The events of 2020 have a long tail. As marketers enter 2021 with decreased marketing budgets, ROI is of increasing importance. Analytics and the ability to evaluate performance are key, especially as media mix is evolving. And it’s a great time for marketers to check in with their plans and confirm they are still looking at the right metrics.

As companies are finalizing budgets for next year and marketers are fine-tuning their plans, it’s a popular time to look back at what worked and what didn’t. It’s also a critical opportunity to revisit your organizational strategy, realign your KPIs, and design a testing system that gives you actionable insights.

It’s no secret that 2020 was an unexpected year for all of us, and a big year for ecommerce. A recent eMarketer report suggests, though, that “the pandemic has only accelerated an ongoing shift to the [ecommerce] channel.” So with this growing channel in mind, our CEO Michael Caccavale and I sat down to discuss what marketers need to keep an eye on.

The kids are going back to school, our Denver office has already seen snow, and it’s starting to feel like fall. While 2020 has dished up a lot of new challenges, marketers are still facing the need to plan and budget for next year, even if we’re still struggling to plan for next month. Here’s what our CEO thinks about 2021 planning.

Like many people, I have spent a lot more time in 2020 with Zoom meetings and Netflix characters than with real people. And as social distancing continues to be the norm, the resulting consumer habits are leaving some marketers to rethink their tactics. I recently sat down with our CEO to talk about what’s changing – and what isn’t – as more consumers are staying home.

Although states and communities are beginning to lift their stay at home orders, it’s clear that social distancing is going to be a part of our “new normal” for quite some time. That said, there’s much to consider, especially for retailers.

The ways in which consumers are acquiring goods and services are ever-expanding. We are in the driver’s seat when it comes to competition among brands, both in price and value. And beyond that, we are more in control of the customer experience than we’ve ever been. How are brands responding to that? I recently had a chat with our CEO Michael Caccavale about direct-to-consumer (D2C) marketing and what it means to marketers.

Often, consumer behavior – especially in the ever-changing digital landscape – can feel like a moving target. And as we’re head-first into the new year, it’s always enlightening to sit down with our CEO and talk shop about what’s happening, what’s ahead, and what we as marketers should – and shouldn’t – be responding to. 

Marketing technology providers talk a big game about integration but few live up to the hype. More often than not, the addition of a new marketing technology to an existing program creates a new silo – a repository of data that does not flow freely within an organization but remains stagnant within a single piece of technology. But, much like kindergarteners, marketing technologies need to be taught to play well together and to share.

As marketers, we constantly strive to improve our results. And when it comes to learning – and proving – efficacy, something as simple as A/B testing is paramount. A/B testing, the process of using two versions of a marketing piece (web page, email, etc.) to see which one performs better, offers us the ability to tweak very small details in our programs to see incrementally larger results. But, like many marketing strategies, A/B testing can provide mixed, or even inaccurate results if not properly executed.