Prominent online traders such as Amazon, Etsy, eBay and Wayfair experienced price drops and less consumer traffic during the end of July 2021.
Marketing experts credit a return to pre-pandemic consumer behaviours as one of the contributors.
This raises several questions that directly impact your business’s marketing strategies and approaches.
Is COVID-19 really nearing its end as more and more people get vaccinated or will new waves and variants continue to affect life and establish new normals?
Will the surge of business digitisations ebb and return to pre-COVID-19 retail patterns or will companies adopt dual retail and digital approaches?
These questions tend to lead to more questions and generate few tangible answers.
Businesses and marketers, however, need tangibles to read and predict consumer trends and channel funds into strategies that will deliver and realise a return on investments (ROIs).
The analysis of trend-based surveys revealed that consumer behaviours were somewhat erratic at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
Stock shortages experienced when the pandemic was first declared a global crisis drove approximately a third of consumers to stockpile goods.
Few consumers turned to online shopping solutions at the start of the pandemic and preferred to put non-essential purchases on hold and wait for retailers to reopen.
This trend did, however, change.
A gradual and progressive shift towards online shopping occurred during 2020.
Numerator Insights data indicated that approximately 87% of survey respondents shopped online and roughly 51% placed orders for pick-up.
The data shows a definitive increase in online shopping activities that continued even after the reopening of retailers.
A combined study conducted by Alvarez & Marsal and Retail Economics showed that traditional retail profit margins dipped from 6.4% to 4.5% between 2010 and 2020.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a shift towards online shopping, these statistics indicate that there was a gradual move towards online shopping before the pandemic.
As stated, many online retailers, however, saw a decrease in traffic and sales in July 2021.
Comparative research between consumer trends in July 2020 and July 2021 indicated an 8% drop in online grocery sales.
Despite this drop, records indicate that online shoppers spend more than £3bn online when compared to the same periods in 2019.
The studies and statistics highlight the fact that consumer behaviour depends on the current climates.
An amalgamation of political, social and economic factors drives these behaviours and influences the shifts in trends.
Your company’s marketing strategies and approaches should be on top of these drivers if you wish to predict and adjust to consumer behaviour patterns.
Effective marketing content flows with the dynamics of changing behaviours and aims to change behaviours to benefit both the consumer and business.
You should therefore partner with a professional content marketing agency that knows how to:
• Identify consumer personas and how these correlate with the varying stages of the buying process.
• Develop content that informs, adds value, and promotes your business.
• Address the real-life concerns and experiences of real people and address such in your marketing content.
