Digital Marketing Trends 2021 – What to Expect?
Personally, all of my strategies relied heavily on pre-existing data but this time with absolutely no trends available and things changing overnight I was forced to act fast, think outside the box and work around the clock. Based on my experience here’s I think will be in the spotlight in digital marketing for the new year to come.
1. Impacts of Covid will linger
We are starting a fresh new year but don’t think that this pandemic is even close to being over. Most countries are still fighting with mutations of the same virus, acquiring the vaccines, more lockdowns, and cases rapidly increasing.
As competition is increasing amongst e-commerce brands, consumers are showing new behavioral patterns, needs, and demands.
So what do businesses need to do? Focus on understanding your audience and the buyers’ journey to make life easier for consumers to get what they need in time and with as minimal effort as possible.
According to the latest Retail insights on the Canadian consumer journey report provided by Google in the Canadian online market, 30% of Canadian shoppers experienced at least one issue while shopping online during the pandemic and 40% have experienced delivery issues when shopping online. This sounds more like a nightmare and moving forward in 2021, online businesses, especially local ones need to focus on eliminating this friction for online shoppers.
2. Shopping Ads
Google has been kind enough to lift some limitations and allow businesses to sell their products on Google SERP for free. However, is it really a good thing that now everyone can so easily join the game? Pardon my pessimism but opening the floodgate to let millions of products inundate the search engine doesn’t seem like such an easy way to make your product visible to online users.
Bill Ready, President of Commerce at Google states:
For advertisers, this means paid campaigns can now be augmented with free listings. If you’re an existing user of Merchant Center and Shopping ads, you don’t have to do anything to take advantage of the free listings, and for new users of Merchant Center, we’ll continue working to streamline the onboarding process over the coming weeks and months. (source: Cardinal Digital Marketing)
While this might sound like a way for Google to include everyone, in my opinion, this looks more like a business strategy to increase the popularity of Shopping Ads. More e-commerce businesses will likely take advantage of this opportunity and start creating their Google Merchant Center feed. However, while they’re at it why not try to pay for some ads as well. This in return will increase the number of Shopping Ads accounts and increase competition boosting the price for advertising so be prepared to increase your media budget if you want to be competitive.
3. AI/Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence has been trending in 2020 and it will likely increase in popularity over the next few years.
A recent article from Marketing Insider Group states that Chatbots will likely become the new standard on every application and will evolve from doing basic customer service tasks to more sophisticated tasks such as closing a sale. Some of them have become so good that users can’t even tell that they are not speaking with a real human anymore. So I guess Larry from sales is going to lose his job pretty soon, huh?
Another reason why AI will be trending in 2021 is that users have become comfortable with “machines” and marketers are able to analyze more data more efficiently in order to make the right decisions.
However, marketers be warned that you need to make sure you feed the “machine” the right data and give it time to learn, or else you will fail. I’ve seen it happen way too many times when a marketer paired machine learning strategies with their Google Ads campaigns when they haven’t had enough conversions only to end up with a considerable loss in efficiency.
4. Emerging Marketing Platforms
Since all the action will happen online in 2021, marketers should focus on reaching new audiences via emerging marketing platforms such as TikTok.
TikTok has been rapidly growing in popularity following the beginning of the pandemic. The latest official data shows that there are 800 million monthly active users around the world.
While most think that the demographics present on this app are made out entirely of teenagers recent data shows that the number of adults started growing since 2019. 41% of users are between the ages of 16 and 26, however, the number of adults grew 5X in the last year. Also, most influencers are close to 30 years old.
Advertising on TikTok has several other advantages including the fact that there’s less competition since it hasn’t been yet saturated with ads, the Creator Marketplace makes it convenient for businesses to find influencers that match their audience, the short 15 seconds video loop content format offers one of the highest engagement rates.
5. Local Marketing
With Covid impacting many of the world’s economies users have been more inclined to purchase from local businesses in an effort to support their local economy. This trend will continue to be present in 2021 with many boycotting big retail chains.
Google has shown a lot of supports to local businesses by launching new Google My Business features such as:
Small Business Advisors
Businesses located in the US can consult with Small Business Advisors about Google products. Small businesses can schedule a one-on-one, 50-minute video call with a specially-trained Google Advisor who can: Provide guidance directly from Google Tailor recommendations based on the business’s specific business needs
YouTube playlist of Google My Business tips
We found some great videos from Google My Business users who discuss some of the most common questions we get. You can explore a new YouTube playlist
Health & Safety attributes
Food, retail, and service businesses can add attributes to let customers know about the safety measures in place at their business. Safety measure attributes include: Masks required for customers or staff Temperature checks required for customers or staff Appointments or reservations required
You can find more Google My Business announcements here