2021 is moving faster than we anticipated.
Local SEO, Mobile-first Indexing, Featured Snippets, Page Speed, etc., were popular digital marketing trends at one time.
As of today, most business owners and digital marketing professionals have them on their priority lists.
But, that’s not all.
The winds of change are all over again.
Now, ambitious concepts like augmented reality, shoppable posts, and chatbots are emerging.
They’ve inspired new digital marketing trends, which are sure to dominate the rest of 2021 and beyond.
So, let’s dive into the upcoming digital marketing trends and understand how they will help businesses.
But before that, let’s check your website’s health.
Audit Your Website
Before running any digital marketing campaigns for your website, you must analyze its health.
It will help you identify any underlying issue or problem that can negatively impact your campaign’s performance.
You can fix those issues beforehand and save yourself from wasting a lot of bucks!
For a quick and easy analysis, you can use a free website analyzer tool, and it will instantly show you all the errors on your site.
You can fix these errors to prepare your site for future digital marketing campaigns and prevent any losses that might be accountable to them.
If everything is fine in the website audit report, you are good to go with your digital plan.
In a nutshell, being cautious and proactive always helps!
With that, it’s time for us to look at the new digital marketing trends for 2021 and beyond.
Digital Marketing Trends For 2021 & Beyond
Trends symbolize progress. If you don’t keep up with them, you are simply not growing.
Here are the upcoming digital marketing trends that urge you to get creative or else get left behind.
1. In-Email Purchases To Be Common
Personalized emails, sophisticatedly targeted and tailored to the user, can deliver 6 times higher transactional rates.
When you combine email marketing with retargeting efforts, you can trigger and lead users into buying your products or services.
But, they generally don’t like a lengthy process, even when they are ready to purchase.
You have to keep it short and give users an instant buying option: in-email purchases.
When you email a person, ‘Hey, you were looking for this product on our site and, we got an exciting offer or discount just for you.’, you lure them.
Tell them more, ‘This offer is valid only for today, and we’d suggest you click the button below to buy it instantly. Don’t worry, we won’t take you out of your inbox.’, and they will be triggered.
Result: They make a purchase. You make a sale.
ECommerce sites will find this digital marketing trend quite fascinating, as it might give them a better ROI than their other digital marketing strategies.
And as more and more businesses add this to their digital plan, it will be normal to buy from our inboxes!
2. Shoppable Posts/Stories Pick Up Pace
As online shopping continues to grow, social media shopping seems to be picking up pace.
While the ‘Buy Now’ button was already there on most social media platforms, ‘shoppable posts and stories’ have further boosted social buying.
In 2020, 16% of US Consumers indulged in shopping via social channels. This is up from 12% of shoppers who said the same in 2019.
I hear you ask why?
Because users don’t have to switch between apps when they are in the moment of buying, plus, they don’t have to sign in to an unknown store. They can make payments and checkout from the social media app only.
Using the shoppable options, eCommerce brands create interactive ads and sell products in a much easier way.
That said, shoppable posts and stories are now a buzzword among digital marketers. It’s gaining popularity and is a great way to leverage the massive potential of social media platforms.
3. Chatbots Driven Sales Will Boom
A chatbot is an AI-driven technology.
Originally, chatbots helped businesses automate their customer support process by:
- Providing round the clock service
- Giving instant responses
- Answering simple questions
- Solving common problems
- Resolving multiple queries simultaneously
- Serving each customer individually
And by 2020, nearly 80% of businesses had included chatbots in their digital strategy.
But, the use of chatbots has gone a lot farther from just providing customer support.
As chatbots evolve and learn from the available data, they can perform many other tasks.
One of them is generating sales. By guiding users to make informed buying decisions, chatbots can help businesses multiply their profits.
They can offer personalized suggestions to the customers using the customer’s buying and browsing history and make sales happen.
In this way, chatbots help businesses generate more sales. And trust me, they are getting good at it with time.
As per an estimate, chatbots will help in reducing business costs by $8 billion by 2022. They’d not only be providing customer support but also driving sales.
Hence, chatbot-driven sales will boom, and they’ll dominate the digital marketing trends in years to come.
4. Voice Shopping Goes Upward
In 2020, 24% of Americans or around 60 million people owned a smart speaker.
This is up from 21% in 2019, and by 2022, 55% of all American households will have a smart speaker.
That said, more and more people are using voice-enabled devices to perform voice searches.
Recently, people have started voice shopping. They are issuing commands to their voice assistant to search for products and services.
After careful analysis, they are buying what they need with the help of voice assistants.
Thus, voice-enabled devices such as smart speakers have become an efficient sales channel.
Businesses are now optimizing for voice searches and implementing ideas that make voice shopping more lucrative.
They are fostering innovative voice interaction strategies to get on user’s shopping lists and drive more sales.
With that, voice shopping will be one of the fast-growing digital marketing trends in years to come.
5. Augmented Reality Unveils New Possibilities
Augmented reality offers an interactive experience to the users.
It helps them explore new things by offering computer-generated perceptual information in real-world environments.
For example, users can now feel how makeup items will look on their faces before buying them.
Or, they can get an idea about how a furniture item they are planning to buy will look in their room.
Also, if they spot a new car in their neighborhood, AR will help them identify and learn more about it.
By 2023, there will be approximately 2.4 billion mobile AR users worldwide, a rise of 2.2 billion from the 200 million in 2015.
Thus, augmented reality is of great interest to businesses and will shape an important digital marketing trend in the future.
The Winds Are Changing Fast
Technology, innovation, and user adoption are key drivers of changes in the digital world.
They bring new ideas and concepts to the table, inspiring marketing trends and influencing business decisions.
As a part of the digital world, you must look ahead of time and embrace the new trends well in time to outperform your competitors.
If you miss out on them, someone else will attract all your customers and sales, leaving you repenting forever.
So, watch out for the latest trends and think of innovative strategies to grow your business.
According to you, which digital marketing trends mentioned above will dominate in the future? What’s that one trend you’ll be optimizing for? Drop your views in the comments below.
This is guest post by Sahil Kakkar.
Sahil is the CEO and Founder of Rankwatch – a platform, which helps companies and brands stay ahead with their SEO efforts in the ever-growing internet landscape.
He likes making creative products that can help in automation of mundane tasks and he can spend endless nights implementing new technologies and ideas.
You can connect with him and the Rankwatch team on Facebook or Twitter.