If you’re predicting trends, I say good luck to you. I don’t want to play. I wish you well, I hope you enjoy yourself. I’m going to take the financial investors approach to predictions this year… “there’s just not enough data”.

With trends articles usually, we tend to see the same things repeated over and over again, year in and year out. Things like mobile and user-generated content will continue to rise, and so on. It’s all very predictable, it’s all quite boring. I’m not against looking back though, and after the year we’ve just had, I think it’s important to interrogate and re-evaluate marketing efforts.

Do you know your audience?

Honestly, if all you know about your audience is their age, gender, and monthly income, you don’t know your audience. But, if you have some psychographic data generated by some good conversations with them, then good for you, you know your audience a little bit better. No matter where you sit with your audience knowledge, I have some bad news; you may have to go back to the drawing board.

During 2020, the sale of luxury goods dipped dramatically while consumer electronics shot through the roof. People have become far more focused on simplifying their everyday lives than they are with wearing trendy fashion items. The luxury brands that are weathering this storm are the ones that actually did focus on sustainability as opposed to paying lip-service to it. If your brand doesn’t make everyday life easier or makes some kind of positive and tangible difference to the world, you might be in trouble.

Community has also become a prioritised topic. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and isolation has definitely highlighted that community is essential to wellbeing. Brands that are focused on the single individual, using terms such as  ‘individuality’ as part of their brand promise will find that they no longer resonate with their audiences like they used to. So, relook at your audience. They might be different people.

Social channels

A couple of things have happened here that are noteworthy. Firstly, social has become a very solid sales channel. It’s something that Facebook has been trying to push for a while now and many brands are starting to see very tangible results from Facebook. Tools like Facebook marketplace have come into their own, but another factor is all-round better content and targeting from brands.

The biggest external contributor to sales across multiple social channels is lockdown. As I mentioned earlier, people have become isolated and they’ve turned to social media to fill those emotional gaps.

But, and here’s the thing, maybe you don’t need ALL those social channels.

I know, I know, you’ve been told you need a presence… but really? Do you? Is it a solid strategy to just exist on a platform without getting tangible results? The trend is moving towards optimisation, culling the under-performing channels and focusing on creating better content for the platforms that remain. It’s a big step to take and it requires a shift from a reach/engagement mindset to a conversion mindset. As I said, I don’t want to be the trends guy, but it’s worth considering.

Mindset

While looking at trend reports does have some uses, and can sometimes be quite inspiring and insightful, remember that each brand ecosystem is different. The thing is, you need to keep your ear close to the ground and an eye on the value your marketing efforts generate. This is a rule of thumb. If you only remember one thing from this article, let it be this: throw away your checklists because you’re not in Kansas anymore. I am certain that 2021 will be a harsh master and if you’re not paying attention, it will decimate you.

I was looking at some data from a client’s ecommerce platform, and I noticed something rather shocking. The segment that all of their budget and creative was aimed at (the millennial) was only responsible for 50% of sales. The other 50% came from a range of age groups who seemed to be returning to the platform simply because they liked the product. A sample of one is hardly compelling, but it did take me on a journey of seriously considering how we set up our target audiences, especially when it comes to using these broad labels like ‘millennial’ or ‘Gen Z’.

I’ve sat in countless agency presentations where the word millennial is taken out and paraded around like it has some kind of meaning. As I delved deeper into the topic, I realised that any sort of generational classification is actually quite meaningless. My starting point was looking at how people’s attitudes shift as they move through different stages of their lives. While most of my research centred around the physiology of the human brain and how it ages, I will spare you the science and get to the point. As we age, our brain changes. As our brain changes, our priorities change, our abilities change, and how we make decisions changes.

Younger people will be more open-minded. Older people will be more set in their ways. It has nothing to do with your generational label and more to do with how old your brain is. As you get older, you’ll move from being like a millennial to being like a Gen X’er to being more like a baby boomer. The labels and descriptions should change as you do, but they don’t. If you’ve been labelled a millennial, you’ll be one until the day you die. All the descriptions that go with it will be yours forever. And I think it’s plain wrong.

The labels are wrong, but what has that got to do with my ecommerce example? It goes beyond labels. Not only is your generational label irrelevant, so is the year you were born. Looking at adoption rates for new technology, it takes older people as little as four years to catch up and use the technology adopted by younger people. While you could say that younger people are technology-centric, we’re almost on a level playing field, all things considered. If you are using age-based targeting, you need to very carefully examine whether you’re not losing out on a much broader audience. If your sales are coming from other age groups despite your marketing efforts to a single group, you might be sitting on a goldmine. A shift to more inclusive audience targeting should be on the cards.

In the ideal world, you’d want to leave all this third-party audience nonsense behind you. Third-party data (like Facebook and Google) should only really be used to generate first-party data (stuff that you own). Constantly using other platforms to drive your sales means that you’ll always be at the mercy of the tech giants. Once you have your dataset, you can break free of their rules, regulations, and generally poor quality of the data provided to you. You can move into a world where you can grow and segment your data where and when you please.

Back to the ecommerce data I first mentioned, 15% of the sales came from owned data. That dataset is not a priority, and yet it is generating sales for a far smaller budget than the social budget. Social generated just 1% of the sales. Leave generational and age targeting behind. Build your own audience database. Get rich.