Ever since the business world went online, things have changed. Gone are the days when trendsetters used to dominate the market for good ten years before early adopters catch up. But with the digital market in the driving seat of the modern business zeitgeist, even the top digital marketing trends 2021 are open for public use.
The scope of digital marketing has swelled up with amazing intensity and all the businesses—be it a Fortune 500 organization or a small one-person startup at a Starbucks round the corner, all of them keep up with the latest thrills and frills of digital marketing.
The beauty of this intangible form of business is that you have to keep up with the race—there are no consolation prizes for being an early adopter of a digital marketing trend that’s a year old, for it might be a game-changer back then—but not now.
The digital market (or any market, for that matter) belongs to those who strive for the absolute aberration of mainstream ideas in order to innovate and lead from the front. For that to happen, we need to be aware of the top digital marketing trends of 2021
Digital Marketing Industry is run by the ones who are determined to foray into the unknown. For an organization to be geared up for challenges that lie ahead, they have to keep up with the buzz of the biz. Now that we’re on the business end of 2021 let’s look at top digital marketing trends that lit up the booming market.
We cannot compile a list of top digital marketing trends of 2021 without the hottest buzzword of the year—AI. Automation has proven to be the most prevalent factor in making every procedure of business simple with complex technology that comes with Artificial Intelligence.
Every sphere of business environment is moving ahead with this technological breakthrough and as simple as it sounds, AI has sparked many things to life. Unlike what many meme-lords think, there’s more to AI than R2D2 Vacuum Cleaners and chef assistance (for instance, email marketing).
With the likes of Robotics, Speech Recognition, Machine Learning and Text Analytics impacting major business operations, AI goes way beyond than what meets the eye.
Studies predict that peeps joining the AI party late will find themselves open to serious competition in
a few years.
If you are looking to explore into the tech territory, then remember the name—AI is the hottest in our list of top digital marketing trends of 2021—and it’s going to be there for a while.
We often hear the “Okay Google”, “Hey Siri” and “Play Maroon 5 Songs” commands flying around because the voice search technology has made it one to savor. This feature has opened doors and windows to a new era of user experience that will only transcend into better times.
Many brands that work on SaaS (Software as a Service) model peruse the voice search algorithm to give subscribers a run for their money. We are all aware of smartphone assistants that are built on the cornerstone of voice recognition and search.
Almost every mobile-based application supports the voice feature and the text-to-speech is very famous in all its glory. Voice search algorithms are getting sharper every passing day, thanks to AI and improved smartphone mechanics.
Digital advertising is noticeable to every other person that browses the good ol’ www and the concept it holds is much more of a real-time affair now. Programmatic Advertising has been one of the topmost digital marketing trends in 2021 as these ads directly promote a product or service straight to specific audiences.
But why is programmatic advertising so much in demand? The real reason is that the users’ clicks and impressions are traded instantly in real-time. Whenever a user casts impression/clicks on a webpage, the publisher auctions off the impressions and clicks to advertisers who bid in real-time for the impression. If the ad is lucrative enough, the advertiser profits from it with a conversion.
Chatbots were pretty much the deal-breaker in the year 2021 when they were a top digital marketing trend for interactive communication with clients, customers and prospective customers. At this very moment, Chatbots are on front desks of major enterprises and this technology is all set to be stronger every passing year.
Chatbots do what a customer care executive sitting in a call center thrives for—it keeps the prospective customers happy. Earlier Chatbots were only used by big enterprises, but right now they’re a must for any organization that wants to build a good online reputation.
We won’t call dibs on naming video marketing as the Queen of digital trends, but it’s definitely a solid tactic to rise up the Digi-marketing ladder. Video content will surely be one of the top digital marketing trends in half a decade, but as of this moment, it’s definitely keeping the viewers happy. Video Marketing increases a website’s SEO prominence by 53 times!*
A video vests the power within to sell any product or service to the viewer and video content on a website has a strong positive impact on its SEO. Also, it generates more likes, shares, and upvotes than text content on social media (ref: Insivia*).
Whenever we talk about digital marketing innovation and rejigs, we talk about bringing something out of the box. Influencer marketing was one such idea that derived from out of the box and everyone is going gaga over any Instagram “Celeb” with over 15,000 followers.
Influencer marketing is based on the concept of opinion leadership, wherein an “influencer”, who’s a personality/entity with a considerable amount of followers, becomes an opinion leader for the followers and publicizes the given product/service to the audience.
Influencer marketing turned out to be more effective than what marketers expected and at this very moment, any account with a considerate number of followers can get into influencer marketing—with methods ranging from paid posts to sponsored video content and reviews being used as a sales pitch to gather the audience.
Push notifications have been crawling through the bottom right corner of your computer screen for a while now, but that isn’t enough to make it a top digital marketing trend in 2021. Mobile push notifications, however, are the real game-changer.
Gone are the days when push notifications were just annoying and spammy pop-ups. As of this moment, nearly three in every ten individuals ranging from age 18 to 34 decide to “allow” push notifications on their desktop and mobile phones.
Not only that—with the help of Geo-fencing, push notifications are personalized so as to enhance the customers’ experience by delivering what they need when they need it. Push notifications are brisk, contain an image and CTAs and are just enough to churn some digital showbiz.
Sure, Virtual Reality (VR) came in with a lot of drums banging behind its stride, but Augmented Reality (AR) is here to stay in the game for a longer period of time. AR was on every man, woman and child’s lips when Pokémon Go! made it into the smartphone gaming industry.
But the likes of furniture, cosmetics, home décor, and furnishing giants took the augmented leap of faith and AR has changed the game ever since.
If you have a tangible product, the AR might turn out to be one of the top digital marketing trends for you this year.
You know what they say—a happy customer is the best salesman. Some of the biggest brands in the world like GoPro and tech giants like Samsung and OnePlus are using content posted/sent by their users to market their service.
The best part of user-oriented marketing is the degree of trust that the brand builds. The users can actually see how other customers feel about the brand’s products and services—something that influences their decisions to buy. It might be a hard task to master, but it brings the results.
This will always be one of the top digital marketing trends to look out for—no matter what year it is. Social media started as a medium for people to interact and at the moment, it is a social marketplace. With all major social media platforms introducing in-app shopping features and low-key dealers doing business in direct message inbox, it is only a prelude for better things to come.
We just skimmed through the top digital marketing trends of 2021. Now that the digital marketing world is rapidly changing, we can’t help but gear up for the coming days, months and years. Try to incorporate as many trends as you can in your business proceedings before 2021 kicks off!
