10 Marketing Trends You Can’t Overlook in 2021

Sometimes following a trend can feel counterintuitive. Surely being innovative and out there is more significant and impactful in the marketing world? While this might be true, digital marketing trends can actually help. Allowing you to understand and employ current techniques that are working to help your business’s success.

Here are 10 digital marketing trends in 2021

AI

Artificial intelligence is an excellent tool to use in digital marketing. AI can help with creating content, checking its readability, and providing SEO scores. However, marketing isn’t just about creating content, it’s also about analytics. Therefore, you can use AI in marketing to track and analyse consumer behaviour. Evaluating how they are engaging with your content and marketing campaigns. This feedback is essential to improve and target your audience in the right ways with future campaigns.

Chatbots

Chatbots are a type of AI that can be used to personalise communication with each customer that visits your website. AI is advanced enough to analyse a visitor’s language and intent so that the bot can provide accurate responses and suggestions for them. Chatbots might not seem too significant when it comes to marketing. However, the personal touch and immediate response can convince visitors to buy your product/service over your competitors.

Video Marketing

Video is a versatile marketing choice for any business. And don’t just think about youtube because video can be used on almost any and every platform. From Facebook and Instagram live videos to a tutorial video for your products. Video has many applications and a high potential for marketing and sales opportunities. In addition, video content has the potential to attract 50 times more organic traffic than text content and is suitable for all screen sizes. Therefore, video marketing contributes to SEO in more ways than one.

Voice Search

Voice search was an up and coming marketing trend in 2019 and 2020 but now, voice search is becoming an even bigger part of consumer’s lives. With shopping by voice search set to reach $44 billion by 2021, it’s even more important to optimise for voice search. Voice search devices provide more than just answers to questions, they can also read out recipes and play music. Therefore, your marketing strategy should develop methods suitable for both online and voice search.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing helps to increase the reach of your brand and increase brand awareness to more of your target audience. Influencers recommend your product to their loyal followers that trust their opinion. So, finding the right influencer with the same audience as your brand is extremely important. There are hundreds of companies and marketplaces to find influencers for your campaign. This marketing trend is sure to grow along with the popularity of social media platforms.

Shoppable Posts

Along the same lines as influencer marketing, social media is so important for marketing in 2021 and shoppable posts make buying from you even easier. Last year, Instagram introduced Instagram checkout so consumers don’t even need to leave the app to complete their purchase. Encouraging them to complete their order and to help avoid cart abandonment. Pinterest also suggests products for users to buy based on their pins and makes a ‘shopping list’ board for them, directing them to your product page straight away. This marketing trend is easy to implement and will attract more sales for you as your brand and business grow.

AR

Augmented reality has made its way to the marketing world with all kinds of ways. Examples include apps that change hair colour before buying the right hair dye or trying IKEA furniture in a photograph of your room. AR helps consumers imagine the product in their space or on themselves which can convince them to buy your product right then and there.

UGC

User-generated content also taps into the potential of social media and sharing. One example is asking customers to participate in hashtags like Graffcity, which ask its customers to share their work and art using their hashtag: #graffcityshipment. User-generated content is an effective marketing trend as people trust reviews and the opinions of others. Therefore, it has the same effect but with more visuals that consumers love on social media!

Privacy Marketing

In recent years there have been huge data breaches with massive companies like British Airways. As a result, stricter consumer acts are being introduced across the globe to protect personal data. Therefore, consumers that are worried about their data will be more inclined to communicate and trust brands that treat their data with respect and security. Your business can do this by choosing the right channels of communication and thoughtfully engaging with them.

Long-form Content

Content will always remain king in marketing but not all content is created equal. We touched on video content earlier that increases brand awareness and contributes to SEO. But long-form content has been proven to attract more visitors and rank higher in SERPs. This is because content with 3,000 words or more received 77% more backlinks than other content, according to search engine journal. Investing time and resources to creating killer content can pay off in the long run and make your website an authoritative voice in your niche.

Final thoughts on marketing trends in 2021

Following these trends will help set up your business and brand for success. Marketing trends will help boost sales, brand awareness, and SEO right now. In addition, learning and following trends will also help your business in the future by offering hints and predictions about how marketing will change in the next few years.