Digital Marketing Trends 2021 With the digital era taking its toll over the world, the traditional marketing strategies have become redundant, to say the least. Rising competition and the rise of the pandemic has made us enter the digital era once and for all. The businesses are now in dire need of digital marketing to survive the reality and capitalize on their investment.
The virtual and on-demand platforms have drastically replaced face to face interactions for businesses thus acknowledging the reality pandemic has set upon us is the need of the hour. To say the new digital marketing tactics can work wonders for organizations, in general, would be far fetched if one doesn’t use them the right way.
We all say that content will be king but will the fact prove right for the year 2021? How marketers are planning to offer a personalized experience to their customers and stand apart from the rest is surely gonna matter whatever the circumstances are.
The consumer behaviour has changed with the introduction of the “contactless services” while the digital marketers now tend to focus towards changing trends to stay afloat in the competitive market.
Gone are the days when SEO was all about getting the first slot on the SERPs. Now the new king is in town and it sits on the zero positions. Yes, we are talking about featured snippets. The digital marketing trend that needs to be prioritized is the “featured snippet”.
For the ones not knowing what a “featured snippet” is, it’s a search result that is showcased in a box at the top of the search engine result page, even before the organic results. It can be shown in the form of a list, paragraph or a table and answers the query searched right away. You can optimize your content for featuring in the “featured snippet” answer box by thoroughly answering the exact queries people are searching. For instance, answering detailed information on “how to get more Instagram followers” will make you rank on the zero position of the SERPs while offering you best overall exposure and better CTR.
2. Content Equality
Even if the content quality speaks a lot about your brand, the new era of millennials and gen Z now wants their brand to speak diversity and equality when it comes to different religions, cultures, sexuality, gender and more. Nobody wants to deal with a business that is culturally biased and not offering diversity in their products/services. Rising trends and social media must not be limited to homogeneous content in 2021.
3. Customer Segmentation
Another digital marketing trend that is expected to rise in 2021 is customer segmentation. Diving your target customers into groups based on age, language, area of interest and more is rather resourceful and can guarantee more engagement and better returns on investment. Larger organizations are now focusing more on better customer segmentation thereby showcasing informed ads to the different groups and decreasing the ad costs while offering personalized services.
4.Google Ads Automated Bidding
Automated bidding for Google Ads has been trending a lot though the year 2021 will be able to witness its full potential. To be fair, 2020 has lost its charm for people that manually set and optimize their bids for Google Ads. It is the era of automated bids that are optimized better and offer better results. Google optimizes the bid automatically to offer better conversion rate and get clicks by analyzing user data.
5. Shoppable Features for Social Media
Major fashion brands are now inkling towards shoppable Instagram posts which are offering them larger traffic as well as better sales. According to the recent stats, 46% of Instagram users have shopped from products that are featured in the shoppable posts on the brand pages. It is rather convenient to buy products directly by looking at a picture, checking its price and just moving to the checkout section.
6. Image and Video SEO
The world is changing and so are the customers. They are now focused on using voice search for any query they have rather than optimising to type the query in the search box. The voice search yields different results than that of text search and the organizations need to optimize with the target keywords in the right way. Moreover, people are now submitting existing images and original photos in the search box to search for related content. All the businesses and most importantly the eCommerce stores now need to optimize their content images with proper alt tags, keywords in the image titles, and more. Offering images in the sitemap can also help optimize your web content while optimizing for Google lens can also work wonders
7. Ad-Blocker Impact
Since more than 27% of users are expected to use Ad Blockers in 2021, digital marketers now need to reconsider their engagement and exposure strategies. It is not necessarily going to reduce all the traffic or most of the traffic coming your way but for some, the ratings are going to fall drastically. So the organizations should invest more in other digital marketing strategies for better exposure like influencer marketing, or sponsored Ads. They can give you all the required traffic especially from the millennials.
8. Local SEO
For the local businesses, investing and focusing on local SEO is always going to be effective as Google frequently updates its local SEO algorithm. For the customers searching for specific products within the local diameter, optimizing your website according to that can bring in fruitful results. Try to rank on the Google Maps 3 Pack while the first step would be the Google My Business listing. Using appropriate keywords strategy and adding it to your business info and listing can help get easy customers and better ROI.
Hailing victoriously from the disaster of the year 2020, it is necessary to focus on the repercussions and the evolving trends that it brought with it. Even though many digital marketing trends are not going to see the light of day, some are always going to help rank higher and better conversions. Every marketing strategy must now offer a personalized experience to its customers to stay ahead in the competition.
