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15 Digital Marketing Trends 2021

15 Digital Marketing Trends 2021

Today’s digital marketing landscape has created the most competitive time for attention. Every brand, influencer, studio, and artist is competing for the consumer’s attention and brand loyalty. Yes, if you’re a company with shareholders and a business to run you want to make sales to hit your quarterly goals. 

To develop an arsenal of digital marketing strategies we are going to outline the latest trends to ensure you are provided with the sources to stay ahead of your competition. We outline various technology marketing softwares, developing a strong lifetime loyalty with a consumer creates a customer for life. Here are the latest technologies and digital marketing trends to help you develop customers for a lifetime. 

1) Artificial intelligence

In the latest trend that most progressive businesses are implementing into their digital marketing practices involve artificial intelligence marketing. Not only are robots taking over the labor workforce for manufacturing companies and what not. Artificial intelligence has crossed over into marketing by analyzing customer behavior, search patterns, and data gathering from various social media platforms. 

Mastercar recently instilled a new Facebook messenger bot that uses a natural language processing software to understand what the customer wants and responds accordingly like a real person. 

This ultimately alleviates the constant customer service monitoring for any company having time issues or staff personnel to handle all customer service manners for one specific platform. Soon AI will be at the forefront of handling multiple marketing tasks such as: 

• Internal and external communications
• Product recommendations
• Email customization 
• eCommerce transactions 
• Content creation

For example, when it comes to content creation Clickflow’s Content Editor is using Artificial Intelligence to build subtopics and keyword articles for SEO and digital marketing managers. Clickflow created this artificial intelligence marketing tool that allows every marketing manager to utilize it and save them time and cost for creating written content like blogs, articles, and more. 

Brands, companies, businesses, utilizing artificial intelligence marketing in their operations and day to day will be able to cut staffing costs and gain a competitive advantage over their competitors. 

2) Programmatic Advertising 

Programmatic advertising is another great example of artificial intelligence marketing being put to use. Specifically, programmatic advertising is using AI to automate ad buying to target a narrow audience. With AI, you are able to use real time bidding as a type of programmatic ad buying. This sort of AI marketing automation is more efficient which leads to higher conversion rate and lower customer acquisition cost. 

This new method of digital advertising has shifted how marketers use marketing automation and   will continue to inspire brands to change from conventional marketing tools to artificial intelligence. 

According to Irina Kovalenko of SmartyAds: 

“Most search-driven manual advertising campaigns (even those performed with professional tools) take into account three or four targets: the keyword, time of day, and location. Such tools like programmatic demand-side platforms can use hundreds of targeting signals to individualize the advertisement and even target according to lifestyle or behavior habits when integrated with customer data platforms.”

Take a look at how programmatic advertising works: 

To further understand and how to implement this digital marketing trend — programmatic advertising– please follow the PPC Hero’s Guide to get started.

3) Chatbots 

Chatbots are becoming an increasingly important tool for digital marketers in 2021. It is also an AI-based technology that is used in instant messaging systems with real-time responses. No matter day or night your site visitors will be able to speak with an responsive and understanding AI chatbot that answers important questions they may have about your brand’s service or business. 

Here are some surveys backing chatbots in digital marketing and advertising: 

• Chatbots will be utilized for 85% of customer services for brands.
• The top benefits of chatbots are 24 hour services at 64%, instant message responses at 55%, and answers to more simpler questions at 55%.    

A study shows that customers prefer to interact with chatbots since they respond 24/7, message promptly, recall your entire buying history, and do not lose patience when dealing with an issue. More often than not, virtual assistants offer great customer service by initiating conversations with customers and answering any questions they may have become automated with a select amount of inquiries. This allows you to focus on bigger picture digital marketing tasks that require a deeper level of thinking. 

Brands like Lyft have implemented this chatbot technology to their rideshare app and website. You can see this artificial intelligence marketing tool being implemented by requesting a ride from Lyft via chat (Facebook Messenger and Slack) or voice (Amazon Echo), and their chatbot messenger will let you know the current location of your driver: 

The following brands that have successfully used chatbot technology for their customer service include: Whole Foods Market, Fandango, Sephora, Staples, The Wall Street Journal and Pizza Hut.

4) Conversational Marketing 

With the rise of automated chatbots, connecting with your consumer or website visitor has sparked a new way of communicating with them — and it’s called conversation marketing. People want to be spoken to as if they were at a storefront and they are being attended to with immediate responses. 

Conversational marketing allows you to connect with your customers or website visitors one on one and in real time. Every marketer knows making a strong connection with a prospective customer is the most important thing especially online. 

Conversational marketing is different from other conventional marketing strategies. In this strategy you are able to communicate with your customer across multiple channels and connect with them on their terms. This means you can connect with them on different devices, platforms, and time schedules that best suit your customer. 

David Cancel, the founder and CEO of Drift said: 

“Today’s buyers expect to find what they’re looking for now, not later. As we prepare for the future, it will be more important than ever for businesses to be available across a broad spectrum of channels, and to make sure you’re communicating the way people prefer to communicate.”

The final take away from conversational marketing is that it is meant to enhance the user experience through a feedback-driven model that increases engagement and greater brand loyalty.  

5) Personalization

Marketing personalization is the creation of content, products, emails, and posts that is specifically meant to target a more narrow audience. 

Take a look at these marketing personalization stats:

• 63% of consumers are highly annoyed with generic advertising blasts.
• 80% say they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences.
• 90% claim they find personalization appealing.

EmailMonks’ Kevin George asserted that “personalized, triggered emails based on behavior are three times better than batch-and-blast emails.” 

Studying other examples of marketing personalization, you must look at Netflix and Amazon, with their tailored recommendations for movies and products. Here are other companies that are successfully utilizing personalization: 

EasyJet recently launched a data-driven email marketing campaign that used their customer’s travel history with the airline they selected to build personalized stories, with suggestions of where they might travel next. They saw a tremendous increase in click through rates at 25% out of the 12 million unique emails sent. 

Cadbury’s marketing personalization was a bit different. They created personalized video marketing campaigns that matched every Dairy Milk flavor with users based on the data from their Facebook profile that included age, interest, and location. The personalized video marketing campaign was a success by generating a 65% click through rate and a 33.6% conversion rate proving that a personal touch works. 

Finally, marketing personalization will definitely give you higher results than conventional marketing because of its personalized messaging, content, and reach. 

6) Video Marketing

Video marketing is the most important marketing trend that all brands and companies must follow for the next decade. The following data shows the importance of video marketing when strategizing your digital marketing strategy: 

• 70% of consumers say that they have shared a brand’s video.
• 72% of businesses say that video has improved their conversion rate.
• 52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions.
• 65% of executives visit the marketer’s website and 39% call a vendor after viewing a video.

Video marketing is by far the most effective way to teach and inform your customer about a new product or service: 

There are multiple ways to drive higher engagement with your video marketing strategy like starting a Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn live. 

One of the difficulties that marketers have faced is the growth of mobile devices being used by consumers. Conventional marketing such as email takes too much time to open and view as opposed to a 15 second to 1 minute video on the consumer’s phone. 

According to the latest SEO trends, if your website includes a video it is 50 times more likely to drive organic search results. The reason is because website visitors find video content to be more interesting, so Google validates pages that include videos with a higher ranking. 

The best thing about video marketing is that you can turn one video into a multi purposeful piece of content. So you just recorded and edited a video about your service or product and you uploaded it to YouTube. In addition to posting to YouTube here other things you can do with that piece of video content as well: 

• You can get the video transcribed so you have a text version of the video. 
• You can also publish the transcription on your blog under an embedded YouTube video to improve your SEO rankings. 
• You can utilize the video for a paid social media campaign.
• You then turn the transcription of the video to be a stand alone blog with minor edits. 
• You can also strip the audio from the video and use it for a podcast. 

Here are some examples of the latest video marketing trends in 2021: 

• Live video is a popular video marketing method that businesses utilize to conduct interviews, product demos, and behind the scenes footage. They also use it to show office life, how products are made, company events, and more. 
• 1:1 video is when brands and marketers create personalized video marketing campaigns. Instead of turning to conventional cold calling or email marketing they utilize today’s latest technology such as an iPhone’s camera to create the video content.
• YouTube SEO is when a brand optimizes their website by embedding videos that they have uploaded to YouTube onto their site. It is very important that marketers understand that the description, title, and file name of the video are displayed on SERPs (search engine results page). This includes the text overlays and closed captions. 

7) Influencer Marketing 

Influencer marketing is the digital marketing form of hearsay or word to mouth marketing. It focuses on promoting your business’s product or service on the platform of well-known influencers, celebrities, or tastemakers. More often than not the influencer is promoting your product or service through their social media because of the relevancy that their following has with your target audience. 

Marketers must understand that influencer marketing is more effective than standard marketing tactics: 

• 63% of consumers trust influencers’ opinions of products much more than what brands say about themselves
• 58% of people have bought a new product in the past six months because of an influencer’s recommendation

Influencer marketing is a trend that should not be taken lightly. A mediakix study predicts that brands will increase their ad spend for influencer marketing will reach $10 billion by next year: 

As influencer marketing continues to grow, the way marketers market a new product will has changed the way influencers are partnering up with brands. Artificial intelligence is easing the process of connecting brands with the right influencers for their product or service. AI is helping  identify influencers with the best engagement and a better chance of generating higher ROIs. Finally, AI is transforming influencer marketing in the following ways: 

• Image recognition with ANN (Artificial Neural Networks)
• Determining influencer performance with NLP (Natural Language Processing)
• Predicting incentives with ANN
• Determining an influencer’s influence
• Flagging posts that don’t follow disclosure guidelines
• Elimination of fake engagements and spam bots

8) Social Messaging Apps

Social media apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp have gone past the simple functions of just being a messaging app. 

• More than 1.3 billion users are active on Facebook Messenger: 

• Currently 10 billion messages are sent between businesses, people, and users on Facebook Messenger every month. 
• And WhatsApp has 1.6 billion users and 55 billions messages are sent via every day 
• WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat combined, have more users than Facebook and YouTube. 

As these social messaging apps populate with active users, the more it makes sense for brands and companies to market their products and services on them. 

You can easily send personalized messages to customers on these social messaging apps, which helps with customer service along with keeping them up to date with products. Consumers assume that your business or brand will have a live chat or be on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat because it is the easiest way to connect with them.

Here are reasons for your brand to participate in live chats or social messaging apps: 

• Cultivate contact
• Deliver information
• Boost sales
• Involve people in events
• Regain potential customers
• Provide support and assistance

9) Visual Search 

One of the latest digital marketing strategies is visual search. With visual search you can upload or drag and drop an image on the search engine’s search bar to find a product, service, or image similar to your upload. 

A) Pinterest Lens

Pinterest, of course, has taken the visual search and elevated the experience for searchers to seek similar products, categories, and images similar to their uploaded image. The visual search they came out with is called Lens. Specifically, users can use Lens to take a photo of an item and find out where to buy it online, search for a similar product, or view pinboards of related items. 

The most unique feature about Pinterest’s Lens is your “phone’s camera turns into a search bar”:

Since the launch of Pinterest’s Lens, it now recognizes more than 2.5 billion fashion and home objects and has created over 600 million unique searches on the Pinterest mobile app/ 

The following are updates that Pinterest has implemented to their app: 

• Pincodes is a QR code type technology that allows you to find inspiration while you’re out shopping or looking through a magazine. 
• Lens Your Look was launched for users to take the guesswork out of outfit planning. 
• Pinterest also partnered with Samsung to add the visual search feature to their latest smartphones. This partnership also included a feature that allows Target’s customers to search their catalog using related products that they see in the real world.
• Pinterest’s partnership with Shop the Look added a feature that helps users buy products from brands that work with Pinterest. For example, you can buy a pair of jeans from the pictures on Pinterest.
• They have also implemented new tools that help merchants sell their products using the Catalogs feature. Which allows anyone to upload and convert their entire catalog of products into shoppable pins. 

If you fall under the following categories please ensure you optimize all of your product listings on Pinterest for a visual search: 

• Fashion
• Home decor
• Art
• Food
• Products
• Animals
• Outfits
• Beauty
• Vehicles
• Travel

B) Google Lens

Of course if Pinterest has a visual search option on their platform, Google must also have a visual search feature that identifies products and landmarks through a camera app. It is called Google Lens and here’s what you can do when you take a photo of the following items: 

• Apparel and home goods: Find similar products and where to buy them.
• Barcodes: Use a barcode to find info about a product, like where to buy it.
• Business card: Save the phone number or address to a contact.
• Book: Get a summary and read reviews.
• Event flyer or billboard: Add the event to your calendar.
• Landmark or building: See historical facts, hours of operation, and more.
• Painting in a museum: Read about the artist and learn more.
• Plant or animal: Learn about species and breeds.

Google is the largest search engine in the world and if you are not optimizing your product’s content to be featured on Google lens, than you are not marketing to your full potential. 

C) CamFind

Another amazing visual search mobile app called CamFind, allows you to search for anything on your phone simply by taking a picture of it and uploading it to the app. 

CamFind alleviates the hassle of having to open a browser and typing your inquiry on the search engine bar. All you have to do is to take a simple photo and upload it to CamFind to search for similar products, price comparisons, local shopping results and more. Another cool feature about CamFind is you can take a picture of a movie poster and it brings up information about the movie, trailers, showtimes and local theatres where they are being shown.

D) Bing Visual Search 

With Bing’s visual search, you are able to search for specific elements within an image. 

This means that if you’re looking for kitchen decoration inspirations and a particular design attracts you. You scroll over and click on the thumbnail result to get the “Detail View”. However, you are only interested in the chandelier, with Bing’s Visual Search you are able to find that product without any hassle. 

Described in Social Media Today: 

• 62% of Millennials are more interested in visual search capabilities than any other new technology
• Images are returned for 19% of search queries on Google
• There are over 600 million visual searches on Pinterest each month

If you’re a marketer you can get ahead of the competitors by hopping onto the visual search trend now to gain customers and provide them with the perfect product. 

10) Voice Search & Smart Speakers 

With the increased usage of voice search & smart speakers, digital marketers can start to rethink their marketing strategy and include it to their marketing efforts. 

Take a look at these numbers: 

• 50% of all searches will be via voice by 2020
• 55% of all American homes will own a smart speaker by 2022
• 72% of people who own voice-activated speakers say that their devices are used as part of their daily routines
• Voice shopping is set to jump to $40 billion in 2022, up from $2 billion today
• Global smart speaker shipments have almost trebled between Q1 2018 and Q2 2019, growing from 9.36 million units to 26.1 million units

People are expected to be using voice search far more in the future: 

Voice search has progressively played an important role for consumers in providing them with relevant information through audio content. The improvements that AI has made increased the number of users and owners in smart speakers. The number of errors made by voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google has reduced tremendously. 

The Digital Marketing Institute said it best: 

“Adopting a voice search strategy isn’t just about remaining relevant – it’s also about creating a unique and optimized customer experience that will foster relationships and build brand loyalty.”

A good portion of brands have already included voice search into their digital marketing strategies that deliver value based content effectively to their customers: 

• Patrón Tequila helps consumers access personalized cocktail recipes
• Domino’s allows pizza-lovers to order from the comfort of their couch without having to pick up the phone or even place an online order
• PayPal users can engage Siri to send money to friends, family or businesses
• Nestlé created a skill that provides voice instructions as you cook
• Campbell’s has a skill that helps hungry consumers choose and cook recipes

Google assistant has more than 2 thousand “actions” and Alexa has 30 thousand “skills”. These are functions that allow both assistants to react to the users command and inquiries: 

Keep in mind with the rise of companies producing more audio content for brand awareness, the higher the chance that ads will be run there as well. This means customers’ in their listening experience you will hear Alexa deliver advertisements from sponsored ads. This specific method of digital advertising must be mastered and championed by brands to compete with their competitors.

However, it is key for companies to realize that voice search isn’t a place for spam or irrelevant content that does not peak the listeners’ interest. Instead brands must develop content specifically for voice search marketing that gains the listener interest and still remains relevant to the brands core brand value. 

11) Social Media Stories 

The first social media company to introduce what a “story” is, was Snapchat, then Instagram and Facebook. And recently YouTube has come out with their version of the story which is called: Reels.

To give you a visual display of the “story’s” timeline take a look at this infographic:

Effective social media stories are meant to last no more than 15-30 seconds and last about 24 hours. Within this time frame, marketers can create FOMO around their product or service. 

Perks of using social media stories:  

• Create constant engagement with followers
• Increase brand awareness
• Cost-effectiveness
• Opportunity to reach a younger audience
• Increase website traffic

Here are some ideas for you to use on your social media stories: 

• Use polls within Instagram Stories
• Add links to your social media Stories
• Take advantage of Snapchat geofilters
• Add location tags
• Add mentions for other brands and your fans
• Give live video a try when creating Stories
• Invite followers to explore more with clear call-to-actions

12) Browser Push Notifications 

Has a notification to opt-into receiving notifications popped up immediately when you arrive onto a companies website? If so, you have experience the one of the latest trends in social media marketing. 

Push notifications are on the rise with staggering 85% of the online stores using this digital marketing tactic. Here are some facts surrounding the one of the latest digital marketing trends companies are using:

• At least twice as many people sign up for web push notifications compared to a newsletter.
• Only 10% of the best email marketers can achieve a newsletter sign-up rate that matches the performance of web push.
• 6.4 hours is the average time that passes before the recipient opens a newsletter. In the case of web push, the recipient will see the message immediately.

Since, the updates to the General Data Protection Regulations and stricter filters have stalled the success of email marketing. Also, younger audiences favors other methods of communications who prefers to deal with less touchpoints from different brands. 

Companies are striving to have multiple touchpoints on their target audience and browser push notifications are increasingly becoming popular with brands this year. Personalized push notifications have increased conversions: 

• 7% open rate for segmented push messaging compared to a 3% open rate for generic, broadcast messages (a 2x improvement)
• 54% of users convert from a segmented push notification, compared to only 15% for broadcast messages (a 3x improvement)

Notifications are triggered by a website visitor’s behavior are being used to target people who have shown interest but did not convert, such as anbandoning shopping carts: 

Push browser notifications can even include images and CTAs to maximize conversion rates for example:

13) Content Marketing Continues to Dominates SEO

Google rolled out a major update to their algorithm in November 2019. BERT is a system designed to help Google understand the natural language that people use in their search queries. 

John Mueller from Google says, “rather than chase the latest SEO trends, it’s more important to ensure a site has fast speeds, useful links, and well written content.” Content marketing is the most important part of a strong SEO strategy. In fact, 88% of B2B content marketers agree that creating content tailored to your target audience view them as a credible and trusted resource:  

Statistics from the Content Marketing Institute: 

• Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing and generates 3x as many leads.
• Content marketing has lower up-front costs and deeper long-term benefits than paid search.
• 615 million devices now use ad blockers, which means your ads are not being seen by as many people.
• Small businesses with blogs generate 126% more leads than those without blogs.
• Content marketing rakes in conversion rates 6x higher than other methods.

Understanding that creating content marketing that is well-researched, including updated articles, and relevant content, Google will continue to favor those businesses that are implementing those strategies. 

14) SEO A/B Split Testing 

When it comes to paid or organic digital marketing it is important to test and analyze. With A/B testing, you can test variables in your digital marketing campaign and identify which ad variations perform better than one another. Marketers can identify and be more methodical with what creatives to change in their marketing campaigns. 

Clickflow suggests pages that have untapped SEO potential, a page with a high impression count but a low CTR. After identifying which pages have a low CTR, marketers can shift their focus to those pages to increase traffic, leads, and conversions:

With Clickflow marketers can set a target CTR value, then it delivers a keyword report with pages and keywords and their current ranking. More importantly, it gives marketers new keywords that you should target in order to get more traffic., 

On the Clickflow app you have the ability to make changes to your title, meta description, title tag, and body content, that automatically reflect on your websites backend: 

Choose your target CTR: 

As a marketer, you should run a 15 day experiment and ClickFlow will show you how many more clicks you are getting and any additonal revenue that you may be gaining from the optimization. When you run a SEO A/B split test campaign, you will be able to maximize the most from your digital marketing campaign as a whole. With this strategy you can even begin with a smaller budget and still increase your over ROI.  

15) Social Commerce & Shoppable Posts

In the last decade social media and eCommerce has grown exponentially and it has resulted in brands implementing a digital marketing strategy that offers synergy amongs both. 

Last year in March, Instagram introduced Instagram Checkout. This allows users to complete their purchase within Instagram’s platform on a sponsored ad: 

eCommerce brands will utilize this new feature hoping that it will reduce the number of abandon carts since they will not be redirected another website and stay within Instagram’s platform. 

Recently, Instagram also began hiding likes and you would think this would stall the amount of active daily users. However, social media is an integral part of digital marketing and Instagram is golden for marketers to gain leads and increase sales. 

A recent report shows that Instagram has 1 billion active users and 90% of them follow active shopping brands. And what better way to take advantage of this heavy traffic than offering shoppable posts outside of sponsored ads? 

With the latest shoppable post feature, eCommerce brands are able to post interactive ads that allow users to click and shop products directly on Instagram without having to direct the consumer to a landing page. Instagram believes that this will shorten the customers’ journey and that it will ultimately help brands gain more sales. 

16) Omnichannel Marketing 

17) Augmented Reality & Immersive Technologies 

18) Predictive & Augmented Analytics 

19) Geo-Fencing 

20) User Generated Content 

21) Blockchain Technology 

22) Quantum Computing 

23) Big Data & Deep Learning 

24) Automation 

25) Google Ads Smart Bidding

26) SERP Position Zero 

27) Branding 

28) Better Analytics 

29) 5G technology 

30) Privacy Marketing 

31) Website Security 

32) Long Form Content 

33) Semantic Keyword Research 

34) Structured Data SEO 

35) Alternate Search Engines 

36) Voice Marketing Funnels 

37) Social Media Marketing 

38) Neuromarketing 

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