Sales and marketing involves understanding your business’ unique selling points and communicating them to a customer base. However, other variables such as the demographics of your customers, their preferred communication channels and rapidly changing technology makes marketing a particularly onerous task.
This week we ask contributors to share the marketing techniques that worked for them in 2020.
Neil Luo, VP & Global Head of SME, Airwallex
Whether you’re a startup or larger-scale business, in-person events are an effective way to reach senior decision-makers. While holding events has been a key part of our marketing strategy, the 2020 pandemic ruled out face-to-face meetings for most businesses.
Virtual events have been the obvious next step, however, Zoom-fatigue is a real challenge when reaching target audiences. To combat this, events must provide tangible business value. For example, ahead of our eCommerce Webinar Series we surveyed our retail customers to determine their biggest challenges; customer acquisition (33 per cent), coordinating shipping and fulfilment (13 per cent), followed by managing cash flow (11 per cent). We used these insights to bring together our network of eCommerce experts to discuss these problems and provide real-world advice.
This approach meant we could answer key business challenges, reach a wide audience, and repurpose the event recordings for blog content and eDMs – ultimately improving the ROI on our marketing spend.
Sabri Suby, Founder & Head of Growth, King Kong
2020 has taught us many lessons, but there is one thing that’s for sure. Business owners must stop relying on big tech platforms to dictate their own success. Allowing sometimes volatile networks like Facebook or Google to control every part of your business, is also giving them the power to take it away.
For me, my trusted email database has reigned supreme in 2020. Any marketer should be able to funnel leads gained from external platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, to their own text and email databases.
Facebook likes to tell the world about its leading user database, but email is still bigger. Currently, email has 3.9 billion users, which is more than Facebook’s 2.6 billion and Twitter’s 330 million combined. Email users are on track to reach 4.3 billion by 2023, and this should be a leading tool for any business in 2021 to regain and maintain control of their contacts and sales.
Simon le Grande, Director Of Marketing And Product Management, Lightspeed HQ
In a time where the hospitality and retail industry landscapes continue to change, and future-proofing business models is the priority, operators are seeking information, advice and guidance like never before. This is why content marketing was so successful in 2021. Positioning a brand as a trusted source of thought leadership, and providing actionable insights that help businesses adapt and thrive has proven incredibly effective in the post-COVID era.
The two-fold benefit of a strong content marketing strategy is that it acts as a retention mechanism: ensuring the loyalty (and survival) of existing customers, and an acquisition tool: attracting new customers to a brand and its associated products.
Whitepapers, ebooks, webinars and free tools were some of the most effective mediums used to attract new customers to the Lightspeed ecosystem in 2021.
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