Digital Marketing Trends For 2021 -Expert Roundup

It’s not a secret that 2020 has been a life-changing year for most businesses in the world. While some have been able to thrive, most of the small companies were hit severely with the pandemic and restrictions. This applies mostly to businesses who were not able to switch to marketing and selling online and have not yet adopted the full power of internet marketing.

If there is one major takeaway from the last year it’s that every business should start paying more attention to online marketing. Regardless of the industry.

Therefore, I’ve decided to ask online marketing experts about their opinion on what will be the main trends in 2021 in digital marketing.

Here is what they have to say.

• Andre Oentoro, CEO of Breadnbeyond 

Social media platforms have become ubiquitous in the online world. There are so many platforms that it might be hard to keep up with all the latest apps. However, this is why omnichannel marketing is super important. Whether or not you want to believe it, the trend of omnichannel marketing isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. So, this year, it’s time to focus on marketing across all the different platforms. The benefits of omnichannel marketing is reaching out to different audiences at the same time. 

• Ebnu Sudarso, Co-founder of Milkwhale

Content marketing is more important than ever in 2021. Consumers are getting smarter when it comes to browsing the web and reading content. So, if you’re spending money on paid ads instead of investing in content marketing, 2021 may be the year to change that. With ad blockers, your paid ads might not even be seen. Content marketing may be a long road but with time and effort, you’ll reap the benefits.

•  Victor Ijidola, Content Strategist at Growth Baker

Avoid doing too many tasks in 2021 that don’t really matter to the results you’re looking to get. There are almost always a million and one tasks on our desks as marketers every day; the onus is on us to make sure we’re prioritizing tasks that get the most results. This means we need to constantly do mental and physical checks of what’s taking up our time during a typical work day. Then, identify activities that should or shouldn’t be prioritized — given the results and goals we need to achieve at any given time.

• Farwa Anees, SEO Specialist at Content Studio

Content is going to play a vital role more than ever in marketing now. Ranking content requires more than just listicles and long-form content now . With Google Algorithms updates revolving around micro-moments more than ever, we need to add value to the content in order to rank it. So, invest in content marketing to increase E-A-T and build Google’s trust to build Brand’s name.

• Jyothi Tulasi, SEO Outreach Specialist at SmartKarrot

In 2021, Marketers need to focus on channelised campaigns. Improver vision can lead to failed attempts.

Voice search – Voice search feature will be helpful in creating personalized customer experience which will help brand loyalty..

Interactive content – Traditional text-based content must be replaced with interactive content. For example: sites who publish frequent user-gained content. From activities like fun personality quizzes, videos, roundup posts, influencer- list based articles, influencer interviews, podcasts, you can gain a lot of content with little spend. These are extremely engaging, shared and promoted.

Omnichannel Marketing – Omnichannel marketing gives you an edge on every relevant marketing platform. It’s easy to have a campaign set (such as newsletter, social media, apps, email, videos and blog) so you can connect with prospects on more touchpoints.

Companies should focus on omnichannel delivery to provide customers a uniform experience across various touch points.

For example, customers can interact on linkedIn and through email simultaneously. Enabling uniform customer experience across multiple marketing channels helps to build brand consistency and loyalty.

• Jeffrey Kagan CRO at Nifty

Consumers are very experienced with navigating the internet and are relying on tech influencers they trust more than ever as opposed to ads from the same brands they are familiar with constantly appearing in their social media feeds. I think that we will see a lot more YouTube influencers pop up in 2021 along with many google search users switching to DuckDuckGo and alternative search engines due to privacy and big tech concerns. 

• Erkki Muuta, Founder at WebinarSoftware

2020 was without a doubt a pivotal year for online marketing. “Adapt or die” was the tagline for that year and only the marketers who were able to adjust their targeting, spending and channels were able to thrive in that environment. 

We saw a huge rise in the number of online events and webinars being hosted. It’s no surprise since offline conferences and events are banned. However, we estimate that this change is not temporary. In 2021, we will continue to witness a shift toward measurable performance marketing and online events.

• Nikola Roza; Owner of Nikola Roza-SEO for the Poor and Determined

One 2021 digital marketing trend for marketers to be mindful of is focusing on being the last click.

What does it mean?

 It means giving the user what they want so they don’t keep on searching after they’ve visited your website. This is especially important in the context of Google search.

Let’s say a web user types in their query in search, Google loads up the SERPs, and they pick you first (which is good btw); then they stay on your page for 3m, hit the back button and pick a different result. This tells Google your site didn’t give them what they wanted.

If it happened one time and was a fluke, then it’s nothing to worry about. But if it’s repeated again and again Google will know and they’ll demote you from that particular SERP and you’ll lose your hard-won rankings.

The key to beating this is to match the user intent to the tee and to deliver high-quality comprehensive content for any keyword you target.

• Irina Weber, Content Strategist at SE Ranking

Right now it’s essential to personalize your content and communications. You need to find out as much as possible about your target audience in order to deliver your content to the right people at the right time. Fortunately, there are different ways to collect that: quizzes, surveys, different researches, using your website, apps, emails. The more personalized content you deliver, the more loyalty and engagement you will get from your target audience. 

Online communities (Slack communities, Facebook and Linkedin groups, etc.) will take a huge role in building a sense of belongingness and will be perfect for targeted marketing.

• Ron Stefanski, Founder at OneHourProfessor.com

Video will be king in 2021 and by video, I mean YouTube.  Over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed this insane shift where Google has found a way to embed YouTube videos deeper into their search result pages like never before.  In fact, it’s not uncommon to search for some type of tutorial and everything you see on the first page are YouTube videos.  Further, I’ve noticed that if I publish a blog post with a YouTube video embedded in it, like this one, the cover of the embedded video shows up in the search results ONLY on mobile.  Needless to say, Google is doing some very interesting things to push video to the forefront and I think that continues in 2021 and beyond. 

• Donald Chan, Founder at IMPACT! Brand Communications

In the B2B marketing world, we’re seeing more brands turning to LinkedIn for social selling and demand generation, amidst the absence of trade shows, exhibitions and in-person meetings (due to the global pandemic). For 2021, I believe LinkedIn will only become more important as a B2B social platform, and this means that brands, marketers and users will need to up their game – whether that’s content, outreach or LinkedIn ads. For those willing to put in the time and effort to bring their best to the platform, LinkedIn will be hugely rewarding. 

• Petra Odak, CMO at Better Proposals

Programmatic advertising will be the top digital marketing trend in 2021. Ad buying automation has been on the rise recently and 2021 will speed things up even further. You’ll be able to automate how much you spend on ads and you will be able to place bids in real time. This will not only cut down costs on paid ads but will also significantly increase conversions for many businesses as well.

• Aurelien Amacker, Founder at Systeme.io

Digital Marketing Trends For 2021-2022 and will include new technologies, strategies for global marketing campaigns, unique approaches to engaging with consumers globally, a detailed look at the international market and results of our most recent study on mobile devices worldwide.

• Keerthi Rangan, Content Marketing Strategist at Adaface.com

Content marketing is a long-term investment. Growing your brand and domain organically will be critical in 2021, with marketers focusing more on Audio and Video SEO. Marketing strategies that generate awareness of the brand and convert leads will always prevail.

• Mario DeAlmeida, VP of Marketing at Building Security Services

Google’s algorithms are only getting more robust this year (Hello SMITH), so a key factor in getting search visibility in 2021 will be to focus on search intent and going deep into subjects on your website if you haven’t already started doing that. Before just looking up keyword data and writing a post, do a Google search and see what is being surfaced in the search results. This will give you a lot of data about what Google and other search engines are looking for (think content length, topics used, backlink data, and much more). Suppose you follow the standard practices of just getting long-form content on specific keywords. In that case, you’re going to lose out if your competition is more sophisticated in how they’re generating user content.

• Joyce Qian, Head of Growth at ContactPigeon

As businesses recover after a devastating 2020, the Internet of Behaviors (IoB), as Gartner also predicts, is here to stay and guides the way for the rest of the market. Companies can increase their market share by delivering a coherent and personalized customer experience, and this is where IoB adds value. The capability to gather, blend, and process customer data from a multitude of sources is the fundamental way for businesses to deliver an engaging and data-driven customer experience at scale. We expect a growing number of retail and eCommerce businesses to increase investments in omnichannel solutions in 2021, resulting in an uplift in the ROI of their customer engagement strategies.

• Angelo Sorbello, Chief Executive Officer at LinkDelta

The pandemic accelerated a switch towards digital and eCommerce.With the leading advertising platforms always more saturated and the rising cost of ads, many companies will start using SEO to take advantage of this opportunity as not only the ROI is usually more predictable but easier to nail search intent. Using advanced TF*IDF based OnPage optimization tools are getting more accessible for even smaller companies with tools like SurferSEO. This is bringing up the level necessary to compete on Google’s SERP, while simultaneously opening up an opportunity to be one of the firsts in your niche to take advantage of this.

• Panos Ladas, Managing Director at ON.marketing result-driven marketing agency

We expect that in 2021 we will see marketing budgets further increasing as consumers will continue to spend lots of time at home. This will lead brands to experiment with their marketing mixes and create much more 360-ish marketing campaigns. From our scope, during 2020 we’ve seen the eCommerce sector skyrocketing its interest in SEO, Performance & Content marketing services and we believe this trend will further escalate in 2021, while the late majority will follow. In terms of new technologies, we predict businesses and corporations will invest massively in omnichannel solutions and emerging technologies like visual commerce, unified customer analytics. Infrastructure-wise we think that business connectivity and business agility will monopolize the budgets for ventures, in order to maintain flexibility and efficiency.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many different opinions and predictions about digital marketing in 2021. It’s important however to stick to the basics. Regardless of the marketing channel that you pick, you have to know your customer, be able to stand out, and stay consistent.

Author Bio

Andriy Haydash is a Freelance WordPress Developer who helps people build and launch successful WordPress membership and e-learning websites. You can get in touch with him on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn.

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