With 2020 starting with the coronavirus “black swan”, many companies have had their business disrupted and delayed reopening after the Spring Festival holiday; and some industries were hit particularly hard by the epidemic. In the short term, companies’ marketing expenditures will go south overall. However, the black swan is not all about challenges but has also brought some opportunities to be tapped. Below we present seven predictions on marketing trends in 2020 based on our experience of serving more than 2,000 large and medium-sized companies.
Seven trends towards accerlerating business digital transformation
01. Companies will digitalize an increasing number of traditional scenarios as comprehensive digitalization of consumer touchpoints becomes a trend.
02. All media touchpoints will be digitalized and put under centralized management
When all touchpoints and contents (media) are digitalized, companies will be able to implement more flexible strategies and manage things more systematically. During the current coronavirus outbreak, some outdoor media companies have begun adopting CPR-based pricing, which will prompt companies to focus on media offering a quantitative assessment of media performance. This will protect brands better against emergency events and make marketing more flexible.
03. Online selling of all categories will put even higher requirements for integrated marketing
As consumers embrace e-commerce platforms for more products and services, companies will put a greater emphasis on marketing integrating all sales channels including e-commerce platforms, and seek more effective formats of marketing.
04. Companies will build their customer data platforms (CDPs)/data management platforms (DMPs) and accelerate integrated customer data management.
Although the epidemic has put marketing campaigns in many industries to a halt, it has not affected their effort to build their CDPs and DMPs. Because of the aforementioned trend of digitalization of consumer behavior, the construction by enterprises of their user management platform will accelerate integrated lifecycle customer management.
05. Dynamic creative production technology will gain more applications
Changes that have taken place in the dynamics between consumers and brands during the outbreak require a rapid adjustment of brands’ communication strategies for communications with customers to reflect the new reality. Many brands have launched creative communications with the theme of epidemic response and consumer health protection. It is expected that this trend will gather momentum and make dynamic creative production more widely adopted.
06. Programmed online surveys will become the mainstream
The current coronavirus outbreak has fueled demand for programmed online surveys. DeepZero | iPinYou provided online survey programming services for many clients in February and particularly provided CDCs and other relevant government departments with access to its intelligent survey module. With the compelling advantages of online survey programming in terms of not requiring physical contact with the audience, quick recruiting, quick delivery, quick data collection, and cross-analysis, many companies are won over as soon as they attempt this product. The year 2020 may prove to be year one for programmed online surveys.
07. Brands will implement product launches in unprecedented new ways
New products are a key driver of business growth, and new product launches have a long period of preparation. Due to the pandemic, many companies have to explore new ways to launch their new products. In this regard, DeepZero | iPinYou offers an integrated solution ranging from new product concept testing to targeted market surveys to product testing in e-commerce environments to final launch to help companies launch new products in unprecedented ways.
Window of time to build digital intelligence
One thing for certain is that the epidemic will eventually go away. The time has come for companies and brands to brace up again for market competition and win over consumers by strengthening connections with them.
We see the ongoing epidemic-induced crisis which puts the traditional way of doing business to a halt as the best time for companies to identify and strengthen their areas of core competitiveness and advise that they accelerate their business digital transformation and intelligentization on the four dimensions of touchpoint digitalization, business digitalization, data-driven customer management and intelligent content management by remaining growth-oriented and exploring ways to do business and win consumers in the new reality and delivering growth engine products accordingly. Digitalization and intelligentization, which are summed up as digital intelligence, are two key engines and levers by which companies will drive their business growth this year.
