1. Digital Changes in Consumer Behavior Are Here to Stay
McKinsey found that the pandemic accelerated ecommerce adoption by 10 years in just 3 months.
In fact, 60% of companies across sectors witnessed new buying behaviors over this past year.
The time to pivot and keep up with the demand for quick and easy online ordering, curbside pickup, and contactless delivery has passed.
Now, companies are looking to build security and resilience for the future.
IBM’s most recent Institute for Business Value report finds that transitioning to more resilient infrastructure is a priority for 52% of retail brands, alongside deploying contactless mobile payments (47%) and creating more robust digital selling platforms (45%).
2. Marketers Need to Get Ahead of Consumer Demand with Real-Time Insight
Search insights are as close to real-time voice of customer as you can get.
Consumers are explicitly telling brands about their wants, needs, and intent in search queries and onsite behavior.
If your organization isn’t set up to listen to, analyze, and then activate these insights with real-time personalizations, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity to connect and engage.
Get the people, processes, and platform in place to put this most valuable customer data to work.
3. Customers Are Looking to Brands to Deliver Connected Digital Experiences
In its recent State of the Connected Customer survey, Salesforce found that 80% of customers believe the experience they have with a company is just as important as its products and services.
Whether they’re chatting with an AI support bot, talking to a customer representative on the phone, or dealing with sales, customers expect that agents will have access to their information.
They expect that one interaction will pick up where the other left off – that they won’t have to start all over again in each new engagement with the brand.
The same study also found 62% of customers say their experience with one industry influences their expectation of others.
4. Intelligent Automation in Digital Takes Us Beyond Simple Replication
SEO professionals and digital marketers are finding that simply automating tasks to reduce redundancy is no longer enough. A key digital trend is that the number of consumer interactions and touch-points has ballooned. The volume of data we have to analyze has exploded.
As a result, deep learning, machine learning, natural language processing, and robotic process automation (RPA) are all finding their way into SEO and digital marketing workflows.
Intelligent automation means letting go of the need to make every single decision. It means empowering machines to not only take action in pre-programmed if/then scenarios but to actually learn about and get to know each customer in ways we, as humans, simply cannot do at scale.
And it means enabling those machines to take action in real-time when the customer is most receptive to personalized messaging, content, deals, and recommendations.
5. Hyperlocalization Moves Beyond Geography
The pandemic ushered in an acute awareness of supply chain issues and a widespread desire in consumers to support local businesses.
While “value for money” was the top purchase driver for consumers polled by KPMG in late 2020, Ernst and Young more recently found that 69% of consumers believe that brands must positively change the world.
This is particularly important for Millennials, 83% of whom find it important that the brands they choose to buy from have values that align with their own.
Marketers and executives must do the work of ensuring the brand’s values are communicated clearly.
In addition to localizing content by geography – sharing information about local landmarks on your GMB profile, creating unique blog content by location, targeting ads by location – getting hyperlocal means understanding what truly matters to customers in any given location.
Those values can be reflected back in personalized ad copy, offers, email marketing, and more.
Source : https://www.searchenginejournal.com/
