At one time, artificial intelligence, data-driven marketing and voice search engine optimization (VSEO) were ambitious concepts bordering on the ridiculous. Today, these innovative digital marketing trends are among the top priorities for most business owners in 2021. Make no mistake: We live in a time when technology marketing moves fast and consumer interests and behaviors are hard to predict. Marketers can no longer stick their heads in the sand and hope that educated guesses and the same old methods will work forever.
Not only is technological innovation great for marketing, but it is also a powerful asset for business growth across industries. Today it is important to understand the power of online tools, how to use them creatively and what they can actually do. 99% of marketing will eventually move online. So, let's take a look at five big trends in 2020, where technology is driving the marketing equation in 2021. Online tools can now be used for so many purposes that when it comes to marketing, there wasn’t much diversity one year ago. Although the use of marketing automation tools (MOOK, Hubspot, etc.) rose 22% last year, the number of online tools used per user grew only 17%. Fewer marketers had time to develop creative or social media strategies, so they automated the mundane. Marketing fails when it’s all about automation. Considering the volume and scale of the digital marketing landscape today, automation simply must become the new standard for marketing. It’s no surprise that social media is a hot topic this year, as 2020 brought out the competitive, younger crowd. Social media ads also rose — by more than 20%. Crazy, right? The rise of social and Facebook marketing was overshadowed by LinkedIn and YouTube, but the numbers show that it wasn’t a fluke. Social media advertising grew by 50% in 2020, which means that marketers need to step up their game too. For many marketers, social and digital ads are the first step when starting a new business. It’s a personal and business boost that gives a marketing campaign the direction it needs. Marketers will have a chance to create engaging and relevant ads with the help of automation and social media. The rise of match.com has also divided the online world between those who use it and those who don’t. Yes, while the dating website has become a digital treasure trove, so has the marketing jobs it has fueled. Match.com employed over 90,000 people and was earning more than $1 billion in 2020. With a chance to work for the billion-dollar company come March, we can expect a rise in marketing jobs. Although the question stands, would people still use dating websites if there’s another option? If the answer is yes, use the robot in the red corner. Why? Because there was never a better time to be a job hunter. The hiring landscape has positively shifted to remote work, with remote teams taking over big chunks of growth marketing, content marketing, tech marketing and B2B work across industries.
They need to adopt more digital practices now to differentiate themselves from the competition. Today, consumer behavior is hard to predict. That’s why I believe purchasing decisions with measuring data are more important than ever. Consumers today are more confused, overwhelmed and resentful of online marketing — 67% of people say companies use too much advertising, according to a Forrester Institute study. What a bizarre attitude! Advertising alone doesn’t sell a product or services. When consumers know how much they’ll be saving, regretting or smoothing over with a certain purchase, the marketing and sales process is much easier to understand. That’s why it’s crucial for marketers to understand behavioral data requirements and how to use big data tools to make informed decisions online. Today, A/B is standard procedure for optimizing campaigns on social media, online forums and search engine result pages (SERPs). Leveraging A/B testing data can reduce costs and maximize marketing effectiveness. For example, an agency might run two A/B tests on Facebook ads to discover the optimal message to target people who like MAC cosmetics. When results of the initial experiments suggest a different message to run next, a creative team will pivot the ad campaign to put the best message in front of the right audience. It takes many workers (managers, designers, developers and salespeople) to bring a campaign to life. I believe designers play a vital role in decision-making for brands. They scan through criteria for creative direction, extract data-driven result ideas and let them float around their under-equipped desks for incubation. That way, siloed people talk to one another. That enables each person to understand, debate and make use of information (Digital Innovators 2020): on-the-fly.) As a marketer, I want you to think about the role of story and the voice in digital marketing. Voice is at the heart of what people want from a brand. It gives personalities to online stores. It makes ads entertaining. It creates identity. Digital audio is booming. Fans are excited about interactive audio experiences. Voice allows marketers to entertain and educate before launching their campaign — when the performance really counts. For example, do your research and then plan what voice-director Neil guard and his team will create: “Every industry is now developing the voice as the central advertisement medium. It appears Dolby Vision is the upcoming standard; in fact, it will dominate how sound impacts advertising over the next decade.” — BBC (2020). There are also a growing number of voice-learning apps. In YouTube, if you watch on an iPad, information is displayed next to the video’s thumbnail based upon the keywords you use in your profile.
Not only do marketers need to offer accurate, granular analytics and measurement for account-level results, but many are also turning professional when it comes to data science and AI for ads, content and remarketing. If you don’t seek professional assistance — think of a dedicated team of data scientists and/or an analytics framework that empowers you — make sure you build in support and automation for good measure. To gain clarity from business analysis and make valuable decisions, analysts should make data sharing tools their top priority. Top 10 Marketing Metrics That Should Drive Your 2021 Development Ahrefs conducted an independent market research study to discover which Marketing Metrics Rate. We surveyed business owners and surveyed customers to find out which metrics matter to them and which metrics should be high on their lists to prioritize for their next digital strategy. The results are in and the common thread is that: If you’re an under-the-radar brand or business looking to tighten your marketing game, knowing what metrics mattered to customers and what had been successful for others may unlock major rebranding opportunities, revenue growth or better ad performance. You can expect to see an increasing emphasis on CRM (Customer Relationship Management — the business of managing relationships between a business and its customers). Metrics identifying customers’ expectations for relevant service and loyalty programs will become a top priority for most marketers. A report from Adobe Digital Index found that customers expect cloud-based solutions to deliver authentic recommendations from friends and relatives to complete tasks on social applications such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter amongst many others. Additionally, a 2019 survey by SocialMetrics revealed that more than two-thirds of online shoppers used recommendation systems for everything from shopping and entertainment to food and read recommendations. With more shoppers now coming into contact directly with e-commerce sites, recommendations built from social media and paid methods may prove to be an even more important source of personalized and relevant information about users. Although not yet a major trend, the need for significant retooling in the segmentation of online conversations is a distinct topic of inquiry. Today, very little siloed data lives on either a website or mobile application. Instead, tactical data (such as website traffic, email deliverability, or content metrics such as page views, shares and referring website activity) needs to be fed into intangibles such as Custom Audience Reports (CAR) and Domain Awareness Reports (DAR), a component of Facebook’s Organic Effect measurement system. This mix of sources often equates to over-saturation of information on a page or application.
