READ MORE: PR and Digital Marketing: A Hybrid Approach

More Co-marketing Partnerships

Co-marketing is on the rise, with more brands collaborating to achieve win-win campaigns within their intersecting industries.

Co-marketing partnerships bring brands together to reach new or untapped audiences, enhance brand credibility, keep up with trends, and achieve joint business objectives. When done correctly, these partnerships are hugely mutually beneficial.

Importantly, you need to ensure that the brand collaboration is a good match and that both brands have  clearly-defined target audiences and similar brand representation. Moreover, it should also feel organic. Partnerships that seem forced, or are an uncomfortable combination of products or brand tones, generally don’t get the results.

Increased Interactive Content

Users now demand more than functionality – they want engagement. While social media is key to this engagement, you can also include engagement tools in your existing online infrastructure. This includes website quizzes, games, polls, interactive videos, surveys, and competitions.

Adding interactive elements to your website or social media is a good way to provide value for visitors. It will also get them to engage with your brand, therefore allowing you to learn more about them too.

For example, many companies offer free tips, how-to videos and even online bond calculators on their websites. In this way, they’re offering value to their visitors while also learning more about their website user activity. This info, in turn, can help you refine targeting for paid ad campaigns on Google or Facebook.

Video’s Prioritisation

In 2020, we saw clearly that video content gets higher engagement than copy and still imagery. This is evidenced by the TikTok boom and multiple viral video campaigns. Video content lends itself to shareability and adds distinction to your customers’ newsfeeds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA4dDs0T7sM

Databox conducted a survey to analyse this trend, specifically regarding Facebook. When asked what content drives more engagement, marketers noted that video provided 29,7% more clicks than images.

The reason? Videos force scrolling users to stop and pay attention to the post. As consumers, we’ve gotten better at digesting content while scrolling, making it easier to scroll through images without giving the posts the time of day. With videos, you have an extra second to grab users’ attention.

Experiential Marketing’s Evolution

The immediate future of in-person events remains uncertain. Instead, one key marketing trend you should capitalize on next year is virtual events. Experiential marketing, while once touted as the next big thing, relies on human interaction which, in the current climate, cannot be banked on.

2020 saw everything change, with the global health crisis largely eliminating live events & upending proven marketing techniques. With brands eager to reunite with customers, experiential marketing pivoted to help forge relationships into the future. https://t.co/5oNlmD3Ql7 pic.twitter.com/Q0S0LSKhXV

— Advertising Week (@advertisingweek) December 9, 2020

But experiential marketing has evolved. Forbes notes that it will become digitised. “People are spending more time online and using connected devices as they are mandated to stay inside, giving more opportunities for users to interact. Whether it be through VR, playing an interactive game, attending a virtual concert, or a live streaming demo, experiential marketing will move towards brands engaging audiences for experiences online.”

Expansion into Africa

Considering marketing your business in Africa? If not, you should be in 2021. If your strategy doesn’t extend into Africa, you may be left behind in the next few years – if approached correctly, the growth opportunities are immense.

According to the Harvard Business Review, “the emerging affluent African consumer is as connected as the rest of the world, smartphone always in hand. As this untapped market captures global attention, it also offers marketers a chance to leapfrog the legacy of mass marketing and reinvent the field from the ground up.”

Marketing in Africa has its challenges, with different languages and cultures being the obvious hurdle, and so brands that launch global campaigns in Africa are often unsuccessful. But you can learn from other brand’s mistakes. Crucially, marketing needs to be localised and adapted for each territory and market segment within it.

It’s no wonder that social media holds the key to marketing potential in Africa… Digital media is becoming increasingly accessible across the continent, thereby allowing targeted ad campaigns to flourish across the various platforms. This data also gives brands an opportunity to tap into, and understand, their growing market.

READ MORE: How to develop a Marketing Budget that supports Business Growth

The post Marketing Trends to Look Out For in 2021 first appeared on Fenix Marketing.

The post Marketing Trends to Look Out For in 2021 appeared first on Fenix Marketing.

READ MORE: PR and Digital Marketing: A Hybrid Approach

When to Reposition your Brand

The key question many businesses ponder is whether or not they should reposition their brand, and if so, then when?

Repositioning may be helpful if you feel you are no longer connecting with your customer base. Additionally, a repositioning is highly beneficial if you are expanding to a new, broader market or adapting to competitive forces.

If your market seems to be overtaking you, a solid brand repositioning strategy may be your lifeline. If your enterprise is experiencing periods of little to no growth, it might be time to reframe your offering to (re)appeal to your audience.

The Kellogg School of Management notes that “[brand] repositioning typically takes considerable time and financial resources. Nevertheless, modest changes in a position are sometimes warranted to better align a brand’s frame of reference with its point of difference”.

While lengthy and potentially costly, brand repositioning is critical if your brand’s existing position is failing to gain traction. Brand reframing is an absolute necessity when your services or products have changed or been updated.

Your customers should know what you are offering at all times so that they can buy into your brand. Your brand is more approachable and your audience will more easily spend money with you if your customers are informed.

How to Begin

So how to begin? Firstly, you need to consider the industry landscape your enterprise functions in. Within your business, you also have to take stock of your goals, courses of action, and plans for the future – this then has to be considered in light of what your competitors are delivering. Be sure to highlight your differentiating factors, future-proof your growth strategies as far as possible, and stay up-to-date with what your competing enterprises’ movements.

Similarly, it is essential that you listen to your customers and do the necessary market research. Brand repositioning is of no use if you pivot in the wrong direction. Once you understand what your clients need, you will need to re-look at your brand messaging and internal functioning. Your cross-platform messaging should address your updated offering, (re)connect with clients, and foster trust within your audience.

Next, it is critical that you update and reconsider your marketing touch-points. Every single interaction and offering your company delivers should align with your repositioned brand’s message. It may be difficult at first, but you have to commit to your new message across all your brand’s touch-points. Slipping into old patterns is easy for business owners but confusing to customers on the receiving end of the messaging and should thus be avoided.

There’s No Need to Rush

Finally, brand repositioning is relatively scalable and can be implemented over a period of time. While most businesses want to reposition, or even relaunch, at full-speed with guns blazing, this may be difficult to justify financially. Instead, you can revise your brand positioning bit-by-bit. For a time-sensitive approach, start by re-looking your social media platforms and advertising copy, then move on to website updates. Eventually, you can roll out your remaining touch-points.

A marketing agency with a holistic, results-driven approach can help you achieve effective repositioning by walking this journey with you and strategising to meet your needs. We work with many clients to refine their brand transformation process. Get in touch to see how we can help you.

READ MORE: Why Businesses Should Leverage Social Media for Sustained Growth

The post The Fundamentals of Brand Repositioning first appeared on Fenix Marketing.

The post The Fundamentals of Brand Repositioning appeared first on Fenix Marketing.

READ MORE: Why Businesses Should Leverage Social Media for Sustained Growth

How to Refine your Marketing Budget

As a general guideline, your Marketing Budget should be between 5% – 10% of your total revenue for the year. Some businesses will have much more room to work within their budgets than others.

Start-up companies who have high overheads may struggle to invest in marketing. However, an advantage of the percentage approach is that the budget is not fixed. So it will grow as revenue increases ensuring long-term profitability. Whether you are a start-up or established company, no businesses can afford not to invest in marketing.

Once you have an overall figure set aside, the next question is how and where to allocate the budget. As a business owner, you should have a good idea of your products and services. This includes knowings what the ‘cash cow’ currently is, and which product shows the most potential for future growth.

Where most get it wrong is that they focus all their efforts (and marketing budget) on the cash cow and lose sight of where the businesses future growth will come from. As a first step, identify the current cash cow and set it to one side. Then identify the future ‘money maker’ and have a marketing allocation for each.

Budgeting with the Pandemic

With the current pandemic, there are a few things for business owners to consider when developing or adjusting their Marketing Budget. Is the Marketing Budget in line with current expenses? How much should I set aside for future growth? Does the Marketing Budget support business goals? In the same respect, how have the current consumer trends shifted?

Imagine your business as a pie chart, ‘Product A’ currently drives 60% of your business revenue, ‘Product B’ makes up 30% of your revenue and ‘Product C’ only makes up 10% of your current business revenue. One would naturally split the marketing budget allocations as such, 60% of the budget to ‘A’, 30% to ‘B’ and so on. But what if your future ‘money maker’ was ‘Product C’, then it would make sense to allocate more marketing spend and focus on growing Product C that will one day evolve into your cash cow. With some research, market insight and a good understanding of the change in consumer and media trends, one can identify how to adapt their current budget and strategy to ensure future growth.

Future-proof your Strategy

If your business is only barely covering costs, then a 5 to 10 percent marketing budget may not be practical. Although identifying your Product C or future money maker and investing as such could have a significant trade-off. Ultimately marketing is required for growth, and if carefully thought out, the trade-off of cutting into narrow margins now to increase overall sales in future will pay off in the end by preparing the business for cycles of future growth. Budgeting is a long view undertaking, think about where your business is headed, not just where you are now.

The post How to develop a Marketing Budget that supports Business Growth first appeared on Fenix Marketing.

The post How to develop a Marketing Budget that supports Business Growth appeared first on Fenix Marketing.