Digital Marketing 2021: These trends will be important this year

Voice search on the Internet has been predicted to have a golden future for years. While in the past it was mainly the lack of quality of voice assistants that hindered their spread, Alexa, Siri & Co. are nowadays on a level that makes voice search easy and attractive for web users. Companies must therefore prepare for more search queries being spoken in the future. This in turn means that queries tend to become longer and more complex. For companies, this is both a curse and a blessing. On the one hand, you can optimize your websites for new search terms. On the other hand, previously popular search queries and keywords may become obsolete.

 

Short videos are all the rage among teenagers and young-at-heart adults. No wonder, the short video platform TikTok has become one of the ten largest social media platforms worldwide within just two years. To target young people, more and more companies are producing special short videos with advertising or other youth-friendly content.

 

Facebook has waited a long time to jump on the frenzied online shopping bandwagon. But the social media giant's announcement that it will integrate a shopping feature on the world's largest social network has sent the e-commerce world into a tizzy. Businesses must assume that Facebook Shops will be a guarantee of success. The social network's data base is too large, allowing it to connect users' private interests and opportunities with their shopping desires.

 

For three years now, Instagram users have been able to tag products on posts with tags that provide visitors with additional information about the respective product and enable a redirect to an online shop. Companies now use these shoppable posts specifically to draw Instagram users' attention to their products and encourage them to make a purchase. In view of the rapidly growing user numbers of the image network, the importance of Instagram shoppable posts will continue to increase in the future.

 

In recent years, they have become ubiquitous on the Internet: Chatbots. These small, friendly, computerized helpers now support customers with many questions and problems on websites and in online shops. Thanks to artificial intelligence, the performance of chatbots is no longer limited to trivial questions. Against this backdrop, companies can use chatbots specifically to retain customers and entice them to interact more.

 

Projecting the sofa of your dreams into your own four walls or seeing your favorite shoes three-dimensionally on your own feet - augmented reality makes it possible. In times of high-speed Internet, the so-called "augmented reality" covers more and more areas and promises a completely new shopping experience. Augmented reality offers companies the unique opportunity to present their product range in a completely new and creative way.

 

Marketing with videos is the evergreen among digital marketing trends. Nevertheless, video marketing has lost none of its appeal to this day. Especially for more complex products that can be presented to customers in the form of test and explainer videos, video marketing plays a particularly weighty role. In addition, videos are shared twice as often as other digital content. For companies, this is a good opportunity to draw attention to themselves.

 

The worlds of offline and online shopping have increasingly merged in recent years. Digital marketing takes advantage of this fusion and accompanies a company's customers along the entire customer journey. The number of so-called "touchpoints" (points of contact between companies and customers) is constantly growing for most companies. This makes it all the more important for them to use omnichannel marketing to target (potential) customers via all suitable marketing channels.

 

The use of influencers has long since ceased to be a marketing secret. Influencer marketing will continue to be one of the most important digital marketing trends in 2021. However, special care must be taken when using influencers to spread a marketing message. The tightrope walk between authenticity and promotion is particularly great in influencer marketing. Companies should therefore think carefully about how they want to use which influencers for which message.

 

Last but not least, artificial intelligence is becoming one of the dominant topics in digital marketing. Driven by the big tech companies Google and Facebook, AI is increasingly finding its way into digital marketing. Self-learning programs analyze billions of data sets every day in order to recognize behavioral patterns among internet users and make predictions based on them. The resulting data is intended to help companies make their marketing campaigns even more effective.

 

The range of possibilities in digital marketing is growing from year to year. Accordingly, companies have to deal with more and more complex forms of marketing - no easy task. In addition, 2021 will be the year in which two mega trends in digital marketing, augmented reality and artificial intelligence, will leave their mark for the first time. The world of digital marketing will thus become smarter and more multifaceted than ever before.