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Innovative marketing skills key to business growth in 2022

Businesses moved to digital marketing and witnessed a rise in the online market spending in 2021.

Digital drive has made everyone rethink about innovation they need to adapt in 2022 to remain afloat in a fiercely competitive global market. What digital trends will satisfy consumer needs and what innovative solutions will ensure steady sales are what bother the stakeholders.

How do you define your target segment especially in the UAE? Which marketing strategy will work? How much budget are you ready to allocate given the pandemic impact still affecting businesses? Numerous questions like these are bound to surface. So how will brands do the balancing act when you need to optimise your resources and have a limited budget allocation for marketing and sales.

Businesses moved to digital marketing and witnessed a rise in the online market spending in 2021. Digital advertising uses the internet to deliver marketing messages in various formats to internet users. This includes advertisements in results pages of search engines (Search Advertising); advertising in social media networks in the form of, for instance, sponsored posts (Social Media Advertising); advertisement banners (Banner Advertising); advertisements within video players (Video Advertising); and paid digital classifieds (Classifieds). The worldwide revenue of $465.5 billion in 2021 is expected to grow to $683.1 billion up to 2026, according to Statista.

Dubai-based Ramesh Menon, CEO, brandform, said: “It’s incredibly important for brand owners to prioritise the refinement of their products and services. Now is the time for unprecedented growth; and brands must revisit their offerings to see how they can be scaled in size and volume, across markets. Assigning attention to that means consciously automating processes that are otherwise time-consuming. Automate notifications across your platform. Automate your marketing messages. Automate social media scheduling across channels. Automate lead flow – which is about reaching your customer with calls to action when she/he shows online interest. Automate your analytics in your CRM to track so you can respond quickly.”

Menon says that by integrating automation and analytics as a discipline across digital marketing and management, brands can expect intelligent, prescriptive guidance – leading back to further innovations in product and service design. “To put it simply, use current trends not just for short-term sales, but also to efficiently build long-term value,” he added.

Kantar, the world’s leading data-driven analytics and brand consulting company reveals the trends and recalibrations at play in the global media industry and its expert predictions for this year. The top five areas that may witness a transformation are transparency in video on demand (VoD) viewership; re-modelling of the commercial internet; performance media and marketing balancing act; new approaches to data; and reshaping for Covid-era behaviours.

Brand offerings will need to reflect and shape the changed realities of consumer behaviour. Brands, products and services will need to meet new consumer needs for convenience, value, sustainability, and innovation. The brands that invest  — in data, insight, people and marketing — will flourish.  The most successful brands will embrace the differences — diversity and complexity — of the audiences they’re seeking to reach. This presents a great opportunity for brands to develop in this recovery period: explore deeper segmentation and engage with communities beyond their existing audience.

Similarly, Ritesh Mohan, author and retail expert, founder of retailritesh.com said: “When a marketeer is stuck and no ideas are being generated, the easiest way out is to spend advertising dollars on creating visibility, it’s like automatic strategy.  However, the ad targeting will be more challenging for the marketeers in 2022.  With the advent of the new IOS operating system, the cookie tracking which made the ad targeting very effective in the past would no longer be possible. More and more consumers are becoming privacy-conscious which is posing challenges to the digital marketers.”

Kantar believes advertisers still need to think very strategically about how to steer and operate in this changing landscape

Keerat Dhillon, associate director and media effectiveness measurement lead, Mena, for Kantar’s Insights Division said: “The media landscape has always been dynamic, with the pandemic further fuelling all the change. Digital consumption increased massively, and some newer players grew exponentially during this time. Content and context are now king, so the key is to minimise intrusion while maximising relevance for consumers. With clear evidence of the power of multi-media campaigns, customising your creatives to each context and amplifying the campaign’s coverage is key to driving maximum impact in the Middle East.” — sandhya@khaleejtimes.com