“The pandemic changed everything for the marketers, what all we imagined at the beginning of the year seemed to take a different direction altogether. The expectations of the marketers in terms of formulating the strategies for the businesses saw a shift by the end of the year.

From being a tough call to survive to become a boon for businesses, digital marketing saw exponential growth and a wide array of opportunities for marketers. For the businesses that had to be forced to close shops and operations, digital marketing was the go-to alternative to stay on top of the customer’s minds and make them feel their presence. The retail market opting for the online marketing strategy to walk neck and neck with the online market increased the marketing framework as well.

As we advance, digital marketing will be considered by many more businesses to retain current customers, generate more revenue, and result in a quantum increase in sales. If there’s one niche of the business world that won’t ever stop evolving, it’s marketing. Digital marketing is highly dependent on the maturation of online technologies and is continuously pivoting and responding to new developments. Having said that, are you prepared for 2021 to witness new trends in digital marketing?

Listed below are a few trends that the industry would foresee in the coming year. Check them out.

Increased use of voice search

Would you be amazed to know that 27% of the online global population is using voice search on mobile as per Google reports? The voice search feature garnered much more attention after Google Home and Amazon Alexa. As more and more consumers build active voice search profiles on mobile and home-based devices, digital marketers will find an opportunity to craft a custom Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy based on consumer voice search behaviors and preferences. But ranking for voice searches is easier said than done. When a customer uses voice search, there is only one result for a voice query, and it is your goal to be that result. The use of long-tail keywords should also be the priority to be in that result.

Shoppable Posts

The concept of shoppable posts came into existence with Facebook Shops and Instagram Marketplace, beneficial for those who didn’t have a store. The platform serves as a one-stop-shop experience as the users can search for products without leaving the social network, add items to a shopping bag, and checkout.

Based on a recent survey, 60% of Instagram made a purchase after seeing a product or service on the platform.

In 2021, expect these platforms to provide a more seamless shopping experience to minimize the customers’ hassle from moving between sites or apps. Shopping via social media cuts the time from awareness to conversion by giving everything your customer needs (product details, payment methods, and shipping options) in one platform.

No Click Searches or Featured Snippets on SERP

While searching for something on Google, sometimes the answer is suggested to you in a paragraph at the top of the result page. These boxes, called Position Zero in search engine results, often come with an image and all the information you were looking for displayed in an easy to distinguish box. You have the answer you need, so you don’t need to click on an article. This is what’s called a no-click search. Google and other search engines provide these to help people find answers quickly and in less time. The trick is to make sure you add something to these snippets that will draw the reader in and entice them to click on your website for more information, and away from the search engine that has provided them with a quick answer. For businesses, this is a very powerful tool to get traffic on their website. The content being featured on the snippet has to be very engaging so that the customer ends up opening the whole link. You can also use schema to enhance your content and provide details about your website’s trustworthiness and authority, like ratings and reviews.

AI

AI has changed the face of the digital landscape with the ability to collect data, analyze it, apply it, and then learn from it. AI helps to optimize and speed up many marketing tasks thus reducing the manual work. One can use it to track operations that help in a better understanding of consumer behavior patterns.

AI majorly helps in improving customer satisfaction as it can help in easily reading what the customers expect. With advanced software development, AI has become more accessible to businesses, making itself a very valuable tool for marketers. It also influences the customer’s choice by giving relevant recommendations as per the taste and preferences.

Ephemeral Content

Due to the daily active users on social media, the use of ephemeral content as a marketing strategy has gained much more importance. Ephemeral content simply means any visual content – video or photo – that is only available for a certain period of time usually 24 hours. Snapchat was the first platform to have come up with this concept, now adapted by other social media platforms like Instagram.

There are a number of other reasons that this content is popular and is worth remembering. Firstly, the content can be displayed as a vertical video and their setups are easy and inexpensive. Another reason is FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) which is why people tend to open these apps every minute or so. Moreover, any visual content being played has more impact on people’s minds. They tend to engage more and retain the content being shown which in turn increases the buying persona.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a type of word-of-mouth marketing that focuses on using key leaders to amplify your brand message to a larger market. Influencers can be well-known celebrities, but more often they are Instagram or YouTube personalities with a huge niche following who can help spread the word about your business or product through their social channels. People are highly influenced by these personalities due to the trust and confidence they have in them. They tend to buy any product or service on their recommendations more than anyone else.

This phenomenon has gained hype over the last few years and will continue to grow in the coming years as well. The buyer persona keeps changing so is the power to influence them.

Big Data Searching

Are you amazed to see the advertisements of a product or a service on other websites that you just searched for a few minutes ago? This is what forms a part of big data searching, targeting the audience by tracking their operations.

“As per Google: Big data refers to data that would typically be too expensive to store, manage, and analyze using traditional (relational and/or monolithic) database systems. Usually, such systems are cost-inefficient because of their inflexibility for storing unstructured data (such as images, text, and video), accommodating “high-velocity” (real-time) data, or scaling to support very large (petabyte-scale) data volumes.”

Big data can be utilised for understanding customer behaviour that is beneficial for personalized targeting. Facebook Pixel too uses this concept to attract and retarget audience. Big data has opened new gates for marketers to do marketing the smart way.

Conclusion

With content dominating the digital marketing industry for all these years, the story seems to change a bit in the coming years. Or we can say there will be a shift in the way content reaches the audience.