Top Digital Marketing Trends 2021

If we talk about the real trend that almost devastated all of our lives, it has to be the uninvited Novel CoronaVirus. In 2019, when all were preparing for the new year digital marketing trends, who knew all of this would be nothing but those physical untouched abstract materialistic realities of life.

How did we as a puny human being surrender helplessly to the almighty virus? Well, good riddance to most hated times and now looking forward to healthy life and competition among brands for customer retention and satisfaction for the vaccination is already out there.

But why should we even care? That is because we are not just pure blood-sucking vampire kind of marketers and business professionals. We nurture our customers and help them grow, solve their issues, and it is like a long-term relationship. Well, most of the time is. Moreover, there has been a rise in digital marketing techniques in the past year.

Staying in trend is knowing the latest inclinations of your users and helping them in your unique ways. Some golden trends never fade, and then there are ones that keep making things better. The universal ones are like plain waffles, while the new ones are just toppings making them better each time.

The top digital marketing trends won’t make you a hero among people unless you use them wisely and according to your niche. Using these trends is like making use of your brain. You can’t ever run out.

However, Covid-19 has infiltrated the marketing trends in 2020. Marketers have been bending over backward to build their brands with new marketing strategies. Especially for businesses that were forced to shut down their physical stores, digital marketing came to the rescue.

And, for 2021, here are a few latest trends that will do the trick for you:

Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality And Machine Learning In Marketing Trends

Artificial intelligence and augmented reality are the real future. Sooner or later, it is going to be your stop as a digital marketing strategy. Businesses are actively using Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and Machine Learning. Not just that, it has swiftly overtaken numerous simple jobs.

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But what good does AI do to us marketers? Understanding it this way:

Hyper-Personalization

AI performs hyper-personalization that takes personalized marketing to another level. And, no doubt, personalized experience increases loyalty and trust.

Therefore, bringing you one step closer to beating your competition. Its learning capabilities are really deep. Personalization has forever been the key to marketing strategy.

For instance, let us take Amazon. If you have been using an Amazon account for shopping for a long time now, it probably has:

1. List of every purchase you’ve ever made
2. Your different addresses
3. Music you’ve placed, TV shows you’ve watched, and apps you’ve downloaded
4. Ratings and reviews you’ve left on products and services
5. Your wishlist

This will not just forecast your customer’s behavior but aid you in identifying and focusing on the most important leads to continue to nurture them. All of this based on the emerging pattern from the pre-existing data and giving you automated decisions.

AI-Powered Softwares

AI-fueled software can forecast what type of content you should create, its format, and when to use it. Furthermore, accelerate certain types of content production. No wonder it is estimated that the global AI software market will reach around 126 billion US dollars by 2025.

AI In Social Media Marketing Strategy

AI can boost up your social media strategy by analyzing and monitoring your social media. Every social media marketer can make effective use of AI.

It increases social media audience engagement, distills content targeting, and results in higher ROI with a reduction in marketing cost. Pinterest and Instagram are already using AI algorithms.

Here are some effective social media branding strategies to build your brand through social media.

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic buying simply means making use of AI that narrows down targeting a specific audience. And before you ask, Yes! It is successful because it is efficiently leading to sophisticated and filtered campaigns for marketers.

With increased reach to the audience, it does real-time bidding. No more wasting time on the wrong audience and frauds. Therefore reduce customer acquisition cost with higher conversions. Unsurprisingly, by 2021, eMarketer forecasts 88% of all US digital display ad dollars will transact programmatically.

In the successive decades, the AI laggers will be at a serious disadvantage. From recognizing marketing trends to establishing goals and predictive analysis, there is perfect synchronization between digital marketing and AI.

With so much profitable exploration on your plate, do you still think there is a reason to be ignorant of AI?

Live Interactions And Social Media Video Marketing

As a digital marketing trend, this won’t ever fade. YouTube, Snapchat, Vine, and Periscope are the 4 most popular platforms for video marketing. With the use of video marketing, you can:

• Acquire authority
• Build your brand name and dominance
• Display products into actions or demos
• Add a tinge of humor to the monotony
• Show behind scene sneak previews
• Further your personality

We all know the bounce in the popularity of TikTok. Creating bite-sized videos requires low cost and effort. Subsequently, they are highly shareable. People are attracted to hacks and unboxing videos easily.

Updates come with new features. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Periscope have easy live streaming options. Collaborate with brands and observe influencer marketing too.

Focussing on social media stories with interactive content like QnA’s, polls, quizzes, surveys, games, giveaways, and reposting user-generated content can increase your customer engagement.

Twitch can help you in live streaming. There are a few video marketing tools like Script timer by Vidyard, Wideo, Powtoon, etc.

Practise Inclusive Marketing

The face of buyers is changing in every industry. Not just technology but there are wavering responsibilities, expectations, and society.

How we as marketers connect to this world and resonate our content heedless of cultural backgrounds, race, identity, ability, religion, etc. This is more appealing than exclusion marketing.

Users turn away from brands that do not expose their values and take up their stand. 41% of LGBTQ shoppers would switch to a retailer committed to identity and diversity. While 42% of ethnic minority shoppers would switch to a retailer committed to I&D.

Chatbots

“Bots are the new apps” — Satya Nadella

Chatbots are designed for human communication via text or text-to-speech instead of a real person on the other side. These are best used as customer service representatives on a website’s homepage. You must have seen it for sure.

As brought to light by Juniper Research, chatbots are expected to cut business costs by $8 Billion by 2022. They have an instant response, can swiftly answer simple questions, and with the availability of 24*7.

These can systematically build a conversation with users and continue even from where they left based on the previous data. Hence, providing personalized conversation for the future also.

These come in handy when there are multiple visitors to your website at the same time. These are superfast, cut costs, and are better off than a group of customer service agents juggling requests and queries from explorers. This one will be the most helpful digital marketing trend.

And, if you haven’t already begun using chatbots, you can start it for free with BotMyWork chatbot builder.

Visual and Voice Search

Alexa, Google, and Siri have almost become best friends with humans. Visual and voice search has taken the UI/UX to the next level. Both these aim at providing users with a more specific result.

Visual search transforms your mobile’s camera into a search bar. Optimizing keywords for voice searches and using them accurately can help you come up in those searches.

But, before you focus on this digital marketing trend, your website should be mobile-responsive as most of these are mobile searches. Lens feature is effectively used by Pinterest, Google, Bing, Camfind, etc.

Cannot Ignore Digital Marketing Trends

Compiling one and all best digital marketing trends and practices is another thing but never forgetting the real rules. Here are a few add ons to the top digital marketing trends:

• Conversational Marketing: Build relationships with consumers and increase the user base.
• Influencer Marketing
• Micro-moments Marketing: Identify and act on the intent-rich moments such that visitors may spend less time on your website but convert anyways.
• Social Messaging Apps: These have a large user base and are very popular.
• Social Media Stories
• Omnichannel Marketing: Have a multi-channel sales approach for providing an integrated shopping experience to your users.
• User-Generated Content
• Privacy Marketing: Emphasize customer privacy with transparent data usage. It is like a push of trust.
• Content Marketing: Long-form content along with semantic research and long-tail keywords.
• Organized Data SEO: When the data is structured, it allows the search engine to categorize and crawl easily. If done correctly, you can rise to position zero(snippets) on Google.
• Alternate Search Engine: Target users on other search engines as well after you identify their presence there.

Here are the top SEO trends to look out for in 2021.

All things said and done, three things that won’t change for me:

1. It is still time for machines to replace human beings.
2. The more data you have, the better: False, less is more. Segmentation is the key. Instead of drowning in data, know what ones you need.
3. Video is not expensive to produce and is not slow.

Now you know the top digital marketing trends 2021. Why not try them?