Brand
We have a sense that more companies are starting this year investing energy in considering their brand purpose, their brand’s reason for being, beyond making money. It is incredibly rare, in fact I couldn’t tell you the last time, someone came to us to launch a business they created solely as a money-making endeavour. Startups are born out of a desire to fix a problem and make a change. That is their brand purpose.
Brands can and should take a stance on social and political matters, according to new research by Kubi Kalloo and its partner Alligator Digital. A survey of 600 people in both the US and UK has uncovered that 59% of consumers believe taking a stance matters. Of this percentage, two-thirds take the issue seriously and are likely to buy from or boycott a brand based on their social media posts about an issue.
You’ve heard the maxim that ‘failing to plan is planning to fail,’ right? I’m not here to debate it. For any complicated initiative, a plan is needed – that’s true. But I do want to suggest that the long-held maxim only represents one side of the spectrum, and that the other side (overplanning) is equally dangerous to the success of a startup.
A UK-based digital professional has warned that as many as 70% of British businesses don’t fully understand SEO, or the methods employed by Google’s algorithm to analyse, rank, and display relevant search results. This is a particularly troubling statistic as many firms struggle to stay afloat during COVID-19 and risk squandering their budget on SEO campaigns that simply won’t deliver.
Love for a tech brand has a massive impact on customer loyalty and recommendations according to a new study. People who love a brand are three times more likely to recommend it to others and will tolerate it making twice as many mistakes as any other, before taking their custom elsewhere. Indeed, according to the Brand Love report, such a brand can mess up almost five times and people will still stay loyal to it.
Email marketing is a fundamental part of business communications, but how many are customers actually reading? According to a recent survey by af2m (French Association for the Development of Multi-Operator Multimedia Services and Uses), only 20% – far fewer than most marketing teams would care to admit. Is there a better way to reach your customers? Research by af2m has found that SMS campaigns are blessed with a 90% open rate within three minutes of receipt!
As the UK is now in its third national lockdown, consumers and businesses are turning once more to remotely delivered services and digital experiences to survive in the coming month. As the world adapted to the impact of COVID-19, 2020 saw a rapid increase in digitisation, including from age groups that traditionally had been slower to adapt.
The online world is vital to many people in the current climate. Face to face coffee dates and lunch with friends have been swapped for the scheduled Zoom calls and frequent internet issues. The light at the end of the tunnel is slowly becoming clearer for us all, but that does not mean that digital marketing should be ignored once things begin to become ‘normal’ once more.











