The return of the brand marketing renaissance

By: Craig Neale – Chief Marketing Officer – The Sixty Nine – www.thelxix.com

 

Internet marketing is rapidly moving into a new renaissance period. The world of internet marketing was a place whereby data, evidence and logic could be intertwined with creativity, culture and that certain je ne sais quoi which marketers have always held as a dark art. This artistic right-side of the brain for the internet marketing industry was in true terms a product of where marketeers were living and the references they were exposed to; largely dominated by large cities such as London.

How has working from home changed marketing and customer relations?

You may be wondering, has working from home changed marketing and advertising? The answer is yes, it’s changed everything. In some ways it risked reducing those references to that of Zoom calls and leisure-wear trends but something amazing happened; work from home became work from anywhere, with anyone and at any time. 2021 has become the year where a team of remote-working internet marketeers can combine references from their own worlds, often from all over the world, and build those references into the logical and data-led structures of internet marketing. They can understand and attract the attention of audiences in a more representative way. At a time where internet marketing was destined to become an AI-led, data-obsessive function, the creative and human elements of the discipline have returned. Internet marketing has become a dark art once more.

What is brand awareness best practice in 2021?

So, how do you use working from home to create great marketing awareness? Here are five simple tips to make working from home work for brand awareness and promotion:

1. Consider what has changed – Look around you and consider what has changed in marketing and in what way. Start with people’s attitudes and not just their behaviours. Do they appreciate family time more? Are they more less focussed on price but instead want value? Are people less focussed on a career for life and more interested in having a portfolio career? Are your customers seeing the gig-economy as a better place to get a work-life balance? This will give you a better understanding to build your customer relations from and ultimately lead to a path for increasing brand awareness.

 

2. Reset your references – Step out into the world, speak to new people, challenge your own assumptions. It’s likely that the world around you has changed now you’ve got a remote working job and it’s the same for your customers. To be able to really understand your customers’ behaviours, you need to go back to the start of your marketing understanding and consider what are the words, stimulus and environments that your customers are operating within.

 

3. Think about what has remained – the good news is that many elements will have remained, albeit in a different way. The clocks still move forwards, we still use email and our phones are a place where we can access work, rest and play. Attitudes may be different, and some behaviours too, but much of what you built before in your marketing funnels, brand awareness trackers and analytics software will still be useful and just needs tailoring, not building again from the bottom up.

 

4. Look at what data is saying – the best use of data is to either to trigger, track or test. It should either be a way to start a process (such as a customer funnel), track whether the targets or assumptions you made are on-track or to test out a series of answers to questions you’ve got. If you’re questioning “how many of my customers work from home?” then you can use your analytics software to see whether the number of IP addresses versus the amount of unique visitors is down. You’re then able to track whether that increases or decreases over time.

 

5. Bring it all together – internet marketing is much more of a symphony of different instruments than a mind-blowing solo from one talented player. Now, more than ever, it’s important to combine the logic, intelligence and practical tactics of internet marketing with the intuition, darks arts and gut instinct of traditional marketing. Internet marketing has always been the king of optimising and scaling brand awareness campaigns but with behaviours to work, careers and home life having shifted considerably, it’s an important time to take a step back and see what the bigger picture is

The original renaissance period is often agreed as having occurred after the crisis of the late middle ages during a significant period of disruption and social change. As a result, art, literature, culture and style all came to the fore as dominant influences. Given the changes and the shift we’ve seen in recent times, it’s not too hard to see the comparisons and to understand why marketing is moving into a new renaissance period itself.