Top Digital Marketing Trends For 2021

Hello folks!!! You might be aware that globally digital marketing strategies are continuously evolving and every marketer expects to lookup for the new trends every year and hence we come up with few new trends for the year 2020. Here we tried to cover few strategies from the digital marketing experts and understand what to come up in near future from the marketer’s perspective and service agencies perspective.

Search Engine Optimization: This is still evolving and far from maturity accounting for videos, pictures, social posts, etc.

Rise of long tail keywords – these are more effectively employed in the content offering better precision in targeting significant website traffic.
Mobile and Voice Search – Optimization of website content will be critical for mobiles and also making it mobile responsive for a successful results and recommendations.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) – Paid Social Media Campaigns: As you know, Social Media is more about engagement and branding initiatives. Now a days, paid social media has become more sophisticated.

Instead of just selling products/ services, companies are looking for customer loyalty from their existing customers.
Reduce the steps from product listing to product purchase to check-out thereby enhance the online shopping experience, for example, introducing multiple payment methods than just credit/ debit cards
A personalized strategy balances relevant and high quality audiences compared to wider-targeting a small audience with high delivery costs

Google Adwords: Many of Google’s new features revolve around machine learning and customer-specific marketing. Marketers now a days can target their customers with display ads of all kinds of formats across its entire Google Display Network (GDN). These kinds of Ads can reach all kinds of customers covering different stages of buying cycle right from creation of interest to purchase of products/ services. For this, marketers can employ automated bidding, targeting and ad creation. The Ad Placement is determined by these ads showing at areas where they can generate significant response for the optimized cost (value).

Mobile App Marketing: Now a days, freemiums like In-app purchases are widely used by the advertisers to target their customers. This will continuously gain dominance and reason for long term revenue generation for the businesses or advertisers. In 2018 and 2019, In-app purchases accounted for 95% of the consumer spend in the mobile gaming space. Future is bright as well. In the cashback era, compared to app categories like dating and gaming, shopping app users are economical to acquire and have greater engagement. As per latest survey from Ibotta, more than 63% of users were excited about rewards, cashback and other offers during In-app purchases.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Smart Speakers – are widely being used by the Marketers to place Ads and market their products and services and this becoming a growing development across the world. Smart speakers being sold about 94 million devices in 2019 from 56 million devices in 2018. For example, marketers are using Alexa Skills to connect with their customers offering them customized news, products info, etc. They are also targeting their users with “Flash Briefing” with relevant news, weather, podcasts, etc and other skills as per customer needs.
Voice Search Technology – being a new development that’s impacting the digital marketing industry extensively. This has become a challenge for the marketers to optimize their websites as per targeted keywords and queries. As per report, in 2020, 50% of the search will be using Voice Search Technology. For example, using long tail keywords would be a relevant strategy to optimize the websites for voice search.
Chatbots – are already there and being used by businesses for quite some time now. These are helping businesses/ brands to interact with their customers with ease giving them superior experience. For example, chatbots can also send personalized messages to clients, handle their queries, predictive analysis, anticipate their needs, etc.
Augmented Reality (AR) – has become more popular in recent times and will take over Virtual Reality (VR) more in 2020. It’s been widely used in big enterprises like IKEA, where they showcase their furniture in their homes, even before they purchase giving them unique experience.

Interactive Marketing

Interactive Content Marketing – most of the marketers use interactive content to engage with their clients, for example, quizzes or polls, personalized messages, social shares, etc leading to more brand awareness.
Visual content – they add emotion to the content, making communication more meaningful and powerful. By 2021, video marketing constitutes 13% of the internet traffic. Social media widely using Live Video streaming now a days and this will be a roaring trend in 2020.

Influencer Marketing: This industry grew steadily and significantly in 2019. 63% of Marketers allocated increased budgets to employ this feature in their marketing to target their customers for increase brand awareness of their products and or services.

Videos – These were found to be widely useful in increasing the sales. 2020 will see domination of videos influencer marketing.
Long lasting relationships – Long term bonding based on mutual benefits is necessary for the campaigns to work effectively as customers can notice the relationship between influencer and the brands they promote

Ad-blocking Circumvention: Now a days, most of the web users employ Ad Blockers to avoid pop-up ads while they are browsing sites. This is somewhat bad news for the advertisers and they are finding strategies to circumvent this scenario.

Ads within video streaming platforms – Businesses can utilize Ads placements while playing videos, for example, YouTube or Netflix.
Business Listings – Ads in the form of listings can be shown in the local industry-specific directories.

Email Marketing: In email marketing industry, while collecting the customer’s data, the best practice would be addressing the general output request using upcoming laws and regulations like CCPA, etc. Usually successful marketers analyze the performance of email campaigns by identifying the data changes, clicks, conversions, etc but neglect the opt-out customer’s data which can be used to reduce the negative responses and thereby drive the future performance.

How to improve responses from the customers:

Check whether emails being sent are mobile responsive as most of the customers now a days check emails over their mobiles
Unsubscribe links to be visible for the customers to help them opt-out following the CDPR and privacy laws as per legal compliance, and not to send them mails again once they decided to unsubscribe
Avoid sending the same mails to all customers. Better approach would be to customize the mails as per recipient being targeted, based on segmentation parameters. This can result in higher click-through rates (CTR) and engage more customers

Conclusion

Digital Marketing trends are based mostly on improved shared experiences, advertisements and customer experience. It’s on-going process to stay on top by following latest trends in digital marketing strategies.