The rise of remote work is impacting everyone—businesses and employees. And with seemingly no quick end to the pandemic, it appears that the remote-only or hybrid model will continue for the foreseeable future. Although there’s quite a bit of conversation on how this “new normal” impacts businesses, we also need to discuss how it impacts your marketing strategy and messaging.
How do these new realities impact your digital marketing strategies, including tone, social channels, posting schedule, content type, and article topics?
“The world will never be the same again as it was before COVID-19, so businesses must be ready to change and adapt to the new normal taking shape around them.” Thorsten de Boer
The Shift To Online
The digital-first ecosystem has been growing and evolving for some time now. Still, with the rise of remote work and social shopping, more of your consumers have shifted their shopping to e-commerce only. Therefore, if you haven’t already, you might want to pivot as much of your business as possible online.
Let’s say you offer business coaching,
- move it online
- provide one-on-one coaching through Zoom or Google Meet
- host masterclasses, webinars, and virtual conferences
- use social channels to give tips on business success.
Consumer surveys indicate a rise in virtual sessions with physicians, mental health professionals, fitness coaches, lawyers, and other services.
Are you selling products?
- make sure your social shopping channels work, create an easy and transparent shopping, checkout, and payment funnel
- build a seamless customer experience between your online presence and physical space
- ramp up your email marketing
- take advantage of email marketing platforms that enable you to personalize and segment your email campaigns.
How Has Remote Work Impacted Consumer Behavior?
Rewriting Work/Life Balance
Now that consumers have had a taste of working from home, they’re reprioritizing aspects of their lives, particularly work/life balance. Researchers found that six in 10 global employees are placing enjoyment above working harder to get ahead.
Create blog articles and social media content to speak to your consumers as they deal with these shifts in priorities and the challenges of working from home. For example,
- navigating the home office routine
- balancing a home office with family
- staying fit and eating healthy
- vacation and entertainment tips.
Remote Work Has Created Fluidity Between Home and Office
Employees don’t need to commute, creating a more fluid transition between home tasks and work assignments. As a result, consumers’ time in their cars or public transportation listening to podcasts or their favorite radio stations has lessened.
Economic Uncertainties Impact Discretionary Spending
According to McKinsey, consumer spending will likely continue to fluctuate through 2024. Uncertainty about job security and future income has reduced spending somewhat. However, consumers earning more than $100,000 per year say they intend to increase spending through 2024 by as much as 3.2%. For many, though, especially remote workers, spending priorities have shifted since they now have a different lifestyle.
- Be sure you’ve identified your target audience, including demographics and psychographics.
- Create personalized content to reach different demographic segments.
- Take advantage of message apps and AI to stay in touch with your consumers throughout the buyer journey.
Working Hours Have Changed
Remote workers might start their workday earlier or later. For example, they might work later into the evening or take a long break in the afternoon to tend to kids and then return late evening and work later at night.
In addition, your consumers might be more active on their social channels during the day than when in the office. Most likely, they are juggling—jumping from work-related social platforms such as Twitter or LinkedIn while checking out their personal feeds at the same time.
- The old posting schedule may not be relevant.
- Try experimenting with different times and days.
- Use your analytics to discover what schedule works best for your target audience.
- The important platforms in their lives may also change, as they now have the flexibility to be more fluid in the digital world.
- Make your live feeds and events available for on-demand viewing. You’ll reach your audience no matter what time they have available to view your programming.
This is an opportunity for B2C companies, meaning you might want to publish marketing content on business social channels, such as LinkedIn. Your target audience might be cruising the platform to learn about job opportunities, how to start a business, or just looking to connect with the remote workforce community.
Remote Work Has Diminished Social Interaction
One of the biggest challenges of remote work is the lack of social interaction. Instead of formal and informal meetings and conversations, employees working from home turn to social platforms. However, digital interactions on Slack, Zoom, and other meeting platforms can also lead to screen-time fatigue.
You might want to change your content type to maintain and increase engagement with your consumers who are now working from home.
- Develop marketing strategies that are more fun, casual, and relaxing.
- Create interactive content such as games and contests.
- Focus on your brand communities. Make them a safe place for your audience to share their frustrations and challenges.
- Keep your content type bite-size.
- Use more storytelling and videos.
- Create audio and video versions of your blog articles so your audience can choose whether they want to read, listen or watch.
- Employ traditional marketing strategies. Because of the increased digital face time, consumers appreciate opportunities to engage with brands in a non-digital format.
Businesses are Trimming Their Budgets
For B2B marketers, some of your target customers may be trimming their budgets due to economic uncertainty. Therefore, you need to focus on the ROI.
- How will your product or service help them cut costs and improve efficiency?
Decision-makers will be working from home, and most likely, in-office team meetings are not happening. So you can expect the buyer timeline to extend. They’re dealing with the same remote work issues as other consumers. Focus on creating digital marketing content that speaks to their pain points.
Traditional Marketing Strategies Might Work Better for Remote Workers
Our last blog article focused on traditional marketing strategies and why you might not want to go completely digital. Considering the factors we’ve uncovered above, the realities of the remote work ecosystem are another reason to incorporate traditional marketing elements in your brand campaign. For example, a report recently noted that more than six billion greeting cards are purchased every year. Millennials spend more on those cards than any other generation.
Sending a card to your customers is a great way to let them know you care about them. In addition, it demonstrates that your focus is on them and not just on selling.
Bottom Line
Today’s global realities cannot be ignored; they impact your marketing strategy and messaging. You’ll successfully reach your consumer audience in the new remote work ecosystem if you tap into their needs and thoughts. Focus more on your customers and less on selling.
- Put your customer first.
- Develop content and messaging that is purposeful, authentic, and empathetic.
- Engage in conversations, not monologues. Create two-way channels of communication.
- Keep it light, short, joyful, entertaining, yet true to your product or service and your brand’s mission.
Let us know what you think in the comment box below, and don’t forget to sign up for the blog. We’ve got something interesting planned for February, so stay tuned.