The global COVID-19 pandemic has impacted every area of our lives, from how people spend time, seek for, and purchase items to how businesses, brands, and marketers advertise and promote goods and services.
We don’t need a reminder about how the coronavirus epidemic is transforming the world at this point. The consequences are visible in the way we work, engage, and relax.
Social media Marketing Agencies in the UK are also learning to deal with these unique circumstances, and the successful ones are turning the threat into an opportunity.
Covid-19 has boosted digital business models. According to a market study, more than half of the companies have raised digital and technology innovation budgets due to COVID 19. However, most firms are still far away from realising the full potential of personalisation.
Customer intelligence and marketing analytics will be crucial in the future for giving precise, meaningful customer insights and scoring points with the end customer through a personalised journey.
The blogpost covers the following sub-topics:
○ What has changed?
○ Major insights about digital marketing in 2021
○ Growth of digital marketing agencies in 2021
○ Taxes
○ Role of finance advisors
○ Winding-up
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What has changed in terms of social media usage and involvement during the pandemic?
During the pandemic, social media usage and engagement increased dramatically, with 42 per cent of consumers worldwide claiming they now spend more time on social media.
This can be related to the fact that national lockdowns and travel limitations cause people to spend more time online. People are less likely to leave the house and have fewer options for spending their free time.
People’s desire to connect with friends and family members they can no longer see has also aided the rise. There is also a need to access COVID-19 news and information more timely and understandable than traditional news channels can offer.
Because of the increased use of social media, there has been a higher level of interaction with social media ads, resulting in consumers making more purchases through social media than ever before.
The fact that in-store buying was more challenging during the lockdown and hasn’t yet rebounded to pre-pandemic levels has only boosted this extreme transformation.
Ultimately, the pandemic has changed how people use and interact with social media, and these changes may last long after the pandemic is over. We see these changes as a shift in consumer behavior as opposed to a temporary phenomenon.
Major insights about digital marketing in 2021
1. Marketers are concentrating their efforts on website personalisation
Marketers are customising websites for individual visitors to view the relevant products.
As per a recent survey, a third of UK website offers a personalised experience, with another 13% planning to do so this year.
| Personalised experience | |
| 13% | Already doing |
| 13% | Planning to do so by 2021 |
| 74% | No action |
Only 25% of companies currently employ unique content on their websites, but more than half expect to do so by 2021.
| Content quality | |
| 25% | Unique content |
| 25% | Planning to do so by 2021 |
| 50% | No action |
The idea of social media Marketing Agencies is to reduce bounce rate, increase engagement and analyse customer behaviour to identify gaps. This requires making visitors spend more time on your website. For this to happen, you need to do many things:
- Identify the source of consumers
- Identify whether visitors are new or returning, long term or short term, their interests and demands change; therefore, you must handle them accordingly.
- What are they doing once on your website- document their user journey from clicks to time spend etc.
In 2021, here’s how to develop web personalisation:
- Segment your website visitors depending on their location, device information, previous user behaviour, purchase history, and other factors.
- Based on the user data you acquired, create targeted content, smart product recommendations, or even customised landing pages.
- To find out what people are genuinely interested in, test alternative material for each category. Technically called A/B testing.
2. Data management remained a challenge
One of the critical issues that marketers confront right now is releasing the power of their data.
According to some social media Marketing companies, 63 per cent of organisation’s suffer from disconnected data sets that give only a limited picture of client behaviour. Simultaneously, three-quarters of respondents indicated they could identify less than 20% of visitors to their website, and 38% said they could only identify less than 10%.
Here’s how you can approach this problem in 2021:
- To discover audience segments, increase targeting, and optimise online advertising expenditure, use a data management platform (DMP).
- In a customer data platform (CDP), combine all of your incoming data, including your DMP, to generate a complete picture of each client.
- Combine the CDP with your marketing execution platform to take advantage of real-time customer insights.
3. Customer engagement investments have shown to be fruitful
So the big question is, where will marketers put their money in 2021?
As specialist accountants for social media marketing firms, we believe that marketers will put money into the technology that engages customers!
Such solutions aid marketers in documenting and managing a data driven customer journey.
Businesses using a customer engagement platform report high satisfaction levels, with 67 per cent ranking their vendor 4 or 5 out of 5 during the pandemic.
It all comes down to having a 360-degree view of each customer across all channels and devices. Now use that information to launch customer-centric and highly tailored marketing campaigns.
In 2021, here’s how you may reap the rewards of consumer engagement:
- Invest in a CDP that centralises all of your client data. With unified customer profiles, you can learn more about your customers than ever before.
- Organise your team around the same real-time data and run consistent campaigns across several marketing platforms.
- Make every touchpoint matter by automating your cross-channel campaigns to meet your clients wherever they are.
Growth of digital marketing agencies in 2021
Digital marketing may reach more people in the future, but getting individuals to take action will remain a struggle.
Our research suggests a substantial drop in click-through rates (CTRs) on numerous platforms at the start of the pandemic, with the CTR for Google search advertising falling 41% year over year in Q1 2019.
If these trends continue and individuals become more resistant to internet marketing, agencies will need to keep innovating and investing in quality to succeed.
Whether it’s hiring top-tier copywriters and graphic designers or using digital breakthroughs that prioritise user experience, agencies must pull out all the stops in the post-Covid world to ensure their marketing efforts are effective.
Agencies can’t afford to slack now that there are more consumers online than ever before.
Taxes
The UK now has a digital services tax (DST), which was introduced this year on April 1, 2020, joining Italy and France, which already have comparable taxes in place. Large firms that provide a social media service, a search engine, or an online marketplace to UK-based users are subject to a 2% UK DST.
For this purpose, a company is substantial if it has in-scope annual global revenues of more than £500 million, with more than £25 million attributable to UK sales (as measured on a consolidated group-wide basis).
There is an alternate method of calculation for low margin or loss-making firms. The DST rate depends on the UK operating margin of the group’s relevant activity.
This indicates that if the group’s UK operating margin is zero or negative, there should be no UK DST payable. DST is only payable to the degree that UK revenues surpass £25 million per year.
There is a yearly allowance on the first £25 million in digital services revenues in the UK.
The payment and DST return submission timelines are within nine months of the end of the applicable accounting period.
All this will be changing after the recent G7 summit, where there will be a minimum tax of 15%. Read more on Tech giants and tax havens targeted by G7 deal.
Role of finance advisors
The COVID-19 epidemic was a national and human catastrophe, but it also proved the need for financial advisors in assisting individuals through times of extreme uncertainty and disruption.
Specialist accountants for social media marketing companies in London frequently functioned as crisis counsellors during the first wave of the pandemic. Moat worked long hours to reassure frightened clients and manage their cashflows, finances, furlough and various government schemes in their best interest.
Accountants and finance advisors were confident in the financial plans that they and their customers had created together, and they worked hard to ensure that their clients understood the significance of “staying the course.”
The rise of COVID-19 has also attracted unscrupulous scammers wanting to profit from people’s anxiety and anguish. Scammers are brazen in their tactics to falsely cheat clients and get their hard-earned money credited by unfair means.
Finance advisors provide specific suggestions to clients regarding not clicking on links from unknown people or sources, particularly those claiming to be from government sources.
Hire Financial Advisors
Work with a UK-based accountant for tax, accounting, payroll, & EIS/ SEIS needs.
Winding-up
The future is bright for digital marketing agencies in the post-Covid era, but only for those who can adapt.
Even for the most established organisations, navigating the continuously shifting environment of social media advertising may be challenging. As a result, certified accountants for social media Marketing Agencies are available to assist you in optimising your advertising. Finance advisors now have a more excellent grasp of the spectrum of marketing approaches, especially using digital platforms to create considerable business growth, thanks to our shared experiences during the pandemic.
