User-generated content (UGC) is any content created by someone outside of your brand. It could be a video recorded by an average Joe, a photo taken by a local amateur photographer, or a customer sharing their written experience with your product on social media. Resharing this kind of content that’s created by others can be a successful marketing tool to help you build connections with your current customers and attract new ones. More than that, UGC can help your brand truly build a community through social media.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media played a huge role in our lives in 2020. As people, we spent more time sitting on our couches scrolling, shopping and interacting on social media than ever before. As marketers, we spent more time honing in on social media as a tool to reach audiences and get our messages across. The year 2020 undoubtedly changed social media forever, spurring on new trends, tools and experiences.

Now that we’ve finally arrived in 2021, there’s cautious optimism for the future. With a unanimously hard 2020 behind us, we look at how the pandemic will affect marketing in the new year, where the advancement of the vaccine is giving many people hope, but there’s still a lot of anxiety and unrest about what’s to come. As marketers, we know that public sentiment and current events greatly affect how we interact with prospects and customers. COVID-19 brought a lot of change to digital marketing in the last year, and it’s important to anticipate what will stay and what will go.

American adults spend more than 11 hours per day listening to, watching, reading or otherwise interacting with media content. We’re talking videos, podcasts, news articles and blogs, social media, email – you name it. Clearly, we can’t get enough of it.

With more time at home in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, people are turning to social media more than ever before. Now at an all-time high, social media use is an avenue for staying connected with loved ones, political engagement, shopping, and so much more. While financial institutions seek to take advantage of this massive, concentrated audience, the tension of general economic unrest can make it tricky to navigate the best ways to connect. According to a study conducted by The Financial Brand in April, most prominent financial brands saw a drop in their social media sentiment scores immediately following shutdowns due to the pandemic.

Let’s do a word association game. When we say Instagram, what comes to mind? Perhaps funny memes, your favorite products, visual inspiration? Now, what about when we say email? Is it suddenly feeling stuffy in here?

There's a secret that well-seasoned marketers know. No matter how many warm fuzzies an ad campaign gives you, or how clever, or funny, or relevant it is, none of it matters if the campaign can't drive engagement that leads to revenue. No matter how well the intention should have played out, a campaign that falls flat often loses all the stakeholder support and is replaced with new efforts. That can be stressful whether you are in in-house marketer, a freelancer, or an agency under contract.

There's an old saying in marketing called The Rule of 7. Discovered by former advertising executives of the 1930s, the Rule of 7 is the average number of times a person must be exposed to your messaging before taking any action. Luckily with a solid social media strategy planned out, this becomes much easier. But it only works if your potential buyer recognizes your brand every single time they see it. For this to happen, your brand needs to be consistent across various topics, no matter the location or situation.

When social media first came out, developing a following and getting likes and shares was the task at hand. It was largely reactive, rather than proactive and responded to the trends of the day, rather than setting trends. As professional marketers expanded the social media space, being proactive and building trends became the pathway for much of the traffic. As this has continued, organic social media has taken a back seat to paid social efforts. As with most endeavors, paid advertising is what grassroots efforts use to go from local hotspot to regional or national trends.