Digital Marketing Trends to Look Out For in 2021
The digital marketing landscape is ever-changing. Digital marketing enables small and mid-sized businesses, in a more localised market with smaller budgets, to compete for their share of consumers. For smaller and mid-sized businesses to stay relevant and effective, it is important to keep ahead of the latest marketing trends. Here’s a selection of the latest digital marketing trends to consider for your digital strategy moving forward.
Virtual Events
When the pandemic hit, virtual events started to become a reality, but now they are a necessity. Most people have replaced face-to-face events with virtual events and will continue to do so beyond the pandemic, and last year the number of companies choosing to plan a virtual event doubled.
With more people working from home, Zoom has increasingly become a popular platform for video conferencing with 300 million worldwide daily users, compared to 10 million at the end of 2019.
Virtual events are here to stay!
Virtual events are cost effective. You can attend an event in the comfort of your own home, sometimes for free too. Physical events require a physical conference room to host events, however virtual sponsored events cost a lot less.
They are efficient. You can attend virtual events in your pyjama bottoms (just throw on your professional top). You do not need to book the day off work, or spend the day travelling to a conference. Virtual events are also fantastic for meetings with anyone worldwide, not to mention they are also sustainable! Overall, they are great for not taking away too much of your working hours.
Using Social Media to Engage and Convert Consumers
According to Hootsuite, there are 4.33 billion people on social media worldwide, which has increased by half a billion over the past year. The increase in social media usage has meant marketers now spend more on social media budgets, create new opportunities to engage with new audiences (more people shifting to online) and have a greater chance of being seen by users due to the rise in the amount of time people are spending online.
Chatbots
With the world becoming more digital, artificial intelligence (AI) is slowly taking over many jobs. AI can analyse consumer behaviour habits and track data to help businesses understand how people are shopping.
Chatbots will be a very important part of 2021. This AI technology can connect with consumers at any point in the day and is responsive 24/7 and can meet consumers wants and needs. This AI technology is great for businesses because this allows employees to focus on their work, leaving consumers to get their information from chatbots.
47% of organisations are likely to introduce chatbots AI in 2021 and will be able to help improve customer service and meet social expectations.
Audio
Audio has crept into our lives. From radio to voice gadgets, podcasts and now audio social media apps, such as Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. Such apps offer an audio-based chat room environment. Users visit whichever room they wish to listen in on, or contribute to. Audio is a very intimate content format and has many advantages over text and image-based social networks. Users tend to engage more and the context and depth of emotion can be easily felt and consumed by the listener.
Something that’s evident across all digital marketing trends, is that the priority remains to be with personable engagement and customer experience. People primarily want to connect with each other, and so a customer-centric and social experience is crucial to achieving this.
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