Top Digital Marketing Trends For 2021 (Updated)

With each passing year, the Digital Marketing Trends keep becoming increasingly dynamic in nature. Hence, it is significant to keep up with the latest digital marketing trends in order to attract the right kind of target audience and build a viable presence in the online marketplace. 

With the advent of a new decade altogether, digital marketers are surely hustling to update themselves with the newest trends of digital marketing. Hence, we have compiled a list of the latest and the best digital marketing trends for a successful 2020 brought to us by a handful of the industry specialists. 

Let us take a look! 

Focus On Your Content Marketing Strategy 

It is said that content is the king. However, it works only when it is combined with an appropriate content marketing strategy.  

As shared by Neil Patel in one of his blogs, content marketing is significantly affordable when compared to conventional methods of marketing and generate about thrice the leads.  

However, the question remains how to ace your content marketing strategy? Although each to their own, but here is a very fundamental guide, you can begin with :

1. Chart Out The Desired Goals:

At the outset, one of the most useful things marketers can do is to chart out the desired goals from any piece of content. Doing so shall help marketers in aligning the content with the organizational goals and map if they are headed in the right direction. 

While the form of content may vary, here are some of the common goals that marketers can pursue, whether from their blogs, articles, infographics or even videos: 

• Creating brand awareness
• Generating leads or traffic
• Earning views, likes, and shares.

2. Create Content As Per Buyer Stages:

Awareness, consideration, and conversion are the three basic buyer stages that digital marketers must keep in mind while creating content for their target audience. 

The nascent stages of content creation should focus on creating awareness about the brand, product, or service. It must be followed by creating consideration amongst buyers, which is about generating the desire to choose your product over your competitor’s. And, finally comes the conversion stage where a prospect must transform into your customer. 

3. Use Distinctive Promotion Methods:

Besides focusing on creating content for different buyer stages, a pragmatic thing is to identify the platforms on which a single piece of content can be re-purposed. For instance, if a marketer is generating video content, it can also be re-purposed as a blog, podcast, or even a social media post. A little bit of smart work while generating content can indeed bring a marketer an enormous amount of success. 

So, that’s our two paise on generating quality content for your target audience. 

Incorporate Artificial Intelligence In Your Marketing Methods

Over the past few years, we have risen up to witness the ability of Artificial Intelligence to take over relatively simpler jobs. For instance, Uber makes use of the Knightscope Robots for security patroling, which can be rented at $7 an hour, significantly less than the monthly payment of a guard. 

With such tech-giants already inc Artificial Intelligence into their processes, it will not take much time for this technology to transform into a major commercial opportunity. 

Speaking of the benefits of AI in digital marketing, here is what our experts have to say: 

1. Target Customers Through Personalized Marketing:

AI can help marketers in generating personalized marketing material and product recommendations for their customers. This technology studies the patterns of consumer behaviors by taking into consideration things such the buying patterns, demographics, language preferences, purchasing capacity, product browsing history, etc. Marketers gather and study this data to create tailored marketing material for promoting consideration and conversion amongst consumers.  

2. Attract And Retain Consumer With Dynamic Pricing:

Many renowned brand names make use of real-time data generated with the help of AI to offer their products and services at dynamic prices to their consumers. Such pricing patterns usually depend on factors such as demand, availability, and supply rate. Assigning dynamic prices to products is one sure-shot way of ensuring for brands to ensure customer retention. One of the notable examples of the brand that leverages on this facility is Trivago. 

3. Enhance The Quality Of Customer Service:

AI has contributed significantly to enhancing the levels of customer satisfaction for brands. One of the commonly known methods in this pursuit is chatbots. Many notable banking, e-commerce, telecommunication, and education brands are already leveraging on this facility to respond to customer queries in real-time. A quick response is made available by feeding these bots with pre-determined responses to address some of the frequent queries from customers.  

4. Optimize Search Engine Rankings:

Search Engines keep updating their algorithms quite frequently. Keeping up with these algorithms often proves to be a challenging task for marketers. However, leveraging AI for optimizing search engine rankings can certainly prove helpful. 

Due to the rise in focus on  “intent-based content” by search engines such as Google, marketers are now making use of AI to optimize their marketing material to cater to consumers. AI can also suggest improvements that can be included on webpages and listings on search engines to one-up their rankings.

Hence, incorporating AI can undoubtedly take you places as far as Digital Marketing Trends for the year 2020 are concerned. 

Influencer Marketing is one of the latest methods witnessing a surge in demand amongst digital marketers.  According to a report by Business Insider, the Influencer Marketing Industry is looking at attracting investments worth $15 billion by the year 2022.  

This method of marketing engages influential individuals or celebrities to endorse a brand, product, or service. Influencers create viable and relevant content material to cater to the target audience. Also, these influencers come ready with a huge fan-base ensuring instant reach amongst the masses. 

We are quoting below a few benefits of Influential Marketing as gathered from industry experts:

1. Establish Credibility And Authority

When a noted celebrity or an influencer endorses your product, the credibility and authority of a brand name are automatically established. It reflects that an influencer places his trust in a brand so he chose to endorse its products to his fan-base. The authority and credibility can increase manifolds if a brand can engage influencers who share its domain expertise. 

2. Moderate Purchasing Considerations:

Before purchasing tech gadgets, we often depend on the reviews of technology experts. These experts have established credibility for themselves by creating relevant and accurate content material in accordance with the needs of their audience base.  Hence, a technology consumer is most likely to be influenced by the review of this expert before entering the conversion stage of the buyer’s cycle.

A lot of factors come into play while moderating purchasing considerations of a consumer. Influential marketing enjoys an advantage at this stage as it gives an opportunity to the influencer to establish an edge for the products against its competitors.  establishes the various features

3. Reach To A Wider Audience:

As shared above, a wide amount of audience base readily consumes the content created by an influencer.  While the conventional endorsing methods can limit your reach depending on the budgetary factors, with influential marketing, the sky is the limit as far as reach is concerned. Also, a fresh and entertaining variant of marketing material helps in enhancing its consumption amongst viewers. 

So, we recommend that you definitely try out influential marketing this year and let us know how you benefited from it. 

Include Voice Search Methods In Your Strategy

Voice search methods have progressed from being a mere tactic of remaining relevant in the marketplace. With the advent of Siri, Google Voice Assistant, and Alexa, marketers are witnessing a lot of potential in voice search as the next hot-entity in the digital marketplace.

With brands like Paypal, Nestle, and Google incorporating this technology, it is not long that a considerable amount of digital consumers shift from conventional searching methods to voice-search.  

Let us take a look at how marketers can make the best use of the voice-search technology for their digital initiatives: 

1. Establish Credibility And Authority:

Since most voice-search methods are powered by AI, they can be used to enhance customer experience by offering optimized search results. Devices that are voice search enabled make personalized recommendations to users by remembering their search, browsing, and consumption patterns. They also make the interaction between consumers and brands even more effortless, promoting a sense of loyalty and credibility of the brands amongst its customers.  

2. Increased Rate Of Traffic:

The unexplored potential of voice-search technology leaves a big question mark on its ability to attract traffic on search engine listings. However, failing to incorporate this technology into your marketing method can certainly reduce the amount of traffic that your listing can attract. The reason is simple. Incorporating voice-search methodology in your business can double the ways through which your listing can appear on search engines.

While your listing would automatically appear on the conventional search results, its appearance on the voice search results can likely increase your brand’s visibility amongst digital consumers. 

To rank efficiently on voice-search results, creating intent-based content is very crucial. It is important that the content in the listing must be as concise as it must be relevant.  It must also be created with a focus on satisfactorily answering all the frequently asked questions by customers about a product or service. This technology also helps marketers establish an authority on the consideration stage of the buyer’s cycle by increasing the visibility of a brand when compared with its competitors. 

Including voice-search methods can certainly give your digital marketing strategy a boost. 

Experiment With Predictive Analytics

Marketers are heavily utilizing Predictive Analytics technology, which helps them in forecasting the market standing of a product. This technology leverages machine learning, data mining, and predictive modeling to analyze consumption patterns. Besides the incorporation of AI, this is the next big technology that experts are looking forward to including in their digital marketing strategy in the year 2020.  

One notable brand that has made use of the Predictive Analytics Technology is Amazon. By enabling the Amazon Assistant extension on the Chrome browser, a user can get personalized recommendations from the e-commerce giant along with ongoing offers and discounts even when they are browsing other webpages. 

Let us take a look at the distinctive benefits of Predictive Analytics in relation to digital marketing:

1. Profile Your Customers To Optimize Your Strategy:

By including Predictive Analytics in a digital marketing strategy, markets can profile their audience base more efficiently. The profiling can be done by utilizing the data that is generated through this method of marketing.  Once the data is analyzed, and the profiling is done, marketers can combine the outcome to create a pragmatic marketing strategy. Additionally, they can also predict the quality of response they are expecting out of a particular campaign.  

2. Generate Leads That Are Highly – Relevant To Your Business:

With Predictive Analytics, it is possible for marketers to accurately determine the propensity of the audience base towards a particular marketing initiative. They can accurately predict their brand preferences, spending habits, purchasing frequency, and much more by making use of this technology. As a result, marketers are able to generate leads that are highly-relevant for brands and businesses. 

3. Create New Avenues Of Digital Growth:

As shared already, Predictive Analytics can help marketers in predicting the future of a product, brand, or service. Likewise, this technology gives them the opportunity to create new avenues of digital growth for their business by identifying the different kinds of platforms on which their marketing initiatives can prove to be successful by gauging the real-time data. 

Predictive Analytics is the means through which marketers can distinguish their initiatives this year.  

This was our take on the topmost digital marketing trends for a successful 2020. By combining all these tactics in your digital marketing initiatives, marketers can definitely see an improvement in results. Our specialists have mapped these tactics considering several factors such as longevity, applicability, etc. Since we have ample spare time in our hands considering the lockdown period, it is the best time to try out each of these tactics and share our experience so that our peers can benefit from the same.