Let’s take a look at the current trends in marketing and find out which areas of digital are worth paying more attention to.
Each new year brings new trends in marketing, as well as in culture, economy and technology in general. 2020 was an interesting year in terms of changing consumer behavior and the active penetration of online technology into everyone’s life. For example, in 2020 alone, a huge amount of online entertainment has emerged and developed, with online casinos like PlayAmo standing out in particular.
Trends in digital marketing in 2021 prepare new challenges for marketers who want to improve the effectiveness of their projects. After all, the development of the digital world is not necessarily associated only with positive trends, many changes on the contrary make it difficult to work in the market and force a creative approach to solve problems.
What are the digital marketing trends of 2021? Let’s get acquainted with the current tools.
Users’ Personal Information Is Becoming Less Open
While earlier users were looking for their own ways to maintain privacy, in 2020, IT giants like Apple and Google are standing up for people. The practice of using cookies to identify users and therefore using them to customize personalized advertising is becoming a thing of the past.
Now it will be possible to advertise not to a specific user, but to the segment to which he belongs. On the one hand, this is an opportunity to reach new users who previously did not know about the products that the company offers in the market. On the other hand, non-personalized advertising should be expected to lead to lower conversion rates. Thus, in 2021, digital professionals should continue experimenting, testing, and measuring different types of campaigns and channels. As usual, the digital marketer needs to look for new solutions, measure their profitability and find the optimal balance between costs and results.
Social Media Shopping
People spend a lot of time on social media. In 2020, the average time spent scanning friends’ feeds and socially communicating online has risen to 3 hours a day. This is a good prerequisite for companies to increase their exposure to social media users to raise their chances of making a sale. Especially since social media platforms are trying to make the process of selecting and paying for goods more convenient and easier, without going to third-party resources.
In addition, social media is not just another sales channel for companies where brands meet with potential customers just because they spend most of their time there. Social e-commerce is a new way to personalize offers, where users expect brands to take into account previous interaction experiences. Most importantly, they hope it will help companies better identify a person’s buying options so they can make appropriate offers.
Optimizing Promotion and Data-Driven Marketing
More and more sales are being made online. And it’s changing the way consumers interact with a brand: sometimes making purchases, sometimes just signing up for accounts to follow updates, sometimes buying right away and other times waiting a long time, etc. The year 2021 is a turning point when the relatively linear movement of users along the route to purchase is replaced by a diffuse, chaotic pattern of consumer contact with the brand. In this case, it is important for marketers to ensure that the brand is always present in the daily life of the customer.
When companies start collecting data about their customers and analyzing their behavior, they better understand the necessary actions on their part that have the desired impact on users to eventually lead them to purchase. Machine algorithms and machine learning help them do this. Artificial intelligence not only tells them how to maximize personalization of communication but also allows them to optimize channels, ad impressions, emails, and even the use of content in promotion, finding the type and look that is more effective.
Marketing Automation
The customer’s path to purchase has many touchpoints with the brand. That said, their journey can take place with varying degrees of intensity and using multiple devices. The broader the target audience of consumers, the more difficult it is for a company to track interactions, analyze and make timely adjustments.
One of the key trends in modern digital promotion is to reduce the amount of manual work by the marketer to set up ads, reduce the time for this work and thereby achieve a super-personalized offer to users in promotion campaigns. Automation is the main tool of digital marketing strategies, as it ensures that the company reacts quickly to audience interest and maximizes the personalization of the offer.
Video Is a Key Type of Content
Video offers the ability to share a large amount of content with users in a short period of time. At the same time, such communication has a relaxed, attractive, and dynamic nature. A person in an overloaded information space watching a short video is much easier and preferable than reading even a not very long text description.
Social networks willingly support this format, giving it preference over other types of content. Especially since in 2020 many users have become so accustomed to this form of communication, watching a huge number of live events, video conferences, online courses, video stories, etc., that they are unlikely to want to give it up in the future.
Virtual Events
Online events became popular in 2020 by necessity, but they’re obviously not going anywhere in 2021 and beyond. It’s not just that restrictions due to the threat of a pandemic persist. This format of events is attractive because of its audience expansion, its accessibility to users regardless of location, and its economic profitability.
In virtual space, there is no need for visas, tickets, or hotel reservations, and it is not as important whether the borders are open for travel or not. For audiences and companies, this means a lower cost of participation with no limits on the number of participants. This gives the enormous potential for content sharing and an impetus for new ideas to emerge and develop. So, in 2021, virtual events will continue to be a relevant and popular format for interacting with a wide range of customers.
Optimization (SEO) For Voice Search
Voice search is a new challenge for traditional SEO. A variety of voice-centric devices and apps are provoking users to speak rather than type their search queries. In this case, the results are often different from traditional text-based searches. As this trend grows, companies need to start considering optimizing their content for voice queries. The first step in this direction is to create content that has a more conversational style that matches the way consumers spell out their questions.
Omnichannel
The pandemic situation has shown the need for any company to have a presence in both offline and online environments. This is not only a business requirement, in order to ensure better sustainability in the market despite all kinds of external threats, but also to reach a different level of customer service. They are already in the habit of combining their purchases in different environments, depending on the circumstances.
For companies, however, it’s important not only to provide the same quality of service online and offline but also to retain the privileges for loyal customers regardless of their choice of channel. And that means businesses must set up their marketing processes to put the customer at the center of their communications with them, ensure they are identified regardless of the medium, location, device used, etc. Seamless interaction is the main thing all digital marketers will be racking their brains about in 2021.
The Interactivity of Communications
Another trend that has emerged during the period of isolation is the dialogic form of interaction with the audience. All sorts of travel restrictions, the shift to a remote work format, are all reasons why people are more interested in human communication. It is important for them not only to be passive listeners but also to participate in the discussion, to be heard. This creates a demand for interactivity, discussion of any brand communications with its audience of consumers.
Beginning of the End of A/B Testing
A/B testing was and still is an excellent tool for hypothesis testing, where the marketer does not have enough reliable knowledge and draws his conclusions mainly on intuition. But with the development and expansion of predictive analytics, this way of testing marketing decisions will become a waste of time and budget. The high accuracy of machine algorithm predictions will save marketers from having to verify them but will be a direct guide to action. In 2021, this trend will manifest itself noticeably.
Video Streaming and Influencer Marketing
Agents of influence aren’t just grabbing the audience’s attention in traditional areas by posting ads to their accounts. They actively appear on streaming platforms to create live content with human emotion. The integration of live-streaming, tips to use, and on-the-go shopping opportunities will grow strongly in 2021 and capture the attention of audiences, especially those who care about the recommendation of a person they trust.
The Era of Stories
Stories content only lives for 24 hours. However, it hides a huge potential for including the audience and introducing interactive forms of interaction with it. Despite its short life cycle, users’ attention to such ephemeral content is enormous. It is not for nothing that literally all social media platforms are introducing the stories functionality. This is a new opportunity for digital marketers to be creative in order to keep users in a state of constant attention to the brand.
The review should conclude with a major trend for 2021. Definitely, companies’ spending on digital promotion methods will continue to grow. Digital marketing plays a large and significant role in business development, even though marketing budgets, in general, may be undergoing optimization due to the difficult economic situation around the world.