Seven Digital Marketing Trends For 2021 and beyond

The global pandemic has impacted every industry. Many businesses have realised that they need to boost their digital efforts and focus on a social media strategy in order to connect with their customers, provide engaging experience and gain long-term growth.

The question is what will 2021 bring for digital marketeers? Here is our selection of 7 major digital marketing trends predicted for 2021 and beyond:

Permanent pivots for digital business

Creating virtual events and experiences is one way to engage your audience outside of your traditional marketing tactics. Diversifying your social media activity will also help you connect with a more engaged audience. To achieve that you need to enrich the user experience on your social channels by leveraging shop and other features which will ease the purchase process. For example, launch Instagram shop to complement a new ecommerce feature or project.

Social media to become a top channel for purchases

Social media platforms like Instagram have focused on creating a simple and seamless purchase path for users allowing them to easily go from discovery to purchase without ever having to leave the platform. Social media commerce will continue to grow in 2021 and therefore, retailers will need to adapt new rules to these platforms, similarly to what many did with Amazon.

Informed buyers will buy from informed brands

The period  of personalisation is evolving and is entering an age of personal commerce, where consumers will be able to co-curate their experiences with brands at any given moment reflecting their own preferences. Consumers expect brands to understand what their past purchases were and, based on all the data they have consciously shared while engaging with brands’ websites and channels,  help them to determine their next purchase.

To predict what they will want to buy and when, it is no longer a matter of brands meeting consumers where they are – it is about brands being able to tell them what they want and when they want it. If companies are going to continue collecting first-party user data, they will need to start actioning it in a meaningful way – predicting what their users want to see next and understanding where the consumers are in their buying cycle to predict their next purchase.

Virtual events are here to stay

The COVID pandemic has caused events to become virtual out of an necessity. As we move into 2021 and beyond, many events will stay virtual not only due to safety concerns, but also as a result of their great benefits which have been discovered in 2020. Many companies realised that by going virtual, they opened their events to an entirely new audience as virtual events are way more accessible than traditional in-person ones.

Virtual events eliminate visa issues, travel restrictions, additional costs and other concerns tied up with in-person events. Furthermore, many brands have discovered that eliminating these concerns leads to higher attendance and participation. This means lower costs and higher ROI for brands. The key is to get creative and drive engagement through a  great selection of speakers, rich content and of course – some fun.

In 2021 and beyond, virtual events will continue to be a popular way to engage with a broad audience as companies see the many benefits of them.

Reducing social media channels to only the most relevant

Many brands have started reducing the number of social medial channels they are using to connect with consumers and influence, and rightly so. With so many channels available, many companies are struggling to stay relevant on all of them ,creating an almost persuasive need to declutter. Reducing social media channels to only the most relevant will not only be popular but necessary for brands.

Live interaction included in virtual events

Virtual events have great power but only if the communication is not one-way. Many companies make a huge mistake assuming that virtual events should be broadcast instead of being live. Of course, there are complications that can occur in live events, but the reward is way greater than the risk. This is what attendees are looking for, something that can substitute, even in part, for a live event.

AR implementations for digital engagement

With Facebook owning Oculus and dozens of other augmented reality patents, it is only a matter of time before digital growth specialists will have to learn and incorporate AR into digital engagement. This is still on the periphery, but now is the best time to research, learn and consider how AR could be implemented in  current digital assets.

 

If you would like to know more about the digital services we offer get in touch with us.