The current circumstances, caused by the spread of Coronavirus, have accelerated the adoption of digital for many companies and the appearance of new digital habits.
This is why we recommend you reorient your strategic approach to transform your business activities to meet the new digital expectations of your customers.
How can you do that? Eminence helps you understand these changing needs so that you can adapt your digital strategies.
The impact of accelerated digital adoption on consumer behavior
According to Google Trends, the use of digital has increased since the confinement measures were applied in many countries. Digital channels have become the only tools of interaction with the outside world. It is interesting to note how much the offer has grown and the change of habits has been rapid among Internet users.
During the first confinement, most consumers made their purchases online. Indeed, since the beginning of March 2020, the number of searches such as “online shopping” and “how to buy online” has doubled worldwide.
Based on Google’s reports on mobility, it is expected to take time for the use of retail facilities to return to pre-pandemic levels. These reports represent mobility trends by geographic area, for different categories such as shopping and leisure, food, pharmacies, and public transport stops.
Social impact
The way people spend their leisure time is changing as a result of the pandemic and social distancing measures, and these habits are likely to remain.
This trend is reflected in the types of applications that consumers are downloading: they deal with entertainment, news, care, health, and education.
The underlying needs of consumers (staying connected with others, entertaining, learning, informing) remain the same, but technology is changing the way they think about them. Consumer packaged goods companies need to place greater emphasis on digital tools than traditional tools to interact with consumers and enhance their experiences.
New consumer habits that are driving new digital habits
The adoption of e-commerce has accelerated on the business side. This behavior has become widespread among consumers, who have turned to online for activities they were not used to doing through digital channels. For example, the number of searches on the following topics has increased around the world: “virtual “trial”, “online courses”, “tea delivery”, “virtual pub quiz”, “live chat”, “online fitness”, etc.
Impact of accelerated digital adoption on businesses
It is distinctly apparent that people have used digital channels to adapt many aspects of their lives such as conducting transactions, getting educated, interacting with their loved ones, etc. As a result, today’s consumers have much higher digital expectations. This is the reason why all companies, whatever their sector or size, must accelerate their digital transformation. They also need to transform their business to reach customers where they are and provide them with the experience they expect.
- Digitalization is a strategic priority
The current health crisis is preventing physical contact and is changing the way we work. Thus teleworking is favored. Companies have had to adapt and the solution to enable employees to stay in touch and collaborate remotely is to use digital technology.
Digital appears here as an essential solution and related activities are in hyper-growth.
Numerous situations can testify to this: whether it be teleworking or videoconferencing, the development of telemedicine, the field of education with online courses, the retail sector with Click&Collect, or like many retailers who have developed e-commerce sites.
Indeed, almost all companies and start-ups are reorienting their business models toward more digital because of the impact of COVID-19 on the evolution of consumer behavior. Last year, optimizing digital marketing could enable brands to achieve up to 20% revenue growth and up to 30% cost reduction. At that time, only 2% of the companies in the BCG (Boston Consulting Group) study had reached the “Multi-moment” stage: the highest of the four maturity phases of digital marketing.
The study also highlighted five levers for reaching digital maturity:
- Connect customer data first to multiple touchpoints: essential to better understand consumer behavior, customer segments, and customer trends, to deliver more relevant and meaningful messages to customers, and to measure the effectiveness of multiple touchpoints along the customer journey.
- Automate tasks and customize messages to maximize impact.
- Establish strategic partnerships with shared digital marketing objectives.
- Conduct training and recruiting to ensure leading-edge analytical and data science skills.
- Set up multi-skilled teams with a “test & learn” logic.
- Ensuring the sustainability of your business with teleworking
To ensure the continuity of their activities, companies have been struggling to urgently meet the challenge of massive teleworking. This migration has put IT departments under pressure.
Indeed, 23% of employees say they want to work from home more often. So companies need to digitize their internal processes more so that their teams can continue to work remotely without interruption. This has also resulted in a strong demand for home and office equipment, such as video calling software. For example, Google Meet has been available to everyone since January, and its daily use during peak periods has increased 30-fold.
It’s time to transform your business
Your consumers and employees now spend more time interacting and working through digital channels. This makes it more necessary than ever to integrate transformations in all areas of your business. You need to attract potential customers by meeting their expectations and effectively managing your business over the long term.
We recommend the following four steps:
- Analyze your customers’ needs
In the face of the pandemic, consumer behavior is changing rapidly and unpredictably. That’s why advertisers must constantly analyze what users are looking for and identify growing product categories to adjust their offers accordingly and meet their expectations.
- Adapt your approach and be more flexible
As a result of COVID-19, many companies quickly customized their campaigns to deliver the right creativity at the right time and in the right context. Some of them have even completely adapted by moving into new business areas to meet changing consumer demand. Being fast and flexible is not only useful and relevant during a pandemic. It also allows companies to better prepare for future changes.
- Analyze your data first-party responsibly
The data first-party contains information from customers via their CRM solutions and other touchpoints. Data first party may be necessary to improve your overall digital marketing capabilities in this new reality, and to create the foundation for a strong future. This type of data is specific to your business and provides you with accurate data about your customers and the types of products or services they are looking for. You can create better online experiences, strengthen those relationships, and ultimately drive more conversions and improve your ROI.
- Rethink your business model
In a dynamic environment, many advertisers are implementing short-term solutions to deal with the challenges facing their business. They use these solutions as the building blocks of a reinvented and more flexible business model. In this regard, automation can be particularly useful to capture fluctuating demand as efficiently as possible and to leverage your marketing spend.
Indeed, the pandemic has increased the use of technologies that can also accelerate our exit from the crisis. This will undoubtedly be more difficult for companies that have not yet adapted well to the digital world, but they can still make operational changes.
Eminence proposes to put its digital tools at the service of your strategy and your competitiveness stakes, to guarantee the success of your transformation projects and optimal security of your information system during the pandemic.
Contact us here: https://eminence.ch/contact-agence-marketing-geneve/