Consumers are getting smarter with their buying decisions now that they have an over-abundance of options.
This means brands have to adapt to this changing behavior and rev up their efforts to meet consumer expectations. So for the most part, brands will be fueling their 2020 campaigns with actionable data and appealing to the emotions of their target audience.
Here are the top four brand campaign trends you should expect to see in 2020:
1. Presenting a Unique Solution
The United States alone had 30.7 million small businesses in 2019, which gives you a fair idea of how much competition brands have to face. This means they’ll have to fight harder than ever to build a product that stands out. They’ll be racking their brains trying to present a solution that consumers need but no one else has.
So you can expect to see more brands offering products that solve a highly unique or specific problem. To follow this trend, it helps if you can study the competition to see where their product is lacking and how you can improve on it. Our freelance product researchers can help you with this time-consuming process.
Loren Rochelle, for instance, founded the Not Ordinary Media (NOM) platform because she saw brands struggling to understand where their ads were appearing and whether or not they paid off. And none of the tech startups she worked for could address those challenges.
So she came up with NOM, a platform to allow better ad campaign tracking and ensure that a brand’s ads will not appear alongside objectionable videos.
2. Using Bad Reviews to Fuel Growth
No one likes getting bad reviews, but some brands are growing wiser and learning to use them as a valuable resource. Bad reviews tell you about the end-user experience not just with your product but also with your service and overall brand interaction. So if you learn to block out the noise, you might be able to extract valuable information from those bad reviews.
Use these insights to improve on your product, build a better alternative, enhance the customer experience, and introduce new and innovative solutions.
That’s exactly what happened with Nutpods, the plant-based coffee creamer brand founded by Madeline Haydon. Nutpods made the most of bad reviews to address and correct product flaws, especially during the early stages. It has since become a category leader on Amazon, racking up over 6,000 reviews.
3. Genuine (and Relevant) Philanthropic Efforts
Consumers are becoming increasingly conscious of social and environmental issues. And they expect brands to do the same. In fact, according to a Sprout Social survey, 70% of consumers find it important for brands to take a stand about important causes.
So for 2020, you can expect to see more brands standing up for a cause – whether it’s social, political, or environmental. At the same time, 53% of consumers also feel that brands are only taking a stand for the sake of marketing and public relations. If you want to generate real impact through your brand philanthropic efforts, make sure you’re supporting causes you genuinely care about.
Consumers find it more credible when you take a stand on issues that have a direct impact on your customers or business operations. So your efforts have to be somehow relevant to your business.
Going back to Nutpods, the brand is doing an excellent job of supporting relevant causes. The brand gives back to the community to support food security through volunteer work, product donations, and charitable giving. They work with charities like Food Lifeline, The Rachel Way, and PCC Farmland Trust to name a few.
4. Getting to Position Zero in SERP
For the past several years, brands have been spending thousands of dollars trying to get the #1 ranking in search results. That’s soon to change with the growing popularity of voice search. And according to Backlinko, Featured Snippets make up 40.7% of all the voice search answers.
The Featured Snippet is the most prominent section of the page as it takes up a huge portion, even outshining the top-ranking result. This makes it much more likely to get noticed and attract clicks even for non-voice search results. So in 2020, you can expect to see more brands aiming for the Featured Snippet section, otherwise known as position zero, in search engine result pages.
But this can be even more challenging than regular SEO. It’s best if you can work with marketers who specialize in SEO strategies to target position zero instead of just walking in blind and wasting your resources on efforts that don’t pay off.
Take a Data-Driven Approach for 2020
From most of these campaign trends, it’s clear to see that data (in various forms) is playing a critical role in fueling business growth. Competitor and market research help you come up with unique ideas to solve pressing issues, while bad reviews give you opportunities for product enhancement.
Additionally, brands are growing even bolder with their efforts to appear in Featured Snippets, as well as with taking a stand for important issues. So if you want to get ahead of the competition, take a bold yet data-driven approach to fuel your 2020 campaigns.
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