Digital Marketing Skills & Trends to Focus on in 2020-21

The digital marketing industry is continuously evolving with time and so are the skills and trends. Digital marketing is made up of a lot of moving parts – SEO, social media, marketing automation, PPC, and more. New technologies, techniques, and ever-changing Google and Facebook algorithms keep many digital marketing teams on their toes, including ours. Part of our job is to stay up-to-date on the upcoming trends so our clients’ digital marketing campaigns remain effective.

As we entering 2021, marketers and business owners must prepare for upcoming digital marketing trends. The landscape of marketing is constantly changing, and if you don’t keep up, you’ll miss out on ways to bring your business to new heights.

Forward-thinking strategies will drive traffic to your website, grow your email list, generate sales and bring customers back again and again. Imagine if marketers used the same approaches they used decades ago. They wouldn’t be able to appeal to their target audiences, and their businesses surely wouldn’t thrive off of old procedures.

Keeping up with the trends is important if you’re going to advance your business and market to consumers the way they want. So here are 5 most important skills which every stakeholder in digital Ad Network shall focus to keep up and pay attention to in an continuously evolving industry:

1. Digital Psychology: Humans are complex creatures and multiple factors inter join in an complex web of mind space before a buying decision is made. Most of the buying decisions are made in sub conscious mind. Understanding how consumers behave and make purchasing decisions online is of utmost importance as e-commerce space is also evolving at a greater pace. Digital psychologists look into online behaviors, to give an explanation as to why customers behave the way that they do. If we’re able to better understand those behaviours, we can better understand how to digitally position ourselves. Digital psychology combines psychological and behavioural economics and understanding such behaviours. So looking at the theme of digital and web psychology as a whole, and the science of online perusation, what hidden psychological influences do you think your company uses on clients? How do you get people to click on something? And what should you be doing?

2. Digital Customer Experience(DCX): Digital customer experience is the sum of digital interactions between a customer and a company and the resulting impression that a customer walks away with. Its a fact that customer pay more for better Customer Experience (CX) and researches show customer quickly move to competitors for better CX and this probability is as high as 98%. Focusing on CX across entire value chain of Ad Networks is of utmost importance as inconsistency in this area frustrates users & stakeholders and erodes loyalty, which will impact overall customer experience (CX) whether you manage it separately from DCX or not. One such concept to effectively manage DCX is HYPER PERSONALISATION.

3. Hyper Personalisation: Hyper Personalisation is a more advanced next step to personalised marketing where it leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and real-time data to supply more relevant content, product, and service information to every user. Personalization is the incorporation of personal and transactional information like name, title, organization, purchase history etc. to your communication. Hyper-personalisation goes one step further and utilises behavioural and real-time data to create highly contextual communication that is relevant to the user.

For example a user browses for green shoes on your app, spends around 15 mins and leaves without purchasing. Sending an email to a user with their first name in the subject line is a typical example of personalisation. A good practice, but not engaging enough to capture a user’s fancy. While a hyper-personalized campaign would send a push notifications to the user’s mobile device advertising a flash sale on X brand’s green shoes on a Sunday, preferably between 6-9 PM. 

4. Front End Coding: Understanding front end coding is now a highly recommended skill in digital marketing space specially with the advent of code free modular tooling platform options. For example making custom changes to an e-mail campaign with changes in form design and front end interface design suited to needs of target audience by making it more appealing and user friendly with a clear Click to Action(CTA). If you want to have an competitive edge over others, understanding and executing code free tooling options, changes in form designs, changes in landing pages along with understanding of tracking codes, pixels etc is of prime importance.

5. Interactive Content Marketing & Video Marketing: Marketers are always looking at ways to spice up their content and appeal to their target audiences. As time goes on, consumers respond more to inbound marketing practices than outbound, which explains why using content to generate sales makes sense in 2020. Unlike static content, interactive content requires visitors’ active participation to get results. Some examples include:

? Quizzes

? Polls and surveys

? Calculators

? Maps

? 360-degree videos

? Infographics

Interactive content works because it grabs the reader’s attention and provides them with value. Boosting conversions requires persuasion on your part, but since it’s so good at keeping visitors entertained and engaged, it does the work for you.

Video Marketing is the most powerful digital content marketing tool as it increases the social engagement of viewers. As the old saying goes " A picture is worth thousand words and a Video is worth a thousand pictures" , video marketing is an effective and promising tool.

6. Digital Analytics: Digital analytics is the process of analyzing digital data from various sources like websites, mobile applications, among others. It provides a clear vision to the organization on how users or customers are behaving. Through digital analytics, companies obtain an insight into the areas where they need improvement. Digital analytics helps companies to provide a better online experience to its clients as well as potential customers, which gradually results in the achievement of desired goals.

Digital analytics is a tool used by organizations for collecting, measuring, and analyzing the qualitative and quantitative data. The data is then used to enhance and modify current business operations in order to provide a better online experience.

Understanding and having sound knowledge of digital analytics tools like google analytics is more of a necessity in 2020-21 as data collection and analysis, particularly in volumes enabled by the Internet, provides greater insight into customer lives, preferences, and desires. In addition, it offers greater insight into the efficacy of business practices and strategy, and provides concrete, actionable information on which to base important decisions in a myriad of business contexts.

As the year 2021 is almost setting in its foot, marketers must look at the upcoming trends to better market to their audiences and generate sales.