We all know the year 2020 – for some, it’s very memorable and for others, it’s a year they try to forget. There were many changes that 2020 brought like masks, social distancing and other factors we wish to not bring up. But.. something drastic changed during this time, the consumer behavior. What happened to the minds of consumers during 2020 and the following years? We’ve put our heads together and laid out some of the biggest changes during this time.

The beginning of the pandemic there was a lot of scramble, and no we don’t mean the style you like your eggs. People scrambling to find toilet paper online, businesses frantically trying to develop an online presence, and people figuring out how to quarantine and work from home. With the influx of people swarming to the internet, this shifted not only the price and limits of data (internet companies raising the price and limiting how much someone can spend online) but the way people make purchases.

The consumer behavior during this time was extremely predictable. More eyes online = more eyes on digital ads = more online purchases. This leads us into impulsive buying… duh, duh, DUH! Let’s reflect back on the days when everyone was bored in bed during quarantine. What would they do? Most likely scroll through Instagram and TikTok! By doing so (majority of the day) this created a huge increase in impulsively buying everything they saw. Influencers were a huge game changer when it came to pushing people to ultimately click “buy now”.. Does anyone remember the whipped coffee trend that exploded across the internet and made instant coffee sell out everywhere during covid? Consumers swarmed to ads and trends at the swipe of a button. Who were the biggest drivers of the trend? The people with thousands of followers making whipped coffee or even the feta pasta look amazing on their feeds, that’s who!

The changes for advertising really took off when TikTok began to gain traction. Although TikTok did not have ads on the ‘for you page’ initially, advertisers took note of the influx of consumers and how they interacted with the 5-30second long videos. Let’s just say attention spans are growing smaller and smaller (keep your videos short and sweet!). If someone posted a casual ‘get ready with me’ video on TikTok and used a cute pair of slippers after getting out of bed, suddenly those slippers would be sold out everywhere. Rather than someone posting a video talking about how cute these slippers are and to ‘click the link in my bio to buy’, consumer behavior started to show an increase in purchases when it was from a casual and more personal video/ad. This was the beginning of a big change in ads. Focusing more on an organic approach has shown more results than a classic ‘buy here’ kind of advertisement.

Other tactics that we all knew as best practices before the onset of the VID became essential for businesses staying afloat during the true digital era. Things like keeping hours and services up to date on business profiles or on service sites like Yelp or Angie’s became a lifeline to customers trapped at home. Long gone are the days of saying “I’ll just drop by and see if they have XYZ” especially when you have all the info that you need right at your fingertips. 

We can all agree that 2020 was the year of change… maybe a little too much change. We’ve learned to do more than adapt with the digital world. We learned how to innovate with every new hurdle. Keep innovating your reach friends, we’ll be here to help along the way.