Staying on top of marketing trends is extremely relevant for the future success of your branding initiatives. That’s why we’ve made the task a little easier for you by compiling a neat list of 7 marketing trends to keep an eye on in 2021. Keep these in mind at your next creative brainstorming session, to make sure your marketing strategy for 2021 is completely aligned with the expectations of your customers and employees.
1. Understand and explain your purpose
Knowing why your business exists, and for whom it exists are two increasingly important topics for 2021. To use the fancy word, you have to understand your company’s raison d’être, or in short, your company’s mission and vision.
By truly understanding this, you are able to articulate it, which helps you communicate and build stronger relationships with your customers. Look at it like this, if you know which customers you’re doing what you do for, then you also know which kinds of relationships you should focus on building.
Building the relationships is then another matter, which individually printed promotional products with doorstep delivery can help you do. Reach out to us if you need help with this!
2. Prepare an agile marketing strategy
Agile is admittedly somewhat of a buzzword that often leaves people confused, but still, the concept of what it represents is gaining ever more traction in recent times.
And we definitely think you should pay attention as well. In short, what being agile really means is being able to be flexible: Listen to your environment (customers), and compose solutions that fit their ever-changing needs.
That means you have to make sure your marketing strategy for 2021 isn’t a set-in-stone thing, that can never be deviated from. Things change, and you should be prepared to do the same.
3. Focus on the human experience
The harsh truth is that your company is hard to relate to. By changing this, you create stronger relationships with your customers. Relationships where you understand your values and what you help your customers do by mirroring what they care about. In turn, they will also care more about you. In short, you have to focus on the human experiences by separating your business from its corporate objectives of generating a profit and making it more human and relatable.
A good example is this: We understood based on customer conversations that sustainability was something all our customers cared deeply about. Naturally, we devised a plan for how to act on this. The result was us developing an understanding that the core of our business lies in bringing the experience and joy of giving to our customers, but this time it was more about giving back to the environment.
As such, we launched our IGO Green initiative and made it so part of our revenue goes towards planting trees together with www.onetreeplanted.org. In fact, in September alone we planted 6.800 trees. Additionally, we developed a sustainable materials dictionary to educate employees and customers alike on the sustainability of the materials that exist in the products they choose.
Like that, we focused on mirroring values that our customers hold and care about as people, which in turn made our business sound a lot more human. Win-win.
4. Build trust with your customers
In recent times, and especially for 2021, you must develop trust with your customers. Professionally, this means you have to show your customers and employees that you have values that you can repeatedly deliver on. To borrow our example from above – your customers and employees probably care about sustainability, and you may have told them you do as well.
So when you have the opportunity to launch promotional product campaigns, can they then trust that you will use products aligned with their values? Or will you use materials that aren’t what they had in mind when they pictured you as a sustainable brand? If you want to develop trust, and thus a stronger relationship with your customer and employees, then the correct answer should be obvious.
None of this is meant to shame businesses who have to start small and are just now getting started using promotional products to elevate their brand, but it’s meant to show you how you can make a difference based on what the trend is.
5. Participate in your customer’s lives
In marketing, the age-old question of “where do you customers hang out?” is as relevant as ever. Simply put, the answer to the question tells you a whole lot about your customer’s interests and how/where you can reach them.
This is important, because if you know what they care about and where they can be reached, then you can target them even more effectively with creatively developed promotional product campaigns. After all, if your message isn’t being heard by your target audience, then the effort is wasted.
If you need any help on figuring out how to develop a promotional product campaign for your business, we’ll gladly offer you a free consultation!
6. Fuse cross-industry experiences
This is at the core of what we offer at IGO Promo. We strongly believe that products and experiences make a stronger impact when you add in carefully chosen promotional product to help spread the message of your new product launch, or build a campaign for internal branding, etc.
The idea is this: If you can create innovative experiences by offering products and services to your employees that span industries, for example by merging software products with physical products, then a new world of opportunity opens up for your business. This is a little more advanced, but also where the real prize is at.
To get started, we recommend you start viewing businesses, not as something that delivers value by creating something and offering it to customers in a linear input –> output way. Rather, think about how your business can participate in a value-network comprised of businesses that are seemingly unrelated to yours. Together you have the potential and capacity to merge ideas that can turn out to be innovative new product/service offerings for your customers!
Start small, and reach out to us if you need help understanding how your brand can be elevated by more creative and innovative means of engaging your customers with promotional products.
7. Attract talent to develop your business
Successful businesses are those that can attract, develop, and keep talent. This is a 3-part challenge that is increasingly more important as we move into a fast-moving digital future where a lot of jobs can be done online.
Luckily, our industry of promotional products and the idea of corporate gifts can help you solve this 3-part challenge. First, we’re no strangers to supplying cool merchandise for companies to use at career fairs. This helps start conversations between aspiring talent and your company.
Second, to develop talent, you want to make sure they grow, but not alone; as part of a team. We’ve previously provided team-building tips and made suggestions for products that can be used at events to foster growth.
Lastly, to keep the talent, you want to make sure the talented people feel appreciated.
Take this year as an example, there are probably some very capable employees that helped your company survive the initial (and ongoing) rough state of Covid-19. And you are probably grateful for their hard work and feel lucky that they were there to help.
All you have to do is show that to them. The best way to do that is through a carefully selected corporate gift, delivered straight to their door. It’s the simple things.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this post helps you stay on top of the 7 most relevant marketing trends for 2021.
Instead of listing everything again right here, we’ll end by saying one thing that applies to every tip we have given you, and to the field of promotional products: Make sure your marketing choices are aligned with your employees’ and customers’ professional expectations and personal values.
If you do this, everything will be alright.