2021 Marketing Trends: What no one is talking about!
Year 2020 has been chaos. With the pandemic hitting badly worldwide, lock-down was imposed in countries and hence people were forced to stay indoors, which made the e-commerce sales to go higher more than ever. The shift in sales was also seen in IT industry, which also went through the roof. A small example is of video conferencing service-providers, such as Zoom or Google Meet, whose demand kept on increasing during the pandemic. This has led a major shift in the marketing trends and due to people spending more time online, COVID-19 has transformed the way in which brands interact with the customers. Hence, there is a major shift in the overall marketing.
Here are few of our insights:
1. Don’t rely completely on Google Analytics
Google Analytics is still a great tool with the fact that it is FREE, but relying completely on it can ruin your business.
With the fact that marketing is getting changed in this dynamic environment, there are new channels which are being constantly introduced and utilized in many productive ways. One of them is voice search. These days there are other things like repurchase, upsells, retargeting, webinars, influencer or affiliate marketing. In order to organize and analyze this whole data, Google analytics is not sufficient alone. Companies have now started shifting towards business intelligence tools more than ever, because in this era, data management is not an easy job. Managing databases and integrating them with the analytics solutions is a mandatory part of any kind of business, in order to generate meaningful information out of raw data.
There should be a central place where you could gather and integrate the whole data, which ultimately helps in major decision-making for your business.
In 2021, companies are adopting business intelligence solutions with greater pace. These solutions are so widely used that there are some efficient open-source solutions which have been launched and being used successfully. For example, Google Data Studio can be used to store and manage all of the marketing data in one place. You can even integrate more granular data from Facebook and Instagram ad campaign data in Google Studio Data and extract useful analytics out of it, which would be difficult in Google Analytics.
2. Shift to Automation
Automation is a key to any successful business. The importance of automation can sometimes not be realized in the early stages, but its absence can sometimes bring serious consequences to any business.
This is a world of automation. We experience it in our daily life.
AI has played a major role in it. Even SEO has been replaced by AI, it’s a win-win situation. With the fact that it is cost-effective, it also saves us from SEO-efforts and keyword hassle.
In B2B sector, there is a need for companies to shift towards automation. Transforming their business models and incorporating automation has saved many businesses from getting doomed.
3. Increase in Visual Search and Video Marketing
In 2021, people are using voice-activated tools more than before, like Alexa. This is because they are readily available and easy-to-use. Not only voice search is getting popular, but visual search is also gaining boom very rapidly. Tools such as Google Lens enable the consumers to search for whatever they see. In the same way, Pinterest is also contributing to this. This has opened new methods to explore for marketers. Now marketing heads are shifting towards deriving more visually-appealing and engaging content to generate more reach and impressions. It is predicted that over the next decade, visuals will become more and more important in the SEO game.
Video Marketing is the most important trend for 2021 and for the next 5-10 years. Talking on statistical facts, 90% of the users say that they want to learn about the new product through video aid. Therefore, incorporating video in the marketing content is becoming seemingly important these days.
In this regard, don’t just consider YouTube. There are now plenty of ways you can use to do video marketing, one of them is to use live video of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or LinkedIN.
It is stated that a business page gets 50 times more traffic when it posts a video, because people say that video post is compelling and attractive.
4. Personalization has always been a key!
The most common problem that is faced to marketers is that 95% of the visitors are not converted into customers. Reason to that is the visitors were not the rightly-targeted audience. This is not because your marketing is not right. This is because there was no personalization in targeting the audience and more than half of the target audience was unqualified. This means that your message did not fit to everyone who read your message, identifying that your marketing content was lacking personalization.
We experience personalization from businesses in our everyday life. From random Facebook scrolling to ending up pressing “Checkout”, we are being urged to shop from their page, which happened just due to personalization. A major example can be taken from Ali Express, it will show you the things that you are always interested in or often end up buying them. This is personalization. And it always works!
5. Branding is important now more than ever
Branding and content marketing is all about building trust. In the latest era of 2021, it is gaining much importance because trust can’t be build overnight. It requires slow and consistent efforts. In order to stay relevant in the eyes of your audience, it is the best practice to stay top-of-the-line and incorporate latest marketing trends of 2021 with your business strategy.
6. Virtual events
Why virtual events would be a big thing in year 2021?
Turn on your smartphone, laptop or tablet, and you won’t have to go so beyond to see an event which is live streaming. Live streaming has now a “never to miss” factor associated with it. As per the Facebook experts, the ratio of audience commenting on live videos in 80% more than done on recorded videos.
Many businesses have now started using the term “Happening Now”, which is gaining so much importance in creating buzz for the event.
Apart from this, virtual campaigns are also on boom!
