Here are some changes Marketers must pay attention to:
The last few months we have seen a climatic mix of chaos, uncertainty, empathy, challenge and opportunity.
All over the world business had to adjust operations.
They had to scale up or down, and had to rethink their entire business model as conditions continue to change.
All over the world, companies have had to adjust the way they do operations.
At the same time, the transformation to digital accelerated, with the demand for SEO at its core.
In this article we will cover the 5 fundamentals shifts that we have seen in the market with some insight into search behavior.
The traditional customer journey is changing :
Suppose you look at the big companies like Salesforce, Adobe and IBM.
They solely relied heavily on trade shows and field-to-field meetings.
Now they invest in online content for their websites to replace what customers would have gotten from offline events.
They create content and mechanisms for one-on-one interactions so that their account teams can connect with customers.
For example, normally overnight retail consumers questions about takeout menus, seating charts and COVID policies have changed what customers are looking for.
Global companies are struggling to understand how they should adapt to a NEW NORMAL and modify their content for different regions to address regional lockdowns and re-openings.
Pro Tips
- As we enter Q4 and holiday season, search can help these radical changes in real-time.
- Continue to invest in virtual connections and be prepared to balance the in-person events when the time comes.
- Marketing Fails in Times of Dynamic Change:
When marketers only look at the narrow range metrics to capture important Business Intelligence (BI) to understand the full extent of market shifts to inform search strategy.
Analytics that only look at the narrow range of metrics fail to grasp the extent of market shifts I have seen in search.
Typically, SEO platforms look only narrowly at trends.
This is not enough to really see the scale of what is happening in search.
It’s essential to process massive amounts of data to see the full scope of changes happening across the whole search landscape.
Pro Tips
- Ingest as much data as you and your team can, use it better, and utilize AL where you can.
- Invest more time to gain a better understanding of market data and not just user data.
- What is past is not a Preface:
I’ve seen a significant shift away from over-reliance on historical trends during COVID.
There is a greater and more critical role today for real-time data in the search and content space.
It is CRITICAL to detect how markets and customers intent is changing massively and quickly.
SEO and Digital Marketers have to speed up their cadence when things are rapidly changing and the magnitudes of those changes are great.
Looking at data every year or even monthly can miss essential inflection points.
Pro Tips
- Going forward in the future, marketers need to respond more efficiently to thrive in this kind of market.
- Marketers need to look for timely data to rethink their search strategies for the holidays and the new year.
- 4. Big Trends Can Hide Important Things
Valuable insights – particularly in markets that have been hit hard by COVID-19, are found at a very granular level.
For example, flights are down overall.
But it s city-by-city changes, city-pair changes, and timing of regional lockdowns and local quarantine requirements that marketers need to be able to see.
Similarly , interest in regional flights are growing, whereas international flights are down.
Marketers need to look at a granular level, find where the opportunities are, even in a market like travel that has been depressed.
- Marketers need to go both broad and go deep at the same time.
- As marketers we have to deal with vast amounts of data and get better at looking at it at a granular level to reveal insights and patterns that are actionable.
- Marketers need to try new Approaches to understand user intent :
What digital marketers and SEO professionals have long known is finally coming to fruition: online shopping is convenient and easy.
Shoppers are browsing more frequently, which is leading to more purchases and overall revenue, according to research from the 2020 BrightEdge Holiday Planning Guide.
However , these purchases are smaller in value.
A recent survey provided that 60% of consumers have been shopping online more often since COVID-19.
Of that percentage 73% will continue after the pandemic.
Now has never been a better time for marketers to test new ways of understanding intent from a macro industry and a micro user perspective.
For example, earlier this year Best Buy, Kohl’s, Walmart and Target announced they wont be open on Thanksgiving day.
It is still unclear if major retailers are sitting out Black Friday altogether, but smaller stores are likely shifting everything online to generate sales.
With little Black Friday customers, self-isolating shoppers will be keenly focused on Cyber Monday deals.
The more marketers build up their knowledge and understanding of progression that affect their industry and combine this with search intelligence, the better they will understand different types of intent – not just in the holiday season but in the year ahead.
