To succeed as a small or medium-sized business (SMB), employees must work smarter. Tight budgets and scrappy teams require innovation at every level — from the Founder and CMO, ecommerce Marketing Director to VP of Marketing, Social Media Director to Paid Search Strategist. This opportunity to bring creativity and agility to the table is one of the many reasons why employees find SMBs rewarding workplaces. Employees can help define the company vision. They can imagine ways to actualize this vision. And often, with SMBs, the product offering aligns with employee values and belief systems. 

But let’s face it. The job of a digital marketing decision-maker within an SMB can be challenging— from the long hours to shifting budget priorities. Some might say digital marketing for an SMB is just as hard as creating the company product, thanks to ever-changing platforms, resources, content demands, and time constraints. Getting seen by the right audience can be difficult.

A challenging digital marketing world

Tasked with a new campaign, the digital marketing lead faces questions on how to create, target and execute digital advertising: When do you launch a digital campaign? What platform do you advertise on? How do you reach your target audience? What do you even post?

Digital marketers understand online advertising is key to amplifying their brand, but often they’re not clear where to begin; SMB advertising starts to feel like a ball-and-chain. Rapid changes in the advertising industry also contribute to marketer overwhelm. Consumer behaviors and demands for privacy are forcing brands to adapt how they reach and best serve people’s needs. While the digital marketing space can feel overwhelming, now is a crucial time for marketers to forge deeper relationships with people.

“You need to continually create and revamp the things that work, staying timely. It never ends. We have to keep tweaking our graphics to make sure they’re going to catch attention. It’s not like back in the day when you could run an ad in a newspaper and that same ad was going to run for six weeks, and you were done with it. You constantly have to make content to stay top-of-mind.“

To help accelerate SMB growth, Microsoft developed a quantitative and qualitative research program to better understand how SMBs manage their digital marketing today and to identify the pain points digital marketing leads face. Advertising decision makers of companies with less than 200 employees participated in a 15-minute survey to understand their needs and top pain points within the digital advertising landscape. Microsoft later conducted qualitative interviews to dig deeper into SMB needs. Most respondents noted they had few internal resources to support their efforts and often relied on agencies or freelancers for support (typically for content production or digital campaign management and optimization).

Four universal digital marketing pain points

The SMB founders and employees surveyed had different marketing POVs and experienced challenges unique to their roles. Some respondents were big-picture thinkers struggling to keep up with the ever-changing digital landscape, while others valued flexibility, optimization and results but had a tough time justifying marketing dollars spent. Many focused outward, eager to explore new ways to become and stay relevant on emerging social platforms like TikTok, while other leaders spent a large amount of time inside marketing brainstorming sessions, developing strategy with their team.

Although the findings were as diverse (and interesting) as the businesses surveyed, four clear SMB challenges emerged as shared frustrations: content creation, time and resource constraints, platform fragmentation, and evaluating ROI/ROAS. Read on for details about shared SMB marketer pain points.

Content creation

A shared frustration with SMB respondents was the volume and type of content deliverables required per campaign — and the reality that content takes time and effort to create. Many people and review cycles are necessary to strategize, envision, develop, write, design, update and optimize a successful digital marketing campaign. This constant demand for content tests SMBs’ bandwidth to fully execute the planned marketing vision.

“Coming up with the right content and being able to put that content together…that’s driving everything these days. Having the right content and current content. For me, it’s a resource thing, I don’t have the resources to generate content in a timely manner. Keeping it fresh.“

Time and resource constraints

The list of tasks for digital advertising marketers is extensive — from determining the marketing budget to developing and distributing content, managing digital campaigns, to analyzing and optimizing marketing efforts…and everything in between. Marketers have much to do but little time or resources to get the work done. The study shows that, out of necessity, SMB digital marketers are forced to either become marketing “Jacks and Jills of all trades” or are left scrambling to find freelancers or agencies to get tasks accomplished. The result? Mixing varying resources produces varying results.

“You spend a lot of time to do a quality check on content, because once it goes up there, it’s up there…Creating and monitoring content has been the thing that takes the most time because it’s only one piece of what I do here, and I’m the only person that’s doing it right now…it just takes time.“

Platform fragmentation

The stress of platform fragmentation is another shared SMB hurdle, as marketers face large quantities of information to learn, manage, and analyze. This is because digital marketers use many campaign and reporting platforms with unique algorithms and ad formats. Plus, these platforms and tools are continuously evolving. Digital advertising leaders experience overwhelm, not only with the many CMS platforms, reporting tools and analytic insights available but also with feature updates within each tool. Forced to keep up with platforms and upgrades, marketers experience pressure to hire more people to diversify the learning load.

“Algorithms change all the time. You have to be specialized in digital marketing to understand everything. My marketing department also works in shopper marketing and trade marketing. The amount of specialization that we can get to a degree is limited.“

Evaluating ROI/ROAS

Evaluating a campaign’s return on investment (ROI) and return on ad spend (ROAS) has always been challenging — but respondents note that it is even harder to track conversions and gauge true campaign ROI/ROAS with recent privacy changes. Another shared challenge is the perceived lack of standardized metric consistency or transparency across platforms. When developing reports for executives, respondents are tasked with piecing together multiple reports from different platforms to paint a clear picture of a campaign’s tangible return on investment.

“I think conversions are really frustrating. Some of that is the iOS update stuff that happened recently…it’s not accurate because it’s not giving conversions from Facebook. I want to have a completely accurate ROI for digital campaigns, and I don’t feel I’m getting that.“

SMB digital advertising solutions

In today’s digital space, businesses need smarter solutions to grow their business online and find new customers. SMBs are time-constrained and know every click matters. That is why Microsoft Advertising offers its newly redesigned Smart Campaigns experience to make online advertising easier and help small to medium-sized businesses reach more customers across leading advertising and social media platforms.

Smart Campaigns empowers digital marketing leaders to easily reach high-value customers across the web who have higher buying power, spend more online, and are more likely to engage with ads. It’s easy to get started. Marketers set up ads in a matter of minutes while they watch in real-time as the platform intuitively improves the ad, measures its performance, and shows understandable results across platforms.

A new feature within Smart Campaigns is Multi-platform. With Multi-platform, SMBs can expand their reach and maximize their investment by using one ad tool to target many channels like Google Ads, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Microsoft Advertising. Instead of creating ads on fragmented platforms to launch and monitor a campaign, SMBs can save time by running ads on multiple platforms in minutes.

Smart Campaigns with Multi-platform is a new digital marketing ecosystem designed to eliminate SMB digital marketing pain points and connect marketers with people at the right moments across work and life.   

“Hearing that everything could be in one place and that you could manage it all on different platforms, that’s exciting and innovative…I would be very interested. Being able to log on and do everything and see everything in one spot would save me time. That would be amazing.”

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There’s a rise of the Workday Consumer who, due to changes stemming from the pandemic, unapologetically switches between employee, personal and consumer mode throughout the day. This behavior stands to have a significant impact on how your advertising engages them.

Microsoft Advertising recently partnered with Forrester Consulting on research outlining how work and shopping behaviors have changed for people who work remotely. We take a deeper look at the behaviors of these consumers, the nuances of their shopping and work behavior, and how advertisers should think about reaching them.

The Workday Consumer mindset

To be more effective in reaching the Workday Consumer, we must consider that nearly 62% surveyed said they spend time shifting between various mindsets during work hours. During this time, they research or purchase products and services, sometimes putting those tasks ahead of browsing social media and consuming entertainment.¹

While mobile is still a part of the decision journey, many consumers use their PCs to research and purchase high consideration items across categories.

In fact, nearly two-thirds of respondents (63%) said they spent more time on their work PC than before the pandemic, and 56% said they use work laptops and videoconferencing software for personal purposes. Almost half (48%) said they prefer not to switch devices when doing personal tasks during work time.¹

When targeting Workday Consumers, it’s important to consider their mindset, which influences the types of tasks, such as purchases, they’re undertaking.

Three ways to reach the Workday Consumer

As you reevaluate your methods to reach Workday Consumers, here are a few ideas that you can use for campaign planning.

1. Consider working mode

The Workday Consumer’s time and place of work has shifted dramatically. They may be hybrid, desk-based or frontline, office-based or remote. In each of these situations their mindset will be different.

Having a deep understanding of your audience will make a difference in reaching and engaging them. Employ methods such as self-reported studies, observational studies, location tracking and time-of-day data.

Just as Workday Consumers have shifted their mindset, advertisers must also shift targeting strategies. Use products that employ automation to understand audience behavior and adapt in real-time to adjust to their search desires. Consider using:  

• Responsive Search Ads to optimize ad copy and refine messaging to home in on audience mindset when they’re searching.

2. Engage Workday Consumers throughout the funnel

To attract, convert and retain Workday Consumers, it’s important to craft messaging, content and ads optimized for PC, search and native. This is especially important for upper-funnel campaigns because Workday Consumers actively research products and services in between work tasks.

Once they continue their search, you’ll need to prepare to target them across their online purchasing journey. Engage partners that enable targeting based on signals such as opted-in digital consumer tracking panels, contextual insights, time-of-day data, and others to predict audiences and performance.

• Smart Campaigns use automation to learn and adapt throughout the customer decision journey in real-time.
• Dynamic Remarketing lists are a mid-funnel ad type to show searchers ads based on what they’ve looked at, considered, or already purchased on your website.

3. Use the verticals they’re researching

It isn’t just one vertical that’s affected, this is relevant to all advertisers.

The top 10 categories researched (in order) are travel, clothing, tools, sporting goods, electronics, financial products and services, health and personal care, household appliances, media/entertainment, and cars.

When working, people are in a productive mindset, and they view researching and purchasing with efficiency in mind. This mindset has evolved the consumer journey, and much of this research is done on their work PC.

• Vertical ads are a good option when trying to reach the Workday Consumer at the bottom of the funnel.

Vertical ads are different for each category or industry. They focus on information that a specific consumer is looking for and provide it in an engaging, easy-to-read format (pre-click) and with images. Vertical ads for travel, financial services and automotive industries, with more coming soon.

The Workday Consumer and niche personas

Consumers’ attention spans have been famously likened to that of goldfish for years. Now you must also consider short attention spans and distracted and fragmented browsing as they shift more frequently between work and personal tasks. Therefore, knowing your audience thoroughly is more important than ever.

For example, we took a deep dive into our data and found our new attitudes and behaviors causing a change in how we reach and engage customers across industries. They are:

• Digital Nomads
• Empowered Activists
• Luxury Shoppers
• Self-Care Enthusiasts

Download the booklet for a wealth of information on these attitudes.

The Workday Consumer behavior shows up across all these personas, as well as others you may have developed yourself. Read on for tips on how we applied the Workday Consumer mindset to the four new personas for ideas on how you might apply the thinking to your own personas.

Luxury Shopper

We already know the Workday Consumer is working remotely while researching, purchasing products and services, performing personal tasks, chores, managing finances, and consuming entertainment. They have a few additional characteristics if they’re also a Luxury Shopper.

The online Luxury Shopper seeks to elevate everyday experiences with the finer things and is comfortable purchasing online. They’re browsing online, researching, and looking at the large variety of luxury goods online instead of in-store.²

They can be found across multiple search engines, with 51% of them researching vacations, and 43% searching for business-related topics.³ 

Because Workday Consumer Luxury Shoppers research before purchasing and are quick to switching tasks, consider features that grab their limited attention. Remind them to revisit sites and put them closer to making a purchase decision before they even click.

• Multimedia Ads are exclusive to Microsoft Advertising and drive quicker engagement by combining text and images for the look and feel of social media ads. For people with limited time, these can earn their attention quickly.
• Ad extensions make ads more effective and attract relevant customers by grabbing attention and positioning your message pre-click. For shoppers with limited time, this puts what they need front and center.
• On the Microsoft Audience Network you can target and reengage with audiences while they’re browsing and researching websites such as MSN, Microsoft Edge, and Outlook.com, as well as CBS Sports, Fox News and more. Your ads meet consumers where they are, and reminds them to reengage with your brand.

• In-market Audiences are curated lists of users who are in-market for a specific purchase category. Using these lists helps you cut through the noise and get in front of those most likely interested, so they don’t have to waste time searching. 

Empowered Activist

The Empowered Activist is the consumer who makes purchasing decisions by spending money on brands that align with their own values. They seek eco-friendly, inclusive, ethical small business-oriented brands, and they vote with their wallet.

Empowered Activists on Microsoft Advertising are 33% more likely to purchase online if they know the product or company is environmentally friendly.⁴

They use multiple devices throughout their day to shop and to research products and company or brand values. On the Microsoft Search Network, we saw a 141% year-over-year (YoY) increase in beauty searches for black-owned and minority-owned related terms.⁵

• Try using business attributes, which are text additions that can be added to search ads to showcase the mutual values between your brand and your customers. Examples include carbon-neutral, minority-owned, and wheelchair accessible, among others.

Self-Care Enthusiasts

Self-Care Enthusiasts are interested in spending time where it matters most, whether with family, on mental health, or fitness. They seek brands that enhance their physical and mental well-being. This audience works hard across all aspects of life. Their time is stretched throughout the day, so time management is top of mind.

This group consistently multitasks between work, school, life and leisure activities.

• Use In-market Audiences to find curated lists of users for a specific purchase category to ensure you’re targeting the right groups at the right time.

Digital Nomads

Digital Nomads are location-independent people who value flexibility and make a living working online. Because they work 100% remotely, they can travel constantly and move from place to place as long as there’s an internet connection.

Digital Nomads are the ultimate Workday Consumer, as they’re searching for housing, transportation, and all the needs, services and amenities that accompany daily life in new locations. Consider using:

• Property Promotion Ads to inspire travelers early in the planning process and provide you with an opportunity to influence their decision.
• Hotel Price Ads showcase rates alongside photos, directions, availability, reviews, and more while providing engaging information at the decision point.

Reaching the Workday Consumer requires targeting based on a robust first-party data strategy, signals like opted-in consumer tracking panels and contextual insights to predict audiences and performance behavior. While some aspects of the pandemic such as virtual happy hour have come and gone, the integration of work and life is here to stay. Make sure your brand is there when the Workday Consumer is making decisions.

Stay informed

Sign up for the weekly Microsoft Advertising Insider newsletter for additional Workday Consumer topics and insights, product news, tips and tricks, thought leadership, customer success stories and resources.

Sources

1. A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft, November 2021. The global online survey included 5,329 employed consumers. They were 18 or older and had made an online purchase via their PC during the previous six months. Another survey of 1,301 marketing and advertising decision-makers are directors, VPs, or heads of brands.

2. Microsoft Advertising Luxury Shopping Study, 2021.

3. GlobalWebIndex, U.S., June 2020-June 2021.

4. GlobalWebIndex, U.S., Q1-Q4 2021.

5. Microsoft internal data, U.S., May 2019-August 2021 and May-December YoY figures.

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What do advertisers need to know heading into Black Friday and Cyber Monday? What do we know about 2020 holiday trends so far? How should your brand adjust your advertising and messaging? Let’s find out.

While we’re navigating uncharted waters during this year’s holiday retail season, changes in consumer behaviors lead us to believe the retail holiday season started earlier than usual, beginning with Amazon’s Prime Day sales event in October. Consumers flocked to Prime Day deals to kick-start their holiday shopping, resulting in Amazon’s third-party sellers earning more than $3.5 billion in sales — an increase of nearly 60% from last year.

At the onset of COVID, consumers shifted their buying of necessities and other retail items online due to store closures and safety concerns. According to eMarketer, U.S. ecommerce sales will reach $794.50 billion this year, up 32.4% year-over-year (YoY). And ecommerce sales will reach 14.4% of all US retail spending this year and 19.2% by 2024. Online shopping is so strong that it will more than offset the 3.2% decline in brick-and-mortar spending this year.

Your business might be off to a strong start or have gained momentum after Prime Day, and you’re now thinking of ways to build upon that to continue your winning streak and boost your sales in the coming months.  Microsoft Advertising is here to provide you with additional insights on how to advertise during a retail holiday season unlike any other. Here are five tips to set you up for advertising success leading into Black Friday and through the holidays:

1. Optimize your holiday campaigns to reach online holiday shoppers

Consumers are relying on search now more than ever. A huge spike in search growth occurred as consumers around the world have turned to search as a lifeline in the face of COVID-19 restrictions.

This, coupled with other lifestyle shifts, has led to an 18% growth in searches on tablets while desktop searches are up 8% when compared with pre-COVID-19 levels in the U.S., eMarketer reports. More people are also using search on the weekend, which has led to a 12% increase in volume. That’s two times the rate of the weekday search volume growth. Consumers are also searching during non-business hours, specifically between 5 p.m. and 5 a.m., at a rate twice that of regular business hours.

Make sure your holiday campaigns are already up and running to connect with those trends. Advertise early, and speak to, non-traditional holiday searchers and shoppers. As they say, the early advertiser gets the early shopper.

2. Get advertising ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday  

The weeks leading up to Cyber Week will see many Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales and promotions, with retailers often teasing products well before Thanksgiving week. And with good reason: Cyber Week draws the most sales and highest consumer spend of the holiday season. 

The post-Thanksgiving dates of Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year are expected to deliver. Cyber Monday will once again be the biggest online spending day in U.S. history with sales of $12.89 billion, up 38.3% from last year. Black Friday is expected to be the second-biggest day of the season, with sales anticipated to increase by 39.4% to $10.2 billion.

And what categories are top of mind for shoppers this year? 

• Shoppers intend to shop for gift cards, apparel, and toys and games.
• 65% plan to shop one or more sales events. 
• 30% will purchase gifts for their pets this holiday, our research shows.

Utilize these insights to build your Black Friday and Cyber Monday advertising campaigns, and get them in front of shoppers before the rush. 

3. Reach a high-value audience 

Consumers turned to desktops at the start of the pandemic and are continuing to rely on them for their search needs. In fact, nearly 70% of ecommerce sales in Q1 2020 were on desktops.

As retail searches have increased YoY due to COVID-19 and the stay-at-home economy, certain categories saw more significant growth than others. Top purchase categories in recent months have included apparel, small electronics, and skincare. Food and grocery searches saw a 44% increase YoY, as consumers stayed home, searched for grocery and food delivery and went to restaurants much less.

With day care shifting to working parents, and remote working and online schooling becoming the new normal, consumers searched for computers and other electronics 36% more YoY. The shift to at-home entertainment and work led to the home and garden category seeing a nearly 30% increase in searches YoY, and the beauty and personal care category saw a 23% increase in searches YoY as consumers in the U.S. were forced to alter their beauty routines due to COVID-19 closing salons and spas.  

Advertisers can reach a high-value audience on the Microsoft Search Network as: 

• Users are 97% more likely to be in the top 10% of income than the average internet searcher.
• Unique searchers spend 25% more online than the average internet searcher.

With these category and consumer shifts, think about how your business or service can adapt to meet new consumer behaviors and how you can subsequently reach them authentically where they are, on search.

4. Stand out from the online crowd

With the growth in ecommerce sales and sellers, advertisers will need a way to stand out from the thousands of ads sure to be vying for the attention of online shoppers. Use eye-catching ad customizers to tease your upcoming sales and enhance your text ads.

Microsoft’s Search Network can help you reach consumers planning to purchase, so be sure to target those audiences by applying audience targeting bid modifiers to your holiday ads and shopping campaigns.

Product recommendations for December:

• Curbside pickup badge for Local Inventory Ads
• Merchant Promotions
• Dynamic Remarketing and standard Remarketing 
• In-market Audiences
• Dynamic Search Ads and Responsive Search Ads
• Countdown customizers 
• Callout extensions

Lastly, leverage the seasonal best practice of using Shared Budgets, monitoring bids and budgets to ensure you are competitive during the final stretch of the holiday season.

5. Be like Bose – all in for holiday ecommerce

Today, Bose is one of the leading audio companies, with products ranging from wireless sport earbuds, portable speakers, smart speakers, noise-canceling headphones and other audio equipment. In an increasingly competitive market during the 2019 holiday season, Bose needed to keep their products and brand top of mind while also driving conversions. To meet these objectives, Bose agency MediaCom leveraged Microsoft Advertising to promote sales and offers, reinforce their brand message and deliver enticing calls to action. 

MediaCom built more than 50 remarketing audience lists to target previous website visitors with highly relevant offers and messaging. To expand their audience, they leveraged curated lists of in-market searchers through In-market Audiences, and used Similar Audiences to target shoppers who resembled current Bose customers.

Their efforts paid off. Bose enjoyed a 69% click-through rate (CTR) increase on their paid search advertising from Black Friday to Cyber Monday YoY. Additionally, In-market Audiences delivered a 28% higher CTR than non-audience visitors, as well as a 21% higher conversion rate. In fact, 47% of all Bose’s site visits can be attributed to using the three audience targeting features.

Read the full Bose holiday paid search story today. 

Final holiday campaign tip

Remember: Search is where consumers start their purchase journey. In fact, 57% of consumers turn to search when they don’t have a brand in mind, and 91% of searches on the Microsoft Search Network were non-branded in the 2019 holiday season. Make sure your messaging aligns with key holiday shopping phases and customer journey touch points. 

If this year is anything like last, after December 25, 68% of consumers plan to keep shopping for gifts and product exchanges. That’s why your campaign should run before Cyber Week and extend throughout the entire holiday season.

Plan your digital holiday advertising campaign around shopping trends to improve brand consideration and influence consumer decision-making whether they’re researching products or ready to buy. As advertising gears up as we head into Black Friday and Cyber Monday, make sure your brand is ready.

Advertising resources for the 2020 holiday season 

Get actionable data and best practices from Microsoft Advertising insights to help make decisions and grow your business this holiday season, check our festive holiday retail content and resources, or download the Holiday 2020 Insights e-book complete with valuable trends, tips, key dates and best practices to help you navigate this retail holiday season.

The post Don’t miss out on the most unpredictable holiday season yet appeared first on MarTech.

In today’s world, every other headline is a bombardment of the senses: social unrest, climate justice, global pandemic, cancel culture, fake news and data privacy erosion — not to mention the myriad of opinions on how to navigate these issues.

As a result, there’s is an acceleration of transformation occurring across industries, businesses and consumer behavior. There is a mindset shift where people are increasingly looking to brands to solve societal problems and they seek to buy from brands that stand for something larger than just their products, but are aligned to their values.

As marketers, we are left wondering, what is our role in the intersection of principles, profit and purpose? And can we as marketers contribute to our best collective future? The answer is yes. We call it Marketing with Purpose.

Marketing with Purpose is about building a brand that’s welcomed into people’s lives by earning their trust and upholding their values. It starts with respecting their right to privacy, being transparent and designing equitable experiences.

Trust grows into love when brands demonstrate values throughout the customer experience and express them through marketing and advertising to give people opportunities to connect and find shared meaning in shared values. Brand love leads to loyalty when someone experiences authenticity, personalized inclusion and as a result they feel “this brand is for someone like me”. That’s Marketing with Purpose and is outlined this detailed playbook.

The strategy is based on multiple research studies by Microsoft Advertising and supported by various third-party studies. The result is an actionable guide to building a trusted brand, which means being true to your brand’s values, inclusive of more people and a responsible marketer.

Here’s the three core building blocks of Marketing with Purpose, where you’ll find five quick actions that come directly from the Marketing with Purpose Playbook.

1. Responsibility.

The role of responsibility in marketing covers in part, privacy, transparency, and accessible marketing. It’s about being good stewards of the customer experience.

Trust is not static but can be dynamically built by being a good steward of the customer experience. Companies need to constantly earn peoples’ trust by taking responsibility and being transparent in data-collection — responsible marketing plays a critical role.

Start by actively reviewing your practices on privacy and data collection but also know the platform’s policies on where your ads will be placed. Being a responsible marketer also means prioritizing brand safety and choosing wisely where you place your ads as well as ensuring you’re producing accessible marketing.

Five quick actions to start on the path of more responsible marketing:

• Get the “Top six ways to demonstrate responsibility.”
• Review the top five ways people feel it’s worth sharing their personal data as well as what most concerns them to optimize your brand experience
• Review the “Advertising Platform Requirements Checklist.”
• Review the “Privacy Compliance Checklist for Marketers” 
• Responsible marketing is also accessible marketing, so be sure to review the entire section dedicated to Accessible Marketing

2. Values.

The role of values in marketing builds on brand values first, enabling people with shared values to find shared meaning in the brand experience.

Values are inherently embedded in building trust. And brand trust leads to brand love and brand loyalty which all help drive purchase consideration for a brand. These three elements are closely related: the correlation between trust and brand love is 76% and the correlation between brand love and loyalty is 55%. People want to spend with brands that have shared values and stand for what they believe in. Understand that your brand purpose and values create trust and authentic connections with people to unlock business opportunities.

Five quick actions to drive value with values:

• Learn about Ethical advertising as it’s 3X more important to company trust than competence; review the Ethical Advertising Checklist.
• Review top brand attributes linked to shared values building brand trust. 
• Review your mission as a company and authentically position your products, services, or experiences in alignment with your purpose and values. This is the key to authenticity. 
• Review the Diverse Audience Snapshots of values across ethnicities, sexual orientations and generations.
• Consider sustainability as a value and review how advertising platforms can provide Marketing with Purpose opportunities with their supply partners.

3. Inclusion.

The role of inclusion in marketing is about the expression of an inclusive lens on the outputs of any business; it’s a modern marketing imperative.

Inclusive Marketing means considering multiple dimensions of diversity to create culturally accurate representation in your advertising, not stereotyping. A brand that considers inclusion in advertising strives to provide authentic connection, demonstrate open-mindedness and convey equity. It’s an opportunity to build more meaningful relationships with people and show in advertising that you value them.

There are clear insights within Marketing with Purpose to help activate this core building block to trust. When people feel included, joy and trust follow, which leads to brand love, loyalty and an increase in purchase intent. Further, inclusive advertising increased purchase intent by 23 points.

Five quick actions to create inclusive advertising:

• Review the Inclusive Marketing activation model – the “What you market, Who you market to, How you market” approach to design campaigns relevant for your brand.
• Review the Inclusive Product Marketing Checklist.
• Learn how to develop your Inclusive Keyword Strategy for SEO, SEM, content marketing, and more
• Learn how to apply the three metaphors for Inclusion in ad imagery: Connections, Openness, Balance.
• Learn how to use Microsoft Bing to quickly scan your site’s image representation and contemplate if it represents the audience you are marketing to.

A responsible, values-based, and inclusive approach to marketing isn’t just about targeting niche segments, providing product value or policy compliance. It’s about building genuine relationships with people that celebrate diversity and a wide range of human experiences. Intentional inclusion with purpose woven throughout the brand experience conjures up feelings of acceptance, contentment, confidence, certainty, hope, and safety which precipitates loyalty — a leading indicator of future business growth.

Explore the Marketing with Purpose Playbook to help you authentically connect your marketing with purpose to build a more trusted brand. It’s the guide to building trust, love and loyalty while future-proofing a business in these transformational times. Marketing with Purpose marketers seek to find the intersection of purpose, profit, and principles to contribute to our best collective future.

The post Marketing that our collective future depends on appeared first on MarTech.

The Covid-19 effect that has altered our day-to-day habits in 2020 may have its greatest impact on the upcoming holiday shopping season. The question that is top of mind with most businesses: What’s in store for the holiday retail season in 2020?

To help you navigate this uncertain environment here’s five insights we’ve generated at Microsoft Advertising to help your holiday planning:

Holiday retail sales often stay strong even when consumers say they’re cutting back

What people say and what they do sometimes are not in agreement. This is something we find true in a variety of behavioral economic research. One thing to note are the many surveys suggesting people will cut back their spending that aren’t reflective in real life actions. People still shop and celebrate during economic downturns, usually more than they expect to. So, while retail spending may drop this holiday season, it likely won’t drop as drastically as consumers expect or forecast.

Is there historical data backing this? Yes. From past analysis, we saw this behavior during the 2008 financial crisis. Consumers reported they would spend 29% less during the holidays in 2008, though retail sales dipped by only 4.7% in comparison to 2007, the year prior.

Consumer preference for online shopping will boost ecommerce sales dramatically

The shift to online shopping during the pandemic will help provide ecommerce growth well above what was predicted at the end of 2019. While overall retail sales in the U.S. will decrease, online sales will increase significantly across categories. Categories hit hard by COVID-19, such as apparel, are still expected to see ecommerce growth in 2020.

Consumers want contactless shopping

The demand for contactless shopping has been supercharged as consumers prioritize their safety over the in-store shopping experience. There are a few different categories where the physical senses have always been important in the shopping journey. Yet it’s the convenience of touch-free shopping that analysts believe will cause permanent shifts in consumer behavior this holiday season. According to eMarketer, 52% of the U.S. population will use “Buy Online, Pick Up In Store” or what is referred to as BOPIS options in 2020, driving a 60% YoY growth in BOPIS sales. Consumers are also changing their holiday shipping expectations, with 81% expecting expedited shipping options. It’s expected that 44% of U.S. consumers will delay holiday shopping due to expedited shipping options and the expectation that purchases will arrive before the holidays.

Plan your campaign around holiday shopping trends

Remember: Search is where consumers start their purchase journey. In fact, 57% of consumers turn to search when they don’t have a brand in mind, and 91% of searches on the Microsoft Search Network were non-branded in the 2019 holiday season. Make sure your messaging aligns with key holiday shopping phases and customer journey touch points. The weeks leading up to Cyber Week see Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales and promotions, with retailers often teasing products well before Thanksgiving week. And with good reason: Cyber Week draws the most sales and consumer spend of the holiday season. There is still opportunity in search marketplaces. As all industries come back online and supply/chain inventory is refreshed, product demand is outpacing supply in a number of industries. If a business’ competitors do not have inventory to sell, they won’t be bidding because they won’t be able to fulfill orders and don’t want to waste spend on advertising until inventory improves. This presents a great opportunity for lower cost per clicks in many search marketplaces as a whole and specifically in niche marketplaces inside of specific verticals.

People want to purchase from brands they trust

Consumers want brands they can trust. This means being transparent, using your platform to speak out on important issues, and acting in line with your customers’ values. Brands that make a value-based, emotional connection with consumers stand to build customer trust and loyalty. Reaching them via search in an authentic way that highlights your values is key to capturing and maintaining their attention.

While focusing on the first four areas, don’t leave out this important fifth pillar which is asking and answering: “What does our brand stand for?”

For additional business recovery tips and insights on how to answer question number five for your business, watch Episode 1 of The Download now.

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