Top 13 Digital Marketing Trends of 2021

Digital transformation is forcing organisations  to change the way they deliver their products and services. It is all the more relevant to build an agile strategic approach to Digital Marketing . It is imperative that to win we need to plan ,manage and optimise our digital efforts against the defined targets. To help you in this regard I have outlined the Top 13 trends in digital marketing currently applicable in 2021.

1) Artificial Intelligence

If you haven’t already realised it, the dominance of artificial intelligence (AI) is here. It’s sure to be at the heart of global business and industry in the future – and it’s already taking over many simple jobs.

Here are the top reasons why organizations are adopting AI in their business:

AI can analyse consumer behaviour and search patterns, and use data from social media platforms and blog posts to help businesses understand how customers find their products and services.

Artificial intelligence will soon be the driving force behind many services and, currently, we already see it implemented in such areas as:

• Basic communication
• Product recommendations
• Email personalization
• E-commerce transactions

2) Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising means using AI to automate ad buying so you can target more specific audiences. Real-time bidding, for example, is a type of programmatic ad buying. This automation is much more efficient and fast, which means higher conversions and lower customer acquisition costs.

Here’s a quick look at how programmatic advertising works:

3) Chatbots

Chatbots will continue to be an important part of digital marketing in 2021. This AI-based technology uses instant messaging to chat in real-time, day or night, with your customers or site visitors.

Many customers prefer interacting with chatbots as they are responsive 24/7, give answers promptly, accurately recall your entire buying history, and never lose patience. These virtual assistants offer outstanding customer service by meeting customers’ expectations and automating repetitive tasks – which means that you can focus on more important work.

Many brands already use chatbot technology, including rideshare brand Lyft. You can request a ride from Lyft via chat (Facebook Messenger and Slack) or voice (Amazon Echo), and their chatbot will let you know the current location of your driver:

Passengers can use the app to choose the type of ride, make a request, track the location of the car, send friends a time estimate of their arrival, and make payment.

4) Conversational Marketing

With all that talk about chatbots, the reality of modern marketing becomes clear: it’s more conversational. People want it that way, and so brands are reacting. When consumers have a question, 82% want an “immediate” response.

Conversational marketing facilitates a one-to-one, real-time connection between marketers and customers: 

Unlike traditional strategies, this form of marketing is now available across multiple channels, allowing brands to meet customers on their terms: on the devices, platforms and time schedules that suit the

Ultimately, the primary goal of conversational marketing is to enhance the user experience through a feedback-driven model that fosters higher engagement and greater loyalty.

5) Personalisation

If you want to stand out in 2021, you need to personalize your marketing – and that means personalised content, products, emails and more.

Consider these:

• 63% of consumers are highly annoyed with generic advertising blasts
• 80% say they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalised experiences
• 90% claim they find personalisations appealing

When you want to study examples of the power of personalisation, it’s hard to overlook Netflix and Amazon, with their tailored recommended products or movie titles. Here are a few other companies that are successfully using personalization today:

• Cadbury’s created a personalised video campaign that matches a Dairy Milk flavor with users based on data from their Facebook profile, including age, interest and location. The campaign generated a 65% click-through rate and a 33.6% conversion rate, proving that the personal touch works.
• Starbucks uses a mobile app that draws on data like purchase history and location to get as personal as possible, allows customers to customize their drinks, and encourages further use with its rewards system – which skyrocketed their revenue to $2.56 billion:

6) Video Marketing

Video marketing is one of, if not the, most important marketing trend today and likely for the next 5-10 years. These numbers show the importance of incorporating video into your digital marketing strategy in 2021:

• 70% of consumers say that they have shared a brand’s video
• 72% of businesses say that video has improved their conversion rate
• 52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions
• 65% of executives visit the marketer’s website and 39% call a vendor after viewing a video

Video is by far the most popular way customers want to learn about new products:

And don’t just think YouTube. There are plenty of ways to drive higher engagement with your video marketing, as you can make a video post or start a live broadcast on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn.

One of the issues that marketers have faced in recent years is the growing shift to mobile devices. Those long-form sales pages and emails of yesteryear are fading fast because they’re simply too difficult to read on small mobile screens. However, video can present the same information in a format that works perfectly regardless of the device.

If your site includes video, it’s 50X more likely (50 times!) to drive organic search results compared to text. Why? Because people find video content more compelling, so Google pushes pages that include videos higher in the rankings.

Here are some other video marketing trends that are gaining more and more traction:

• Live video is particularly popular with a large number of businesses who use it for interviews, product demos and behind-the-scenes glimpses of the brand, such as life in the office, how products are made, company events, etc.
• 1:1 video is when businesses or marketers create personalized video messages rather than make phone calls or send emails. With the decreasing cost of film equipment and increasingly high-quality smartphone cameras, this is easier than ever.
• Video SEO. YouTube and other videos are displayed in the SERPs, so video optimization is becoming much more important – like using text overlays and closed captions, in addition to your description, title and file names. Check out this guide to learn more about YouTube SEO.

7) Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a type of word-of-mouth marketing that focuses on using key leaders to amplify your brand message to a larger market. Influencers can be well-known celebrities, but more often they are Instagram or YouTube personalities with a huge niche following who can help spread the word about your business or product through their social channels.

Because influencer marketing is generally more authentic than corporate advertising:

• 63% of consumers trust influencers’ opinions of products much more than what brands say about themselves
• 58% of people have bought a new product in the past six months because of an influencer’s recommendation

For this reason, Iceland, a popular British supermarket chain, switched from ads with celebrities to a campaign that features real-life moms. Teaming up with YouTube community Channel Mum, it now works with a number of vloggers to promote its products in a more “authentic” fashion.

Influencer marketing is also going to be affected by artificial intelligence. With each year, AI is making the process of finding the right influencers to partner with easier and faster. It’s helping identify those with better engagement, fewer fake followers, and a higher chance of generating a positive return on investment (ROI). In addition, artificial intelligence is transforming influencer marketing in the following ways:

• Image recognition with ANN (Artificial Neural Networks)
• Determining influencer performance with NLP (Natural Language Processing)
• Predicting incentives with ANN
• Determining an influencer's influence
• Flagging posts that don’t follow disclosure guidelines
• Elimination of fake engagements and spam bots

8) Social Messaging Apps

If you think social messaging apps are just for sending emojis to your friends, take a look at these numbers:

• 1.3 billion monthly users are active on Facebook Messenger:
• 10 billion messages are sent between people and businesses on Facebook Messenger every month
• WhatsApp has 1.6 billion active users and 55 billion messages are sent via every day
• The top three social messaging apps – WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat – have more combined users than Facebook or YouTube

These statistics show the popularity of social messaging apps, and since people are spending more time messaging each other, it makes sense to market your company’s products and services where your potential customers are hanging out.

Social messaging apps can be very useful in sending messages to customers directly, as they allow personalisation and add value to the user experience.

9) Visual Search

Visual search can take the user experience to a totally new level: People can upload an image to conduct a search and get more specific results.

A) Pinterest Lens

Not surprisingly, Pinterest has jumped on the visual search bandwagon. They came out with Lens, a visual search tool that allows users to take a photo of an item to find out where to buy it online, search for similar products or view pinboards of related items.

Since the launch of the beta version, Pinterest's Lens now recognizes 2.5 billion home and fashion objects, has inspired over 600 million searches on Pinterest’s mobile apps and browser extensions, and has seen a 140% uptick from launch day.

Pinterest has continued to update its functionality:

• They introduced Pincodes, a QR code-type technology that enables you to find inspiration while you're out shopping or flipping through your favorite magazines.
• They launched Lens Your Look to take the guesswork out of outfit planning.
• They partnered with brands like Samsung to bring visual search to its latest smartphones and Target to allow customers to search their catalog using related products they see in the real world.
• They've fully automated Shop the Look, a feature that helps users buy products from companies that work with Pinterest, so you can, for example, buy a pair of jeans you see in a picture.
• They launched a bunch of new tools to help merchants sell their products, including Catalogs, which lets anyone upload and convert their entire product catalog into shoppable Pins.

B) Google Lens

And Pinterest is not the only one with visual search. Google Lens is a visual search engine by Google, which recognizes objects and landmarks through a camera app. Here's what you can do when you take a photo of the following items:

• Apparel and home goods: Find similar products and where to buy them.
• Barcodes: Use a barcode to find info about a product, like where to buy it.
• Business card: Save the phone number or address to a contact.
• Book: Get a summary and read reviews.
• Event flyer or billboard: Add the event to your calendar.
• Landmark or building: See historical facts, hours of operation, and more.
• Painting in a museum: Read about the artist and learn more.
• Plant or animal: Learn about species and breeds.

As CNet says, “Google Lens is turning into what Google Glass never was” when it comes to real-time augmented reality.

C) CamFind

CamFind is another visual search mobile app which enables you to search for anything from your phone simply by snapping a picture.

Instead of typing queries into a search engine, you can directly search via images to find similar images, price comparisons, local shopping results, etc. You can also take a picture of a movie poster and CamFind

As per Social Media Today:

• 62% of Millennials are more interested in visual search capabilities than any other new technology
• Images are returned for 19% of search queries on Google
• There are over 600 million visual searches on Pinterest each month

Marketers can get the edge on competitors by jumping on the visual search trend in 2021 to draw customers and serve them the perfect product.

10) Micro-Moments

A micro-moment is “An intent-rich moment when a person turns to a device to act on a need – to know, go, do or buy.”

People generally make instant decisions within these four Micro-Moments:

To take advantage of micro-moments in 2021, you need to be where consumers are searching for information in the moment – or, as Google puts it, marketers have to “be there, be useful, be quick.”

The growing popularity of micro-moments means that marketers must rethink the linear marketing funnel that follows a set path: awareness, consideration and decision. 

In 2021 and beyond, the customer journey will be more dynamic and unpredictable, as it needs to respond to rapid changes in consumer desires. After all, in the mobile age, people have become accustomed to instant gratification. If they think or talk about something, they want to learn more, see more and buy more of it with just a few clicks of a button.

To get the most out of micro-moments in 2021, you should:

• Identify your consumers’ “I want to buy” moments
• Be there in these moments of need
• Deliver relevant content
• Make it easy for them to make a purchase
• Measure every moment that matters

11) Voice Search & Smart Speakers

The increasing use of voice search has made it important for companies to rethink their digital marketing strategies in 2021.

• 50% of all searches will be via voice by 2020
• 55% of all American homes will own a smart speaker by 2022
• 72% of people who own voice-activated speakers say that their devices are used as part of their daily routines
• Voice shopping is set to jump to $40 billion in 2022, up from $2 billion today
• Global smart speaker shipments have almost trebled between Q1 2018 and Q2 2019, growing from 9.36 million units to 26.1 million units

Overall, people expect to be using voice search far more in the future:

Voice search plays an important role in providing all the relevant information that people are searching for through audio content. AI is getting smarter and the number of errors made by voice assistants like

And keep in mind that not only will more companies produce audio content in the hopes of gaining brand awareness (so you should, too), but ads are likely on their way next. That means that Alexa will tell you the answer to your question along with a “word from her sponsor.”

For all voice technology, remember to write in a conversational tone, focus on getting featured snippets on Google, and think about keywords that people will speak rather than type.

Optimizing for voice search is a great way to spread brand awareness, but how is that going to convert into sales? Well, in 2021, we’ll see more businesses try to tap into this potential, experimenting with new ideas to use smart speakers as a lucrative channel for driving sales.

The key for companies to realize is that voice search isn’t another channel to force messaging and sales. Instead, marketers must develop a unique approach to consumer interaction, and this channel should be

12) Social Media Stories

First, Snapchat came out with the concept of “My Story,” then Instagram and Facebook stories were introduced, and then YouTube unveiled their own story format: Reels.

Since these types of stories disappear after a set period of time, this is a great opportunity for marketers to make good use of FOMO (fear of missing out).

The benefits of using social media stories include:

• Increased brand awareness
• Constant engagement with followers
• Cost-effectiveness
• Increased traffic to your web page
• Invite followers to explore more with clear call-to-actions

13) Browser Push Notifications

Push notifications are on the rise, with 85% of online stores using them last year. Consider these other stats:

• At least twice as many people sign up for web push notifications compared to a newsletter.
• Only 10% of the best email marketers can achieve a newsletter sign-up rate that matches the performance of web push.
• 6.4 hours is the average time that passes before the recipient opens a newsletter. In the case of web push, the recipient will see the message immediately.

These are some of the major trends prevailing in the marketing industry today. The list contains only some of the major ones and the list is exhaustive and excitement never ends.