In 2021, new digital marketing trends are starting to emerge. Marketers live in a time of constant change, so they have had to adapt to new ways of communicating and consuming quickly.
Many things that were thought to happen have not yet happened, while what was not expected to happen has arrived years in advance. And what does this refer to? To the need for rapid digitization of society.
2021 will be the year of consolidation of all those trends that could be explored in 2020. The pandemic greatly influenced some marketing and business specialists to accelerate their strategies while implementing resources to get ahead of physical store closure.
Several years of progress
It was also driven by the difficulties in communicating with customers, as confinement prevented direct contact for months and forced them to turn to the online environment.
Over this year, many users have witnessed how eCommerce has moved forward some five years in time thanks to the urgency of operating. And not only for e-commerce but also third-party platforms such as Amazon, where many businesses have found an effective way to offer a product or service to customers and attract new people.
For this reason, it is vital to know the digital marketing trends in 2021. The digital train is about to leave the station, and anyone who wants to ensure his business’s sustainability has to buy a one-way ticket. Do you want to know them? Then read on because this interests you!
Top digital marketing trends in 2021 that you should know about
It will soon be a new year, and there will be recent digital marketing trends in 2021. Digital marketing is fundamental for any company, business, and store that wants to make life and grow online. That’s why the papers writers conducted a study and described the main trends in digital marketing for 2021.
- The 5 A’s of marketing
Do you remember what the famous 4Ps of marketing are? Well, Antonio has turned this concept upside down to show that the priority for marketing experts is no longer to sell but to help their users resolve their concerns.
These are going to be five significant concepts that marketing will have in 2021:
- You are providing value to the user.
- They are helping the customer to solve their needs and problems.
- Anticipate the future demands of your target audience.
- Adapt to the buyer persona.
- Automate marketing.
- Storydoing technique
Brands no longer want to tell a story; now, they want users to get involved so that they can live their own experience.
The story is to know what you want to tell, what you want to provoke in your users, and what you want to achieve with this.
- OTT TV fragmentation
Another digital marketing trend in 2021 is the fragmentation of OTT TV. Currently, OTT service applications are experiencing a similar phenomenon to what TV channels experienced a few years ago. And what is this about? They are looking to multiply and compete with each other.
Some of the bidding options to position themselves better are Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire, and Samsung Tizen, among others. There are more and more entertainment options for the user, and each one has its application and platform.
And since more than half of the viewers hire one of them, competition in the market will be increasing.
- Esports will have a significant growth
The gaming sector has grown tremendously in recent years, to the point of surpassing traditional sports. It is expected to generate up to $180.1 billion in profits alone by 2021.
In this way, esports has become an advertising channel in high demand. Brands are increasingly seeking to include it in their strategies to reach new audiences that have been more inaccessible until now, such as generation Z.
- Shoppable TV
After the revolution that has had the streaming, the new trend that will have the digital marketing will be to buy through television. Many formats exist for this, and in 2021, the trend will increase.
Some of these formats are secondary shopping screens. In these, the viewer will be able to access with just a click of the remote. There are also QR codes to be scanned with the cell phone.
In reality, shoppable TV experiments have been around for several years. However, experts say that it is at this time when technology and consumer habits are much more mature, it will be possible that this marketing trend can become a reality.
- Virtual events and video training
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, there has been an acceleration in digital transformation. Many companies did not count on this before 2020. For example, one of these transformations has been the pressing proliferation of digital events, which will continue to be one of the top digital marketing trends in 2021.
Many of them are focused on capturing, and mature potential leads—something utterly indispensable in the online environment.
Moving from a physical to a digital event is not such a simple thing, as there is still a long way to go in terms of technical level, losing the category of “special occasion.” The solution to this is not to copy your physical events but to create a different experience.
- Automated customer journeys that are based on AI and machine learning
Customer data platform type tools will allow you to create and manage highly personalized customer journeys, using email marketing in a segmented way based on the consumer’s habits and behavior.
Thanks to this, you will be able to create highly effective messages and take into account all the relevant aspects for each type of customer.
You have to go further. Personalization is much more than placing the user’s name at the top of the email. There are many existing tools where you can benefit from artificial intelligence and machine learning to tailor customer journeys.
These two technologies can personalize the email contents based on the different types of data they have obtained: environmental, interest-based, behavioral, or other types of data.
- Programmatic advertising on wearables, TV, and radio
Programmatic advertising turns out to be another digital marketing trend in 2021 that has gained a lot of strength in recent years. Also, it is a strategy that has opened up to new channels.
Wearables are interesting to host programmatic advertising due to the large amount of data they hold about their users:
- Streaming platforms such as Netflix.
- Podcasts and online radio
- Artificial intelligence and augmented reality in eCommerce.
Artificial intelligence and augmented reality will combine to form part of the marketing trends for 2021.
Thanks to them, it will be possible to personalize the online shopping process for users. In this way, you will be able to guarantee a good user experience and transform deliveries.
- Biometric identification
Biometric identification through facial recognition, iris, fingerprint, and other physical features, has significantly improved its ease and security in terms of digital payments, being a key component in the expansion of eCommerce.
According to a study by Visa, two-thirds of Europeans prefer to use biometric identification for online payments.
- Natural language processing (NLP) based on big data.
This is to help big data systems better understand the information obtained, thus enabling more natural conversations and interactions between software and users.
An example of this is intelligent voice assistants. These include Siri, Cortana, or Bixby preinstalled on smartphones or devices such as Alexa, which function as digital voice assistants.
- Limiting the number of ads in Facebook Ads
It is always said that less is more, or at least, the people in charge of Facebook think, who have implemented a limitation on the number of active ads that a page can have.
The purpose of this is to improve advertising performance to have more information about the version of each ad.
- Self-service advertising in TikTok
Tik-Tok has been one of the significant digital marketing trends for 2020, and it seems that this will be repeated in 2021. The latest great novelty they have had is incorporating an advertising platform with a self-service format.
In this way, ads will have to follow the style that has made this network famous. It is one of the digital marketing trends in 2021 that will be very important.
- Studio Ads by Spotify
Who said that podcasts could only include audio ads? Spotify’s new advertising solution, Studio Ads, will allow users to have video ads using various horizontal or vertical formats.
This will be an excellent opportunity to connect with new audiences and users who are on this network.
- LinkedIn Stories and Twitter Fleets
Stories have sought to change the way you create and consume content on your social networks. LinkedIn has now joined this marketing trend by using its own Stories, which work in a very similar way to Instagram.
Their objective is to dynamize the social relationships that exist on LinkedIn to give much more prominence to creativity and relationships between people.
On the other hand, Twitter has also ventured into this trend with its Fleet. These are images, video, or written content that, like stories, will last only 24 hours.
These are some of the digital marketing trends in 2021 that are coming in strong. Get the most out of your campaigns and have guaranteed success by applying the ones that best suit your objectives.