels. Consumers crave effortless CX—being able to alternate quickly from different platforms, but for these channels to also be personalized, persistent and effective in solving pain points in the user experience. In 2021, you’ll see more companies stay one step (or maybe even five!) ahead of customers’ wants through advanced analytics and embedded intelligence, which in turn creates more contextual and meaningful interactions that allow brands to market, sell and serve their customers better and faster. When brands proactively ‘push’ tailored experiences rather than rely on customers to ‘pull’ from services after they’ve had a problem, that changes the nature of the relationship, offering insights for marketing teams to better evaluate evolving consumer preferences. The convergence of always-connected consumers, new platforms for service delivery and permissioned data provides the insights, context and channels that ultimately redefine brand loyalty.”
As a former General Manager and CMO, who worked for nearly 20 years before getting a PhD and working as an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, I conduct research that focuses on helping the C-suite (and aspiring C-level marketers) better understand, develop, and lead marketing excellence.
You may not be anywhere near the office water cooler right now, but we still want to spotlight the most talked about creative from the brands that should be on your radar. Today, we look at Ikea’s eco-focused campaign, in lieu of a festive spot.
While 2019 saw Ikea’s first Christmas ad, starring grime-spitting kitsch ornaments, this time round the retailer bypassed the festivities altogether. Reallocating its ad spend into its sustainability efforts instead, Ikea enters 2021 with an eco-focused campaign that makes clear what it holds dear.
Perfectly alliterate, ‘Fortune Favours the Frugal’ spells out Ikea’s commitment to the circular economy, by inspiring people to think differently about the benefits of living a life of moderation over a life of excess.
Created by Mother London, the spot opens with a meteor-shaped ball of trash hurtling towards Earth. A cause for concern no doubt, as the rock descends, a newsreader ominously tells the viewer that climate experts are suggesting that time has run out in the fight against climate change.
But, just as the viewer is considering putting themselves into the recycling bin, the mood lightens as a child places ‘Make it Better’ into her cassette player and clicks play, and The Barons’ funky riff engages people to action.
The film then turns to people making frugal changes to their consumption habits, such as pickling out-of-date onions, reusing waste water to hydrate the kitchen herbs, or choosing to dry their clothes on a rack instead of resorting to a dryer machine – all the while, showcasing how Ikea’s products can make you more resourceful.
And, each time a conscious consumer chooses to recycle or reuse, the impending rock of rubbish breaks down in size, to show how much waste can be saved by taking these positive steps. Poof goes a plastic pickle bottle. There goes your dryer. Bye bye plastic bags. Ultimately all that’s left is a lonesome plastic bottle that lands to Earth – only to be recycled moments later in a strategically fitted Ikea recycling unit.
This is the latest line of work Mother has delivered for Ikea – a relationship it embarked on back in 2010. Last year, it reimagined Aesop’s fable – ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’ – to highlight the importance of sleep.
That sleep-focused work was followed by ‘Tonight is to sleep’ whereby Mother dreamt up a beautiful way to illustrate the healing properties of Ikea’s sleep range, which will leave you tempted to take a nap.
The blue and yellow temple of hotdogs and tiny pencils, Ikea has in recent years blended its branding, becoming steadily greener, by placing time and effort into refining its approach to sustainability. It has an ultimate aim of becoming fully circular as a business by 2030, which means its needs to ensure 100% of the materials used to make its 12,000-strong product catalogue are made from recycled and recyclable materials.
For its constant creativity and sustainability work, Ikea was celebrated in this year’s New Year Honors list – the time of year where The Drum looks back at the agencies, the brands, the organisations, movements and trends that have shaped the year. And 2020 was a year like no other.
Feature Image Credit: Ikea promotes sustainable living, in lieu of festive spot
If there’s one thing you can say about Facebook, it’s that it didn’t reach its projected user base of 1.9 billion by being complicated to use. On the world’s biggest social network, your relationship status might be complicated but creating a business page shouldn’t be.
People would still go through the trouble even if it were, though, because Facebook has a lot to offer.
But above all, Facebook is still the place to be because that’s where the people you want to do business with are most likely to be. Unless you’re doing business with other businesses. In that case, you might want to pay more attention to LinkedIn.
If you’re sticking with Facebook, here are the seven steps standing between you and a fully-functioning Facebook business page.
1. Sign up or sign in
Before you start creating a Facebook business page, you’ll need a Facebook account. A regular account will do just fine. If you don’t already have one, you can create it by navigating to Facebook and filling out the form.
If you’ve already signed up, you can simply log in. Once you do, in the upper right-hand corner of your page, you’ll see a “+” icon. Clicking on it will show a dropdown “Create” menu. Choose “page.”
2. Create your page
When you choose to create a page, Facebook will take you to the page builder. Before you can do anything with the page, you’ll need to create it. But to turn that “Create Page” button blue, you’ll first need to provide all the information required in the left-hand side portion of the builder.
At the very least, you’ll need to provide the name of your page, as well as the category. The name can be the name of your business. As for the category, start typing your industry or niche and find the closest match.
You can come back and fill out the description later. The name and the category are all it takes to create a page. You’ll see the “Create Page” button turn blue once you’re ready to create the page.
Press it, and you’ll be able to move on to the next step.
3. Set up your page and add images
After you’ve created the page, the right-hand side menu will switch to “Set Up Your Page,” and you’ll be able to add photos – both a cover photo and a profile picture.
The general guidelines Facebook will remind you of are to use a logo or something identifiable as a profile picture, and something more representative of your business as the cover photo. You should also make sure you’re using the appropriate size for the social network.
If you like how your profile photo looks and you think you’ve set your cover picture just right, you can move on. If you haven’t checked the mobile preview, maybe do that first – it’s as simple as pressing the smartphone icon in the upper right-hand corner of the preview area.
Once you’re done and you press save, you’ll be in for a treat.
4. Establish your page’s identity
After pressing “Save,” you’ll see the complete back end of your page, the place where you can manage all of its aspects. It can be a bit overwhelming because there are just so many options and awesome things to do.
Before you move on to filling out the page, you might want to unpublish your page first. This won’t delete any of your progress or change any information – it will just ensure that no one will stumble upon the page while it’s still being created. You can find the option in Settings.
Facebook might ask you what your reason for unpublishing the page. If you say you’re doing it because the page isn’t finished yet, Facebook will ask you what you need to finish the page. Give it a reason and unpublish the page – you’ll be able to get back into the setting and reverse this at a later time.
Moving through the “Set Your Page Up for Success” guide is a good choice for your next step. Establishing the page’s identity would be the first thing you need to do. If you’ve skipped something in the previous steps it will show up here. If nothing else, you’ll get a chance to center the profile picture.
After taking care of this, you can move on to fill out the next section – it’s an important one for businesses.
5. Provide info and preferences
The next step involves providing all that useful information about your business you want people to know. Do you have a website? This is the place where you can connect it to your page. Do you have a physical location you want to include? Business hours? A phone number? Messaging preferences?
If any of this information doesn’t apply to you – like if you don’t have a website, for example, press the “More” button and you’ll be able to choose that it doesn’t apply to your website.
The last of the options, “Add a Page button,” is a special one. When you choose a page button, you are choosing what type of action you want people to do when visiting the page. Click on “Add Button” and you’ll see several options you have at your disposal – some of which come with options of their own.
When you pick one of the options, it will appear below your cover photo. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to change your mind and pick another page button later.
6. Final preparations before going live
Creating a Facebook business page might be simple, but it can still take some time to complete. Up until now, you’ve been covering the basics. At this point, however, you might decide to go off the beaten track and fill out the page before presenting it to the world.
There are tons of things you can do right now. You could try, for example, to add a username to your page – you’ll find the option beneath your page’s name. Adding it is a great way to make sure people will be able to find your page easily – after you’ve published it, that is.
This is also a great time to go over the business tools Facebook provides. You can set up a store, set up appointment bookings, or show a menu, all depending on the type of business you run and the reasons you created the page.
You should also check the settings and configure some important things like:
Visitor posts on your page
Age and country restrictions
Automated responses in messaging
Assigning page roles to people
Connecting the page to an Instagram account
None of this is particularly difficult to do. However, the settings are extensive, and it might take some time to go through all of them.
7. Introduce your page
Technically, your page was created four steps ago – anything you did in between was setting it up and fine-tuning it. When you think that’s done and your page can perform the functions you had in mind for it – let you showcase products, communicate with customers, get them to sign up for your newsletter – you can publish the page again.
The final prompts in the “Set Your Page Up for Success” guide will have you invite friends to like your page and create your first post.
Inviting your friends is a way to leverage your network to give your page an initial boost. However, that boost is anything but organic – people will do it to support you, not necessarily because they are interested in your business. The jury’s still out on whether you should do this or not.
Things are much clearer with the welcome post – you should definitely create it. Creating posts, or posting content, is one of the activities that are expected from an active page, and it’s a great way to engage an audience. You can add photos, locations, and even moods to the post.
With that, this part of the work on your page is done. Don’t get too comfortable, though, as maintaining a Facebook page requires a lot of work. So, get ready to learn about advertising on Facebook, keeping visitors engaged, and using Insights to grow your page.
Conclusion
A Facebook Business page is a great asset for a business of any size. For a small business with a small advertising budget, however, it can be incredibly useful. All it takes to create one is some spare time and a couple of ideas for content.
Keep in mind, however, that creating the page is the first step towards establishing a useful and profitable social media presence for your business. Don’t expect things to happen overnight. You’ll have to keep at it to see results.
Guest author: Marko Ticak writes about everything from marketing to writing. He likes getting caught in the rain, and he doesn’t mind it’s a cliché. When he doesn’t write, he listens to music and looks for things to write about.
