Digital advertising growth dynamics, how technology is the divide between high growth and low growth businesses, and close observations of customer experience and expectations.
This week’s key insights give you a clear picture of why mobile ads are the place for your advertising dollars, a revised umbrella view of the digital advertising market, a slice of delight for DOOH, customer experience, and why technology adoption is the way to success.
With COVID-19 looming around every corner of the globe, advertising has seen some peculiar dynamics in the US market. Mobile advertising budgets didn’t see the projected growth rate carve into a 2020 reality but it is still a winner amongst other mediums. Emarketer had expected mobile advertising to grow up to $105.34 billion. However, their latest data prediction shows that mobile ad spending will increase by 4.8% ($4.22 billion) making the total mobile ad spend budget this year to $91.52 billion.
Despite this, mobile continues to increase its share of digital ad spending, reaching 68% in 2020. This is a considerable jump from 2019’s 65.9%.
If you take a step back and look at the entire US digital advertising sphere, the estimated growth for 2020 that stood at $154.58 billion (pre-pandemic-era) now stands at $134.66 billion. This is a mere $2.20 billion growth which is heavily reliant on mobile’s projected growth.
As per March, OOH (out-of-home) advertising had a 3.3% projected growth rate. The pandemic has turned the tables now projecting a 4.6% decline in OOH ad spends. This means marketers will spend roughly $8.25 billion on OOH ads.
All these are primarily affected due to lesser footfall outdoors, social distancing, and quarantining. Marketers are more into damage control and salvaging strategies to ensure bottom lines are met with.
What are marketers doing to tackle the challenge?
While OOH is on a downward trend, digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising is on a ballooning pattern as it is expected to account for 33.0% of all US OOH ad spending, reaching $2.72 billion.
Programmatic OOH on the other hand is on a slow uphill climb and will account for just 2.2% of US’ total OOH ad spend. But as programmatic OOH hail from a very small base, even little wins count for this segment.
With all this said and done, businesses continue to grapple at new business while they’re vying for return customers. But are businesses living up to customer expectations? Our next segment will answer this pressing question.
Our earlier articles have uncovered some key insights on the importance of customer experience and how customer expectations are rising during uncertain times. Hubspot surveyed 1125 service professionals across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia to understand the state of customer service, teams’ perspectives on customer service, and the tools they use.
These were some key findings:
A “customer-centric” couldn’t be any more harped on in 2020. But the truth lies in the stats that speak for themselves. Businesses are listening to customers marginally more. A comparative view of 2019 vs 2020 shows that businesses are tracking customer satisfaction, feedback, online reviews, and NPS scores more actively.
High growth companies are very keen on knowing what their customers have to say. We could safely mention that this also explains why they are “high growth” businesses.
Hubspot’s report revealed that even though saving costs is a priority, it isn’t the top priority! Service professionals and C-suite executives have a clear vision that the customer comes first. Which is why their top four priorities were:
Factors like saving costs, training, agent productivity, and using predictive analytics were on the priority list, but as a lesser priority.
On taking a closer look at the tools and technologies professionals used in 2019 vs 2020, these were some of them:
When it comes to building exceptional customer experience and delighting customers, we observed that the highlights here are – CRM being the frontrunner in 2020 and email being at a consistent high in 2019 as well as 2020. Closer observation of Hubspot’s report clearly points out technology adoption as the divide between high growth and low growth organizations.
Customer relationship management (CRM) earns a special mention here, the above graphs prove it. A mere 32% of businesses said they used CRM software to manage customer data, this is a very poor 3.3% rise since 2019.
And since we understand the power of CRM and know it’s not just a sales tool, it’s crucial to convey that it keeps everyone at your company, across sales, service, and marketing on the same page about your customers, leads, business forecasts, data, and more. It is an excellent technology that helps craft superlative customer experiences that can increase revenue and profitability.
It’s interesting to see that this week’s key insights and our reader’s interests are so inline. Digital advertising, marketing, and customer interactions have been some of the most engaging articles along with data-driven attribution.
