With the pandemic hitting the world in the early phases of 2020, we saw a digital transition within the workplace, everyday life, and the world around us. With many of us moving towards an at-home work lifestyle, zoom calls took over the daily in person meetings and content rollout became primarily digital. As we continue to live in the digital era, we must focus our attention on the strategies we focus on as we move into the 2024 year.

More than ever, digital marketing strategies are on the top of the priority list for many companies. For some industries, this was the first time that an ‘online presence’ was needed, but for most it was just a new area that required some extra focus. More time spent on screens means more time for advertisers to get in front of the consumer, more online shopping, and more opportunity for business growth and development in a digital sector. If you are looking to reach more customers, connect with your companies’ audience, and stay in the conversation online this year you may want to reevaluate your digital marketing strategies.

Comprehensive Content Marketing Strategy

During the primary transition to digital this year, we saw a lot more players in the field that hadn’t focused much on social and digital in the past. Companies were shifting their focus from Out Of Home advertising to strictly digital and focusing on pushing products through online sales and campaigns that were up with the times online. In order to keep up with the new Joneses and the new players in the space, companies must understand that the content you are putting out, and the strategy of the rollout is of the utmost importance.

You can have a high-quality campaign brought to life by a fantastic creative team, but if the digital rollout isn’t well thought out and executed – it will get caught in the mix and won’t stick. Re-working your companies blog, social media team, and brand image is something to keep in mind as we move into this new digitally dominated year.

By identifying the goals that you are trying to achieve this year online, you will be able to better tell what you need to do in order to achieve them. We spoke with a few companies in our network to ask them what their main goals of the upcoming year were and they were categorized as the following:

• Increase Brand Awareness
• Increase Social Following
• Continue Growing E-Mail Lists
• Generate Traffic For Website
• Gross More Downloads
• Generate New Leads
• Convert Leads To Customers / Sales

By understanding the goals the company has, the digital marketing team can look at new avenues of production, publication, and rollout to achieve these goals. A key takeaway exercise here is to review what was done over the course of the 2024 year digitally and see what worked for you… and what didn’t. Go in and see what you can do to continue doing what worked well, and rework what didn’t work. But, start with objectives and work backwards before you begin pushing forward.

A Responsive Social Media Marketing Strategy

Today more than ever, millions of people around the world are looking to social media to connect with friends, family, and colleagues around the world. Throughout 2020, social media platforms saw exponential growth and apps like FaceTime, Zoom, Google Classroom, and TikTok taking off as they filled the gaps that were opened due to the shift in the world that the pandemic caused. On the social media side of things, people are on their phones and computers more than ever before and these platforms have been a perfect outlet for marketers to access their customers.

Through social media marketing, brands are able to reach current customers, potential prospects, and turn unaware users into constant customers. With more people online means there are more prospective visitors to your website which means the chances of gaining new conversions is at an all time high. The best place to drive these points of traffic to your site: Social Media Marketing Campaigns.

The beauty of social media is that it offers a perfect vehicle of media for a brand to communicate with their audience. With the ability to respond to public comments, tweet comical jokes, and make videos about people using your product there is no reason a B2C company shouldn’t be focusing efforts on social media this year.

Having a team of workers at every company who work as just social media response can be beneficial to many companies. At all points in the day there are people who are reaching out to the brands they admire and use products from and ask them questions via Twitter, Facebook Messenger, and in the comment section of Instagram. By having a team of responsive workers who can maintain these inquiries via social media, the brand will be able to create a sense of security with customers, proving that you’re always there for them when they are in times of need.

The main role of these team members would be to do the following:

• Tweet on behalf of the brand and engage followers with the brand page.
• Respond to tweets coming from consumers regarding product questions / inquiries
• Manage the Direct Messaging on Twitter
• Handling the comment section of the brands Facebook page
• Reaching out to customers who reportedly had a bad experience with the product/service
• Engaging with customers who posted having good experiences with the brand via Facebook
• Monitor and engage with the Instagram activity of the brand
• Repost and re-share positive posts tagging the brand on Instagram

Deploy tactics on social that encourage other users to post about positive experiences they’ve had with the brands product / service

By doing all of these and staying on top of things, the brand comes off as responsive, there for their consumers, and engaged with the audience. Customers love to hear directly from the brand so never leave them in the dark – stay engaged and stay in the conversation!

A Trust-Building Influencer Marketing Team

Something we are very passionate about at Glewee is connecting brands with influencers in order to execute social media campaigns. With influencers emerging every day on leading social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, millions of users in the millennial sector are channeling their energy towards listening to these users and following their lead.

By deploying influencers for social media campaigns for your company, you are able to have true brand representatives in real time. With content creators using your product/service in their creative videos, photos, and posts – your brand is able to be seen and understand by new audiences. The primary focus of influencers working for a company is to drive new sets of eyes to the brands social pages, website, and promotional posts. By having a strong influencer team behind your companies’ digital rollout, users are able to see the product beyond the surface and see someone they look up to speaking highly of the product and using it in their own life.

In 2021, we suggest that every brand deploys an array of social media influencers to be spokespeople for the brand itself. Each influencer has their own unique following and brand image, and being able to find creators that fit the narrative of your product / service is essential to drive new users to branded social pages, websites, and clickthrough pages to generate new leads, sales, and engagement.

Trend-Forecasting Specialists

One thing that we focused on this past year was looking at how large brands transitioned to social media amidst the at-home lifestyle to stay up to date with their customer base and consumers. Many of them were testing the waters and jumping on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok full time for the first time in the life of the company. Many companies tried it out and saw little engagement, whereas others like Oreo, Burger King, Postmates, and Uber did a great job keeping up with the times and bringing a comedic light to the conversation online.

With this comes the importance of trend forecasting. We’re not suggesting that you bring someone on board that has the trend magic ball that they can look into to see what dance is going to catch on next, but we think every brand should have someone on board who is fully immersed in the trends of social media from day to day.

Driven primarily by the power of TikTok, we saw trends grow to mass popularity literally overnight in the past year. With dances becoming worldwide trends and different trend templates coming out by the week, brands took these and put their own spin on them to work for themselves.

One thing to avoid is jumping on the trend bandwagon too late. If a TikTok trend is a few weeks old, maybe devote time into looking for the next trend rather then having a team create content for something that’s been over with and stuck ‘in the past’.

Having someone, or a team within your digital department devoted to seeing what is trending each week and then figure out how your company can hop on that trend and create content around the trend that works for you is a fantastic way to stay in the loop. People love following trends and always get a kick out of it when a brand plays into the trend correctly.

A Multi-Platform Content Publication Team

One may think that it’s the best idea to devote all creative efforts to making the most appealing and engaging campaign for Instagram. Yes, that may be great, but then again someone may say it’s better to spend the bulk of the effort making the most sharable TikTok. Others say it’s best to find an avenue of Twitter and stick to it for publication. Though all these ideas are fine and work for some companies, we think it’s best to devote efforts to all of the social media platforms.

Luckily with social, repurposing content across different platforms is something that has become more common and a task that is easy to do. We suggest honing in on this idea moving into this year and making sure that your voice is heard across every social media platform, not just one one.

With users separating the time online into different platforms, there is no reason that companies shouldn’t be focusing on producing content that is special to each platform while still maintaining the same brand voice and slogan identity. If you are creating a campaign for Instagram with a certain tagline, you should also focus on how that can be translated to TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, and even Facebook.

When users see something interesting one time they think to themselves “that’s funny, let me favorite that”. But, when users start to see it across different platforms – that’s when it sticks. At Glewee, we tell clients and brands that messages are best perceived and remembered after the user sees it three times. Once it’s in the users mind multiple times and in front of their eyes across different platforms is when it really begins to stick.

By creating content that is meant for repurposing and distribution across all social channels, all brands can see a greater overall impression impact and gross like count. Don’t just focus on posting on one single social media platform, think “how can we distribute this campaign across all of the social media platforms”. That way the campaign can stick and you can stay in the conversation with the users as they move from platform to platform. Just remember to keep your call to action, brand voice, and campaign intentions in mind as you create content for these different channels!

Though there is no telling when things may return to how they were in the past, one thing is for sure and it is that we are going to still live in the digital world for the unforeseeable future. That means more zoom calls, more email blasts, and more branded content being sprinkled into our social media feeds. From the perspective of the brand, this is the perfect time to hone in on social media marketing and take on new strategies for the 2021 year.

The time to connect with your audience is now. Do so correctly and in your own unique way and make sure to stay in the digital conversation.