The year 2020 has brought in a paradigm shift in the way businesses are being run across the world. Especially with the Covid-19 outbreak, the organizations with better digital prowess are found to be fitter to survive. Digital Darwinism has spread its tentacles like never before and it has become pertinent for organizations to exploit the digital marketing strategies to their advantage to stay afloat and then grow even further. So, let us have a look at some of the digital marketing trends that can potentially have a huge impact on how various brands and businesses evolve in the year 2021.
1) Artificial Intelligence aided Marketing Techniques: One might not be consciously aware of it, but Artificial Intelligence is already being used extensively and is now impacting our lives in many ways. Have you ever thought of digital assistants like Siri or Google Assistance? You must have visited websites where you see chat pop-ups offering you further assistance. They are chatbots. Chatbots are already performing a significant chunk of customer service for many organizations. They use Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI helps in analyzing consumer behavior by tracing their digital footprints (Websites, social media, Blogs, videos etc.) which in turn helps organizations understand where and how to find promising leads. Apart from these, AI is also used in the following areas:
a) Programmatic Advertising: This is going to be at the forefront of the digital marketing campaigns as far as targeting a specific category of consumers are concerned. It uses a sophisticated AI ecosystem and enables the companies to purchasead spots by bidding for them real time. According to a study by eMarketer, the United States will have around 86% of their digital display ads coming through Programmatic Advertising.
b) Lead Generation: AI can scan piles of data collected through various mediums to find suitable leads and can also help in lead-scoring to prioritize reaching out accordingly.
c) Personalization: Generic e-mail blast campaigns are usually very annoying to the consumers and considering that there are stricter regulations like GDPR and CCPA in place, such campaigns are more likely to attract lawsuits too. Hence, brands and businesses would now like to focus more on personalized campaigns. Common examples are the way OTT platforms and E-commerce platforms like Netflix and Amazon send personalized campaigns based of the content viewing and shopping patterns of the consumers.
d) Semantic Searching: Semantic searching encourages contextual results and focuses more on the user ‘intent’ than the actual keywords. AI is a key to delivering intent based results.
2) Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR): According to a study published on statista.com, the consumer spending on virtual reality (VR) is expected to touch around 3.8 million US dollars (includes location-based VR and VR Content/Aps). Even more remarkable is the estimated spending on Augmented Reality (AR) which is going to be around 8 million US dollars. This is because of the ease of implementation of augmented reality from marketing perspective. For an example, InkHunter app has been designed to help tattoo enthusiasts to try wearing different tattoo models using Augmented Reality to figure out how a particular tattoo would look.
3) Commerce through Social Media: We already saw its application when Instagram launched ‘Instagram Checkout’ that enabled the users to complete their purchase even without creating a separate account on the actual store’s platform. Millennials today love to keep up with the latest trends, products and fashion and actively follow various brands and businesses on Social Media channels like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Hence, marketing through shoppable posts on these channels looks promising for the upcoming year. Specially because it makes shopping experience spontaneous and hassle-free.
4) Social Media and instant messaging app Stories: Brands and business are increasingly seeming to be exploiting the Social Media Stories feature to target their consumers. Considering that social media and chat app like Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp have a whopping consumer base; businesses can reach out to audiences across the globe in no time. Stories offer an exciting medium to grab consumer’s attention and the very fact that it is fleeting in nature accentuates its appeal. Brands tend to offer discount coupons, behind the scenes activities, rewarding quizzes or limited-edition product through these stories and this helps the marketers to make good use of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). More and more people end up clicking on these stories and considerable number of them can turn out to be good leads.
5) Video Marketing: Power of videos cannot be ignored. Text based marketing alone leaves a lot to be desired these days and people prefer watching videos to gather information when it comes to making a purchase decision. The penetration of smartphones to common households has ensured that people are watching more videos than ever before and share them as and when required. According to a study by ImpactBND, 52% of consumers agree that watching product videos guide their online purchasing choices. While recorded videos do a decent job, live videos prove to be highly engaging. No wonder all the major social media platforms have their own live streaming services that can be utilized to make your digital marketing impactful.
6) Interactive and User Generated Content (UGC): You must have noticed various brands engage with prospective consumers through their social media channels in form of quizzes, contests, and polls etc. For example, it is quite common for smartphone manufacturers to launch a photo contest where participants click photos based on a theme. Also, augmented reality ads and 360degree videos also come under the gambit of interactive content.
Now the inputs received through users on e-commerce websites as reviews, product features through blogs & Vlogs posts, product output comparisons as a part of various contests as described above are all part of user generated content (UGC). They are usually very effective in influencing a purchase decision because one gets a direct feedback from authentic and certified users.
7) The Zero Position or Featured Snippet in SERP (Search Engine Results Pages): These are basically ‘zero click’ search results where the answer to your query features as a snippet on the very top of the Google search result page. You do not even have to click on the search result link to read through the answer. Typically, it picks the most relevant or official page with the accurate or exceptionally good content. Given below is an example:
This is very elusive as far as SEO techniques are concerned; however, featuring in zero rank would mean hitting the bull’s eye and yield handsome returns.
8) Omnichannel Marketing: This is prevalent currently as well and will continue to remain relevant in 2021. It is all about using multiple platforms like e-mail, videos, blog, apps and social media to float marketing content. This enables marketers to connect with prospective consumers on more touchpoints which enhances user experience by delivering cohesive business message through various platforms. The difference between a Multi-channel and Omnichannel marketing is that the latter ensures seamless navigation between each of those touch points even to make a single purchase. Unlike multi-channel marketing they are interconnected and touchpoints are not managed separately with different strategies.
9) Influencer Marketing: Influencer marketing has been gaining prominence recently and would prove to be a key marketing strategy in 2021. An Influencer is someone with considerable number of followers across social media channels and commands a certain amount of trust and respect in the follower circle. The person can be an actor, a sportsperson, a politician, a scientist, a successful gym trainer or even a popular youtuber/vlogger. Various brands and businesses can use an influencer with a dedicated following to market relevant products. For example, a popular gym trainer can endorse a diet supplement.
Content Marketing: Good content remains the king and matters even more now because Google is developing a sophisticated understanding of online content that would be based on the ‘context’ and ‘user intent’. According to BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers — a paper published recently by Google’s AI Language researchers), a bidirectionally trained language model would have a better sense of language context and flow as compared to single direction language models. Hence, it is advisable for the marketers to focus on well written content with proper research, fast accessibility and useful links than to cater to the demands of latest SEO trends. So, the Content marking is here to stay and shouldn’t be ignored.
