The same old digital marketing methods won’t work any longer.
Drawing up a well-rounded campaign now requires digital marketers to be more agile and customer-centric when promoting their brand’s offerings online.
You need to know which marketing channels work for your business.
According to Forrester, customer service interactions via digital avenues are projected to increase by 40%.
Forrester also anticipates that, on average, the digital brand channels numbers will surge from 8 to 11.
This makes it practically indispensable for companies to incorporate digital marketing in their marketing strategy.
Here are some of the must-follow digital marketing trends to look out this year and beyond.
Table of Contents
Conversational Marketing
With all that hype about chatbots, modern digital marketing trends have become all about clear and engaging conversations. Customers want it, and leading brands that deliver it win.
When customers have a question or concern, 82% of them expect an “instant” response. Essentially, conversational digital marketing enables real-time, one-to-one, between customers and marketers.
Unlike conventional tactics, this type of marketing is now leveraged by many brands and across multiple platforms. It allows them to interact with customers conveniently: on media, devices, and time schedules preferred by the customers and are best suited to them.
Today, customers expect to instantly find their preferred products and want their queries to get answered quickly. And as businesses prepare for a digitalized future, they must find ways to be available and accessible and communicate the way their audience prefers to.
Ultimately, the primary purpose of conversational marketing is to improve and enhance the overall user experience with a feedback-driven approach that fosters greater loyalty and higher engagement.
ChatGPT and Other AI-Powered Chatbots and Large Language Models
Chatbots, a software program, interact with site visitors and customers and a naturally sounding way in real time.
This strategy can help businesses save significant recruiting people from communicating and engaging with the visitors on your website on an ad hoc basis. A chatbot is personable, unbiased, and informative.
This, in turn, enables buyers to make faster and more informed decisions and ensures that users feel heard and are treated as individuals.
If you are not leveraging chatbot applications, it’s well-advised to get onto it as the artificial intelligence trend will likely continue to rise in the future. 67% of the companies stated that deploying AI-enabled technology helped them create a better and unique experience for their customers.
While the decision is also contingent on different factors, the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence will lead more companies to incorporate this digital marketing strategy trend.
AI-powered software applications practically facilitate brands with a unique voice and enhance their interaction with customers.
Companies like Swiggy and Amazon have levelled up their digital marketing game and, ultimately, their customer service by leveraging customized AI-powered chatbots.
In addition to responding to the FAQs, these chatbots keep track of previous conversations and naturally interact with visitors. So, upgrading to AI-enabled chatbots is a requisite to ace your overall marketing game in 2021.
Tangentially, and detrimentally for many digital marketers is the fact that link building for SEO will continue to diminish as AI becomes more prominently weighted in search algorithms as well.
ChatGPT’s Impact on Digital Marketing
The rise of ChatGPT has been legendary and it’s impact as a digital marketing trend cannot be understated.
It is the fastest digital application to reach one million users.
- Content Generation:
- Automated Content Creation: ChatGPT can be utilized to generate high-quality and engaging content for websites, blogs, social media, and other marketing channels. This helps marketers save time and resources in content creation.
- Product Descriptions and Reviews: E-commerce businesses can use ChatGPT to generate product descriptions, reviews, and other content to enhance their online product listings.
- Customer Support:
- Chatbots: ChatGPT can power more advanced and natural language chatbots for customer support on websites. These chatbots can handle customer queries, provide information, and assist in problem resolution, improving overall customer experience.
- Social Media Engagement:
- Automated Social Media Posts: Marketers can employ ChatGPT to create social media posts, tweets, and other updates. This can help maintain a consistent posting schedule and engage with the audience on various platforms.
- Email Marketing:
- Content Creation for Email Campaigns: ChatGPT can be used to draft email content for marketing campaigns, newsletters, and promotional messages. This can aid in personalization and crafting compelling messages.
- Market Research:
- Data Analysis and Insights: ChatGPT can assist in analyzing large sets of data to extract valuable insights. This information can be used for market research, understanding consumer behavior, and refining marketing strategies.
- Personalization:
- Personalized Recommendations: By understanding user preferences and behaviors, ChatGPT can contribute to creating personalized recommendations for products or content, leading to more targeted marketing efforts.
- SEO Optimization:
- Content Optimization: ChatGPT can help marketers optimize website content for search engines by generating relevant and keyword-rich content, improving SEO performance.
- Training and Onboarding:
- Employee Training: ChatGPT can be used in training programs for marketing professionals, helping them stay updated on industry trends, learn new strategies, and enhance their skills.
To help navigate this ever-changing landscape, I thought it would prove helpful to weave in the following graphic, which helps showcase best practices for using ChatGPT to ride the wave of LLMs (large language models) in all digital marketing trends:
Video Marketing
Video marketings is one of the most effective ways to inform customers about your products and services. And interestingly, it is by far the most preferred way customers wish to learn about a brand’s offerings.
This is not merely restricted to YouTube. You can leverage the power of video marketings in several other ways to increase a higher engagement level. For example, you can make an entire video post or conduct a live broadcast session on social media.
Additionally, if your website has more video contents, it will drive higher site traffic than text. This is because the audience finds video contents more compelling and visually appealing than simple text. As a result, Google push sites that comprise videos.
Videos marketing is relatively more straightforward, too, as it just requires you to reformat the content. However, it is essential to transcribe the video content and publish it under the video post.
92% of marketers already leverage video content and states that it’s an integral part of digital marketing strategy.
Videos marketing helps persuade and entice the audience to a specific brand that drives conversions. This is because customers are more likely to interact and engage with videos than with other forms of marketing, such as written content or blog post.
Videos marketing trend is likely to remain a growing avenue for brands to connect with their audience and ultimately drive conversions. Therefore, it’s imperative for businesses to incorporate video content in their digital marketing tactic in 2021.
Influencer Marketing
While influencers and content marketers exist within various social media platforms, Instagram tops the brand-partnership preference.
Nearly 79% of the brands leverage Instagram for their influencer marketing campaigns, followed by Facebook at 46%, YouTube at 36%, Twitter accounts for 24% and 12% go for LinkedIn, as stated by Business Insider.
Along with the rise in influencer marketings efforts by many brands, many novel marketing tools and apps have provided creators with ample resources to create compelling content and reach out to the right people.
In 2021, this combination will undoubtedly lead to a successful year for brands and influencers or content creators alike. If you are dabbling to partner with an influencer, now is the right time to invest your time and resources.
Furthermore, there are other influencer-related trends that you can look out for in 2021. This includes building long-term alliances with influencers, focusing on inclusion, and ensuring diversity in your influencer programs. There is no doubt that the right affiliate programs can help you promote your brand-related content.
Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, etc., amongst others, have significantly helped brands target the right customer base. However, it is vital to partner with the right influencers to target the right audience according to your business niche.
You can collaborate with content creators on various platforms to reach a more comprehensive and right audience base. But above all, make sure that their vision and values sync and align with your brand’s.
According to Business Insider, the influencer industry is projected to be worth up to 15 billion dollars from 8 billion dollars in 2019. This makes it indispensable for brands to make the most of influencer marketings.
Voice Search Assistants
Although voice search is not currently incorporated in Google’s Or search engines algorithm, it still dictates the current search results. Often, voice search queries yield different answers than if the user types a text-based query in the search bar.
However, for search engine optimization, voice search components can be a good idea for brands to facilitate the consumers who want to adapt and switch over to this medium.
According to voice search experts, all the brand-related content should be explicitly optimized for voice. This is because the content needs to be more conversational and direct to sync and accurately align with search queries. This will help you boost the site traffic by staying more visible and relevant to consumers.
And amidst the global pandemic, the day-to-day use of voice search assistants elevated 26% in the United States.
Devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo play music, make to-do lists, search for information, set alarms, manage and control other connected devices, and even shop for you. This brings agility and practicality to customers’ everyday lives, and isn’t everyone looking for ways to make their lives easy?
These digitally enabled solutions fulfill a significant need in the market, and they are fun to play with.
This increased adoption of voice and virtual assistants is a brilliant opportunity for digital marketer to innovate in digital marketing. The possibilities are virtually endless as you can use this technology to resonate and connect with your audience using audio content such as podcasts.
It’s also important to note that the use of voice search assistants is greater on smartphone devices. 27% of the customers used voice search on their mobile devices in 2018. And that statistic tends to grow as virtual assistants become popular. So, you can optimize your content for conversational searches.
User-Generated Content
User-generated content is a robust and high-powered instrument for your website. It enhances the overall customer experience and helps with Google search engine optimization (SEO) when moderated appropriately.
A common misperception about user-generated content is that many marketers think it has to complicate or intensive. But, in actuality, that isn’t the case.
UGC could include comments on your blog posts or product reviews on your site. It’s a growing digital marketing trend that will gain more popularity in 2021, and for the right reasons.
As its name suggests, UGC involves getting your users and customers to create quality content for you. This includes unboxing videos, reviews, hashtag challenges, etc.
More than ever, brands value customer experience and want to make consistent efforts to provide a unique service to their targeted audience. And consumers also crave such interactions with brands that are memorable. They want social proof before they invest in buying your products or services and, therefore, want reassurance.
And user-generated content is paramount to develop connective content marketing and helps brands:
- Build a strong community
- Come up with uplifting and relatable content
- Meet their customer requirements
UGC allows businesses to forge strong and long-lasting relationships with their customer base and in a way that provides social proof.
Personalization
Personalization is the cornerstone to creating an effective digital marketing strategy. From podcasts, videos, social media, blogs by email marketing, customer feed are curated by different forms of content.
So if you want to create memorable and unique content that stands out from the crowd, the key is to personalize it.
Whether it’s your CTAs or the landing page copy, the content marketing you come up with should precisely target the niche customer base you want to get your message across.
Otherwise, your content might go unnoticed. Using ideal customer profiles and buyer personas can help you developing content that exclusively appeals to diverse customer segments according to their specific needs.
You can also leverage CRM systems, e.g., Zoho, HubSpot, etc., to better segment and cluster your customers and incorporate them on your website. Tailoring your content for your customers allows you to build a rapport with your intended audience and results in higher conversion rates.
Leverage Ephemeral Content
The rise of social media channels like Instagram and Snapchat has made ephemeral content a predominant influencing force in the digital marketing world.
Ephemeral content essentially refers to the visual content on digital platforms that are accessible temporarily.
The snaps on Snapchat, Fleets on Twitter, or stories on Instagram are typically the content available for a maximum of 24 hours, and after that, it automatically disappears.
Amongst all the other top digital marketing trends, it is vital for brands to leverage this and promote their specific content by making most of this tactic.
The reason for this is that ephemeral content marketing gets a prompt response from your audience base by letting them engage and interact with your brand. It also allows you to expand your reach and build trust and credibility within your network. In order to hook your target market, you can also give them discount codes.
Shoppable Posts
Stories are a great way to promote your content marketing and get your message across in a compelling manner. Shoppable posts across multiple social platforms let you leverage a storytelling approach to sell your offerings. So ensure that you feed your target audience a great tale.
Instagram is one of the most effective platforms for shoppable posts. It has significantly streamlined customers’ buying process and would continue to simplify things in the upcoming years. You can use Instagram stories and promoting your brand and storytelling.
Furthermore, Pinterest and Facebook are quite well known among many brands, so it’s essential to experiment on these popular platforms. If you are specifically an online retailer, leveraging shoppable posts can help you drive traffic to your website and product pages.
VR And AR Enabled Technology
Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) serve as potent tools when it comes to marketing trends on digital platforms, especially during recent times. These technologies allow customers have intuitive customer experience by letting them connect to global brands on an emotional level.
By creating virtual and augmented technology-enabled experiences, you offer customers tours and create interactive 3D based patterns for users.
Brands, for example, IKEA, take customers through the entire product creation process. They leverage Augmented Reality to help customers see how a specific piece of furniture will look like in their actual spaces before purchasing.
Customers expect to have more interactions with Augmented Reality on digital platforms in 2021
According to eMarketer, in 2020, 30% of the users interacted with AR on social channels content monthly. The number is projected to grow by 7.2%, which will make it a total of 46.9 million customers.
Using VR and AR technology makes the buying decisions more manageable, giving buyers a personalized experience by addressing their needs.
Insights-driven Marketing
If you wish to fly high in 2021, leveraging data-driven insights can be a way to level up your brand’s marketing game effectively. Using data and analytics can help you enhance your business performance significantly as well as optimize the outcomes.
With the rapid evolution in customers and their buying behaviors, insights essentially enable you to stay ahead of the market’s intense competition.
Therefore, it is imperative to cash on this digital marketing trend specifically as it’s a secret weapon to improve customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Wrapping Up
Digital marketing trends are constantly evolving. That means that now is the best time to work on your tactics and incorporate a concrete approach to enhance your digital marketing efforts.
Know that all your hard work will go to waste if you don’t keep up with the changing customer preferences and behavior. Just follow your audiences, and they’ll show you the way they’d like to buy from you. And use the strategies detailed above to call their attention to your brand.
You’ll need to develop a well-versed marketing plan and leverage these trends to get maximum results.
This concludes the listicle of 11 important digital marketing trends that you need to keep an eye out for and incorporate in 2021. With these trends, you can stay on top of your digital marketing game and thrive in the long terms. And when you have a clear vision, take your game to the next level.
Tim holds expertise in building and scaling sales operations, helping companies increase revenue efficiency and drive growth from websites and sales teams.
When he's not working, Tim enjoys playing a few rounds of disc golf, running, and spending time with his wife and family on the beach...preferably in Hawaii.
Over the years he's written for publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Marketing Land, Search Engine Journal, ReadWrite and other highly respected online publications. Connect with Tim on Linkedin & Twitter.
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