Digital marketing is a fantastic way to promote a product, service, or brand, providing you’re up to date with the latest tools and techniques. Both technology and consumer behavior evolve at a rapid pace, which means it’s vital to update your marketing strategy based on new phenomena.
To align your marketing campaigns to your customers’ needs and utilize the latest tech innovations, take a look at the seven digital marketing trends you need to know about right now:
1. Augmented Reality
Augmented reality, or AR, blends digital and real-life content to create an entirely new user experience. Now, users can see exactly how a product will look in their own environment before they decide to make a purchase. eCommerce clothing retailers can use augmented reality to enable users to ‘try on’ garments virtually, for example, or furniture companies can incorporate AR into their marketing to enable customers to see how pieces will look in their own homes.
With an added emphasis on personalization, augmented reality makes marketing content more relatable than ever before. As a result, users will be enticed and intrigued to make the most of this new tech, which means engagement could be set to soar.
2. Chatbots
Today’s businesses need to provide omnichannel customer service if they want to meet their customer’s expectations and chatbots are just one element of that. However, they’re an effective way for companies to enhance their customer service while reducing their own costs. If you can resolve queries via a chatbot, for example, a user doesn’t need to interact directly with a sales representative.
Of course, chatbots are only effective if they provide a good user experience (UX). To achieve this, businesses will be using artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance user interactions. When you use national language processing software to decipher what the user’s goal is, for example, you can deliver better customer service via chatbots and online messengers.
3. Personalization
Personalization is a trend in itself in 2021, so much so that it will be built into a variety of other digital marketing tools and techniques. However, making your marketing content meaningful to the user should be a top priority. The days of generic marketing emails or banner advertisements are well and true over. Instead, you need to segment email lists and use programmatic advertising to ensure marketing content is perfectly tailored to individual users.
However, this isn’t the only way you can deliver customer-centric campaign content. By using sector-specific marketing strategies and services, like medsolve.com.au, you can combine digital marketing with the requirements of your industry. By doing so, you’ll have the opportunity to enhance the success of your campaigns and increase your marketing ROI.
4. Video Marketing
Until relatively recently, digital marketing has been focused predominantly on text and images. However, there’s no doubt that the video revolution is underway, which means you need to vary the type of content you’re using to engage with your target audience. Video is popular across all demographics, which means virtually every brand can benefit from using video marketing.
Of course, to get the best results out of your video content, you’ll want to maximize its reach. As well as featuring videos on your own website and landing pages, for example, be sure to upload them to video platforms, like YouTube, and social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter. This gives you access to a massive audience and can dramatically increase the number of people who view, engage, and act on your content.
5. Visual Searches
Traditional search engine optimization will remain highly relevant in 2021 but there will be additional parameters to consider. Instead of being satisfied with text-based searches, users are demanding easier ways to search for the content they’re looking for. As a result, visual searches are increasing.
The vast majority of users have a camera built into their phone, which means they can use images to search for content easily. For brands, however, this means updating your SEO strategy to ensure relevant images are returned in user searches. While you may have been alt-tagging images up until now, you’re going to need to get a whole more detailed when it comes to making your media SEO-friendly. And, while you’re at it, be sure to incorporate this approach into your video marketing, as video searches are showing signs of taking off too!
6. Shoppable Posts
If you sell products or services online, shoppable posts are going to be highly relevant to your business. While you’re probably already linked to landing and product pages via social media posts and advertisements, shoppable posts are set to shorten the transaction process quite significantly.
Instead of having to visit an alternative site, shoppable posts allow users to make a purchase straight for their social media platform, without needing to be redirected. While this allows users to act on impulse and can, therefore, boost sales, you’ll need to capture a user’s interest, inform, entice and inspire them to act via an even shorter sales funnel.
7. Voice Searches
Visual queries aren’t the only way online searching is changing. An increasing number of people are using voice search and smart speakers to find the content they want. Of course, people search differently when using their voice than they do when they’re making a text-based query, which means your SEO strategy needs to be updated once again.
Being able to respond to voice searches means recalibrating your online content so that it’s voice-friendly. Remember – users are generally given more limited results via voice searches, so they’ll be tough competition as brands slug it out to be the top result.
Increasing Your Marketing ROI in 2021
With lots of new tools and trends to explore, 2021 is set to be a really exciting time for digital marketers and innovative brands. While you’ll need to make significant changes to your current approach to campaigns, doing so could give you the competitive advantage you need to boost your sales and establish your brand as an industry leader.
