#SMLive Kanika Jain on how to stay connected with consumers

Kanika Jain, Audience & Formats Lead, India, YouTube India shares insights on staying connected with consumers through the pandemic.

Kanika Jain from YouTube India comprehends consumer behavior during these times, how can brands respond and stay connected with them, and plan business objectives and work towards it with ads and tools.

Consumer Behavior

Consumers are working from home, spending more time with family, doing household chores. With traveling being limited, and no large gatherings to attend to they are coping digitally.

There has been a spike in search of family-friendly movies, a 24% increase in online gaming apps has been observed, according to a Comscore report, and the use of online grocery apps has increased too.

YouTube has observed a massive surge in searches for easy recipes, at-home workouts spike, and general news.

How Can Brands Respond

• Be mindful, empathetic, and helpful

• Be careful while being helpful

• Be compassionate, this is not a theme for moment marketing

• Be crisp with shorter CTAs, consumers have a lot on their plate

• Be creative with the tools and resources you have

Kanika further elaborates this with few examples such as the Netflix India post with the CTA to wash hands communicated with a still from one of their series, and Popsugar Fitness, an offline studio that turned digital with workout videos they put out.

How To Stay Connected With Consumers

Brands need to pay attention to the evolving consumer needs that go in accordance with the consumer behavior mentioned hitherto. They have to ask themselves, 'How can I inform them?', 'How can I inspire them?', or 'How can I enhance their experience? What more can I do now?'

Also Read: #SMLive: Adhvith Dhuddu decodes AR’s importance in the Marketing Funnel

Planning Business Objectives

Follow the steps mentioned below, and use these formats to fulfill the parallel business objectives.

Brands also need to contextualize and enable discovery, think about the content that they can leverage, and be more discoverable with keyword searches, YouTube Searches and content watched. For instance, a cosmetics brand putting up a make-up tutorial, and so on.

Also, Kanika mentions in-feed ads seem to work well, as the Home Feed is personalized according to user preferences, and a user is more likely to lean into the Home Feed videos.

Post-COVID, the platform has seen a 45% plus increased use in connected devices, connected TV particularly is seeing an upsurge, and brands should leverage this big-screen space since hoardings are out.

Google Tools such as Google Trends + Autocomplete, Google Analytics, Reach Planner for media planning, Ignition Labs, Video Builder, Bumper Machine, and Google Articles, can be leveraged for effective creation of campaigns to stay connected with the consumers.

Kanika closes with the ABCD of making content commerce-friendly: Attract, Branding, Connect, Direct. Attract consumers with branding, ask yourself if you are able to connect with them, and involve direct details of how can a consumer buy, and where can they buy it.