As though it wasn’t tricky enough to develop engaging marketing content in an ever-changing digital landscape, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought even more challenges as consumer behaviors change radically. Our president, JG Wolfe, shared some helpful tips and insights with the Triad Business Journal for a recent feature on the Triad’s largest advertising, marketing and public relations firms. We’re happy to share what we’ve learned over the past year:

2020 has been a year of massive disruption. We’ve seen our routines changed beyond our control and formed new habits ourselves, too. Marketers have had to keep up with fluid changes in consumer behavior, leading to innovative new techniques and technologies. Here are some things that are important to understand about trends in consumer behavior and the implications for digital marketing tactics in 2020:

While in-person events may be off the menu for now, it’s important to maintain relationships with your audience in creative ways. More than ever, people are seeking meaningful connection with others. Virtual events present unique opportunities for safely interacting and reconnecting during a time when we can’t gather in large groups.

Written by Jay Mclain

Websites have become a critical component of business development and particularly marketing. Your website is probably the first place people go to when they want to learn about your products or services. With a range of options currently available, from do-it-yourself self-starter websites to custom designed and developed website solutions, what’s best for your business and budget?

Written by Amanda Marshall

For most medium and small businesses, marketing was pretty simple just 10 or 20 years ago. They’d buy an ad in the yellow pages, maybe run a few newspaper ads, send out a direct mail piece to their regular customers, and that would be it. Advertising with mass media like TV, radio, magazines and billboards was often too expensive, although a billboard might be considered if the business sold a product and the board was nearby.

Written by Jay Mclain

Bulk email development and distribution can be overwhelming and frustrating. One common challenge is keeping an email’s design intact and consistent across all email clients (e.g., Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, etc.). This issue arises because email clients, unlike web browsers, operate completely at the discretion of the application developer, which causes disparities from one email client to another. Outlook, for example, uses a word processor rendering engine instead of a browser. As a result, an email may look great in Gmail but fall apart in Outlook. Go-to email service providers like MailChimp and Constant Contact have not even been able to account for this across the board.