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| Top 21 Digital Marketing Trends of 2021 |
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Having a robust digital presence is now more important than ever, and so is content consumption and shopping online at a rapid pace.
So to make your business not just survive but thrive in this age of innovation, here’s a list of 21 digital marketing trends that will pave the way for a year full of futuristic opportunities.
There is no denying that as social media usage rises, social media and e-commerce go hand in hand. It’s no surprise why brands are using the two together and trying to increase their sales opportunities. To maximize opportunities for sales, brands have been using shoppable content for their business to reach prospective new customers.
Visual platforms such as Instagram ( and now many others too) offer an opportunity to showcase your products to your followers or a specific target audience with the help of shoppable posts to elevate a user’s shopping experience. Social media has become the latest trend in digital marketing. There’s no more wasting time by visiting the website, looking for the specific product, and then heading to check out. Came across something you like and wish to buy? Click on the price tag of the product on the post, proceed with your preferred payment method, and voila!
Subscription-based or long-term paying customers are a living dream of all types of business owners. Why do you ask? Firstly, because it ties the customer to your service, in return enhancing the relationship, and secondly, it helps in predicting the business’s financial performance. What remains constant is the inflow of money and a loyal customer base.
Also Read: How To Retain Users On Digital Platforms
What we witnessed in recent times and will continue to do even in the digital marketing trends of 2021 is Artificial Intelligence. AI is taking a front seat and being the driving force of many services across various areas like E-commerce, Content Creation, Product recommendations, etc. AI aids digital marketing on many grounds cutting staffing costs, using data from social media platforms to help business owners understand their customer’s needs and wants, and easing the process of understanding consumer behavior which leads us to our next point.
AI and Programmatic advertising go hand in hand. To put it in a better way, the years to come will be when a lot of people unravel the dominance of AI.
AI is soon going to become the newest trend in digital marketing. Programmatic ads refer to using AI to automate the process of ad buying so one can specifically target a more desired audience group. This conversion has proven to be much more effective, resulting in higher conversion rates and lower acquisition costs.
Chatbots again is a wonderfully curated result of AI. This technology enables instant messaging to chat in real time with all your customers and site visitors at any point of the day, without leaving anyone unanswered.
One thing that modern marketing demands the most is conversational content, something most business owners have realized and adapted in recent times. When consumers have a question about a particular product, they often want the answer immediately. Conversational marketing, therefore, can be put across as a one-on-one, real-time connection between marketers and customers.
Also Read: Benefits & Importance Of Content Marketing
Recent trends in digital marketing show that 60% of consumers trust an influencer’s opinion much more than what the brand has to talk about itself. Influencer marketing, therefore, plays a very important role in spreading the word about your business and gaining good traction.
This word-of-mouth kind of marketing focuses on key leaders or well-known personalities trying to amplify your brand’s message to a larger audience. Influencers can be Instagram celebrities or Youtube personalities that partner with a specific business to make the mob aware of its perks.
Personalized marketing also known as one-to-one marketing is the implementation of a strategy by which companies deliver individualized content. The goal of this kind of marketing is to engage its customers or prospective customers by communicating with each individual. It immerses the viewers with content that is personalized data such as name, age, and preferences based on gender, choice, geographical location, etc. This aids in the delivery of personalized content, emails, products, and more, making it contextual as per their likes and dislikes.
As per a source, Kevin George from EmailMonks asserts that “personalized, triggered emails based on behavior are 3x better than batch-and-blast emails.”
With the advent of AI taking over the digital world at such a rapid scale, audio assistants like Siri and Alexa have prominently come into the picture and minor errors made by them previously have also seen to be significantly reduced. This being a reason, people have switched to audio search as it can be used on the go and simplifies the process of retracting the information you’re looking for easier.
The practice of data mining, machine learning, and predictive modeling to patterns and predict consumers’ future needs together refers to predictive analytics. In the digital marketing world, we see businesses using this to enhance lead scoring and improve customer engagement. Both predictive and augmented analytics strive toward providing the best user experience by automating data preparation and displaying similar results to a customer’s previous search history.
Explain structured data, is any data that is organized in such a manner that our search engines find it easier to crawl and categorize. It is the right usage of meta tags and keywords that push your business above the rest when looked up on any search engine.
Another possible boon of using structured data is that you can generate Rich Snippet results, which display images, review stats, and pricing. These rich snippets – also known as rich cards – are excellent for driving clicks, especially on mobile.
With almost 50% of all global Internet traffic now happening on mobile devices, the competition for these rich results is heating up, so we’ll see a lot of marketers focusing on leveraging structured data.
Also Read: 9 Best On Page SEO Techniques For Your Brand
With so much going on and about the importance of data, privacy has become a top priority not just for the consumers but also the marketers. Before laying out all their information, people these days want to know that their data is in safe hands. These required brands gain the trust of their consumers. Therefore, digital marketing teams should strategically plan ways to reinforce their commitments to privacy to gain the trust of their potential customers.
Along the same lines as Privacy Marketing, Website Security needs to be taken care of with utmost importance too. When a viewer lands on your website, your focus should be on making them feel secure enough to stay long on it. If he/she does not feel safe, they won’t hang around for long which in return can lead to an increase in bounce rates. Not to mention, a high bounce rate is a big no-no for any business.
Another thing that customers usually encounter is pop-ups in their browsers when they visit a website without a valid SSL certificate. Thus, having this in place is basic hygiene to not lose any customers.
If not the most, we all can collectively agree that Video Marketing has lately become one of the most important digital marketing trends in today’s time and will continue to grow for at least the next decade. It is observed that a large audience consumes visual content a lot more than content that requires a long read since it’s a lot quicker and easier to consume.
Visual content, therefore, is said to bring higher conversion rates and make customers confident about a brand. A recent study reflected the importance of incorporating visual content with the help of the following data:
-70% of consumers say that they have shared a brand’s video
-72% of businesses say that video has improved their conversion rate
-52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions
-65% of executives visit the marketer’s website and 39% call a vendor after viewing a video
To put it in simple words, Digital Selling refers to deriving a strategic content plan by monitoring the type of content that is being consumed and generating brand awareness in such a manner that your consumers seem to trust in you. Digital selling is about using the right social media platforms along with other digital tools and processes to sell and drive revenue.
For instance, if you’re a wedding photographer, you may find that an Instagram feed is more beneficial for building brand awareness than Twitter would be. The content you share on social media should be actionable, valuable, and relevant to the needs of your target audience.
Podcasting is a great tool to add to your digital marketing strategies as podcasts come along with various search engine optimization (SEO) benefits. When uploading a podcast on your choice of channel, it usually so happens that your episode directs the consumer back to your website which in turn helps at improving your website’s traffic.
Also Read: Why Is SEO Important For Your Business?
Believe it or not, interactive content has been one of the fastest-growing verticals of digital marketing. 2021 is likely to see a major shift from text-based content to a more interactive way of communication with the help of embedded calculators, quizzes, ants, and also 360-degree videos that give the user a much more immersive experience.
Testing and analysis together form a firm foundation in modern marketing. With A/B split testing, some techniques help you isolate the variables in your campaign and identify the ones that are driving desirable results.
Launched by Facebook back in 2019, the trend of thumbstoppers took over digital spaces and hasn’t seemed to turn down ever since. In fact it seems to be growing as a major digital marketing trend in India.
ThumbStopper ads are short, 10-second long videos that are built around strong emotional messaging to narrate a brand’s presence and develop a relationship with its customers. Since it strums the emotional chord while not consuming a lot of time, these storytelling forms of videos seem to gather a lot of attention on the internet.
Having your business listed on google is among the many essential mandates that every business owner should keep in mind while starting their independent project. By listing out your business in Google’s My Business Listing, you increase the chances of your business showing up among many others when someone looks for a relevant keyword. This also helps you in laying out essential information about your business like the exact location, contact number, working hours, etc online for a smooth customer experience.
Also Read: Why Local SEO Matters For Your Local Business?
Last but not the least, social media stories were a concept introduced by Snapchat, followed by Instagram and Facebook coming forth with the same; and now even platforms like Youtube and Twitter have been taken on board!
Since these stories disappear after a short period, it generates the opportunity for marketers to amazingly use the concept of ‘FOMO’ for their audience.
Also Read: How To Create A Facebook Poll
To gain an edge over your competitors, business owners need to adapt to the changing trends of digital marketing. One must keep looking around and embrace strategies, tools, and new technologies that have shown relevant growth and traffic.
To sum it up, these trends are a great place to start when planning your business/brand’s marketing strategies. Hop onto these latest digital marketing trends in 2021, and reap benefits of the results!
Today’s consumers, no matter the industry, worship convenience. Given this fact, Voice Search has a bright future ahead. It is significant enough for businesses to now start paying attention to it. Here’s what you can do to optimize your website to better suit the voice search trend: -Identify the purpose of the search. -Focus on long-tail keywords. -Research on local searches. -Ensure your website loads quickly. -Make it user-friendly & mobile-friendly. -Write how you talk.
The world as we know it is seeing a rise in Voice Searches. According to a study, current statistics show that 41% of adults use voice search at least once per day. According to Google, 27% of the online global population is using voice search on mobile.
What we witnessed in recent times and will continue to do even in 2021 is Artificial Intelligence taking a front seat and being the driving force of many services across various areas like E-commerce, Content Creation, Product recommendations, etc.
AI aids digital marketing on many grounds by cutting staffing costs, using data from social media platforms to help business owners understand their customer’s needs and wants, and easing the process of understanding consumer behavior.
AI and Programmatic advertising go hand in hand. To put it in a better way, rather 2021 will be the year a lot of people unravel the dominance of AI. Programmatic ads refer to using AI to automate the process of ad buying so one can specifically target a more desired audience group. This conversion has proven to be much more effective, resulting in higher conversion rates and lower acquisition costs.
In a study, it was shown that 60% of consumers trust an influencer’s opinion much more than what the brand has to talk about itself. Influencer marketing, therefore, plays a very important role in spreading the word about your business and gaining good traction. This word-of-mouth kind of marketing focuses on key leaders or well-known personalities trying to amplify your brand’s message to a larger audience. Influencers can be Instagram celebrities or Youtube personalities that partner with a specific business to make the mob aware of its perks.
Podcasting is a great tool to add to your digital marketing strategies as podcasts come along with various search engine optimization (SEO) benefits. When uploading a podcast of your choice on the channel, it usually so happens that your episode directs the consumer back to your website which in turn helps at improving your website’s traffic.
Sandeep Israni is the co-founder of BrightBrain Marketing Technologies LLP – a firm that has now grown into a full-fledged digital marketing agency with 55+ employees and clients from 7+ countries – all under his supervision. He mastered the art of Executive Management at SP Jain Institute of Management & Research, followed by extensive industry experience. His unquestionable expertise allows him to help clients achieve the extraordinary in the digital realm.
