Digital marketing has risen up to the priority list for most businesses this past year. For those who were unable to meet potential customers face-to-face, digital marketing became the go-to communication tool. Therefore, standing out from the competitors has never been so important. If you’re ready to go the extra mile in 2021, there are plenty of engaging and useful digital marketing avenues to explore. Here are some of the top trends in digital marketing that are worth implementing this year.
Digital marketing trends to look for in 2021
- Social Commerce. With social commerce, the entire shopping experience – from product discovery and research to the check-out process – takes place right on a social media platform. Currently, social apps that allow for social commerce are Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. Social media shops remove friction from the consumer journey, making it easy to follow through from discovery to purchase. Consumers are there. The products are there. Nowhere to go but to the checkout. The usual process ultimately gives an opportunity for a potential customer to change their mind. If they have to go from your ad to your website, to add the product to a cart, to fill in their credit card info, that’s a lot of moments to lose their attention. Take all unnecessary steps away and just bring the shopping right to social.
- Personal commerce. This means evolving even beyond the age of personalization so consumers co-curate their experience with brands. Consumers expect brands to understand what they’ve bought in the past and help them to determine what they should buy next, based on all the data that they’ve consciously shared with them by engaging with their sites and channels. If you’re continuing to collect first-party shopper data as a brand and retailer, start using it in meaningful ways, predicting what your shoppers want to see next.
- Chatbot Takeover. Chatbots finally reached a level of conversational capability that will earn them wide acceptance among consumers. If you’ve been wary of using them on your site, put your fears to rest – the revolution is here. The chatbots can help to automate the prompt and quick responses to your customers. That’s why this trend came up with the human takeover feature so it can be switched to an operator to continue the conversation. There’re many different reasons to implement chatbot to human takeover but the art lies in finding the golden balance and leaving only the most complex and critical to your human employees. It’s a win-win. Bots will take care of all the mundane banalities while your employees get more interesting cases that require thinking only humans can do.
- Video marketing. Between YouTube, TikTok, and embedded ads, video has definitively emerged as the medium to beat when it comes to content. The great news for marketers is that there’s an appetite for nearly every form of video content out there: short-form, long-form, animated, live-action, humorous, informative, and so much more. All you need to do is create content that accurately reflects your brand, and there’ll be an audience for it.
Closing Line
The Digital Marketing industry simply cannot stop growing, and it only gets more effective with every new development. Those who rise to the top will be those who stay ahead of the curve, and watching for trends like these can help you do so. The great thing about digital marketing trends is that it offers numerous resources for immediate action to step up your game. What do you think of the trends mentioned above? We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
