The weirdest year of our lives is coming to an end, and it’s time to start thinking about the digital marketing trends of 2021 .
Marketers are living in a time when changes have been constant and we have had to adapt quickly and efficiently to them. What we thought was going to happen has not happened, or half, and what was not expected has come years in advance: like the great digitization of society.
We are going to know what online marketing trends are to come and what will be these revolutionary news. Do you want to know them? Well, keep reading!
- Do you want to know the 180 trends and predictions of digital marketing that will change the landscape in 2021 of our sector? Click here and download the free ebook that we have prepared for you with all the information.
1) The 5As of marketing
Do you remember the famous 4Ps of marketing ? we have given this concept a twist to reflect that the priority of marketers is no longer to sell, but to help users solve their concerns. In our opinion, these will be the 5 great marketing concepts in 2021:
- Provide value to the user.
- Help the client to solve their problems and needs.
- Anticipate the future demands of our target audience.
- Adapt to the buyer person.
- Automate marketing.
2) The storydoing
Brands are no longer just looking to tell stories, but to get users involved and live their own experience.
Storydoing strategies start from knowing what we want to tell, what we want to provoke and what we want to achieve. A star example would be Red Bull, which already in 2012 managed to put the entire planet on edge with the jump from the stratosphere.
3) The fragmentation of OTT television
OTT service applications are experiencing a phenomenon similar to that experienced by television channels years ago: they multiply and compete with each other.
Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung Tizen … we have more and more options, each with its own application and platform. And since more than half of the viewers hire only one, the competition for the market will be increasing.
4) The growth of eSports
The gaming sector is growing to the point of surpassing traditional sports, and in 2021 it is expected to generate up to $ 180.1 billion in profits.
At the same time, eSports are becoming a highly demanded advertising channel and more and more brands are including them in their strategies.
Marketing trends for 2021: formats and technologies
5) The shoppable TV
After the streaming revolution, the new trend in digital marketing is shopping through television . There are different formats, such as secondary purchase screens that the viewer can access with a click of the remote, or QR codes to scan with the mobile.
In reality, the first experiments with shoppable TV date back several years, but we believe that it is now that technology and consumer habits are ripe for this marketing trend to become a reality.
6) Virtual events and video training
The coronavirus has meant an acceleration of the digital transformation that we did not have before this 2020, and one of the consequences has been the profusion of digital events . Many of them focused on training to capture and mature potential leads.
The transition from physical events to digital is not so easy, as there is still a long way to go on a technical level and also causes that category of “special occasion” to be lost. The solution is not to try to copy your face-to-face events, but to create a different experience.
7) Automated customer journeys, based on AI and machine learning
Customer data platform tools allow us to create and manage highly personalized customer journeys, with emails activated based on consumer behavior and habits. Thus, we can create highly effective messages that take into account all relevant aspects for each client.
In addition, we must go beyond that personalization is based on putting only the name of the recipient at the beginning of the email. There are already tools that apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to customer journeys and even personalize the contents of the email itself based on different types of data: environmental, behavioral, interest-based or other data.
8) Programmatic advertising on wearables, TV and radio
The program advertising is another online marketing trend that has been gaining momentum in recent years and is opening up new channels:
- The wearables , especially interesting because of the large amount of data about their users hosting.
- Streaming platforms like Netflix.
- The online radio and podcast , another format content on the rise.
9) Artificial intelligence and augmented reality in ecommerce
The artificial intelligence and augmented reality combine to shape one of the biggest marketing trends 2021. Thanks to them, it will be possible to customize the online shopping process, ensure a good user experience and transform deliveries.
10) Biometric identification
The biometric identification through facial recognition, iris, fingerprint or the other physical features, is improving the ease and safety, a key component for the expansion of the digital ecommerce payments.
In fact, according to a study carried out by Visa, two thirds of Europeans would prefer to use a biometric identification to make their payments over the internet.
11) Big data-based natural language processing (NLP)
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the latest big data and marketing trend. Its role is to help big data systems better understand the information obtained and allow more natural conversations and interactions between software and users. An example is smart voice assistants.
Marketing trends for 2021: what’s new from Google
12) HTTP2 tracing
Since mid-November 2020, GoogleBot has started tracking over HTTP2 on some websites, and will expand this type of tracking over the next few months. At the moment, this change will not imply any modification in the results, only in the efficiency of the crawl.
In early 2020, Google announced that Chrome will no longer support third-party cookies for the next few years (2022) ; Firefox and Safari had already started blocking them in 2019.
Cookies have been used as a tracking method by advertisers and advertising platforms for decades. Now, the goal is to introduce new equivalent technologies to continue segmenting and targeting your campaigns without threatening user privacy.
14) Video campaigns for streaming platforms in Google Ads
Video on demand has been one of the great digital marketing trends of 2021. To respond to this reality, Google Ads has implemented a new TV section in its advertising platform , where advertisers can manage video campaigns for streaming platforms.
15) Smart Shopping campaigns
Google has also given a review of its Shopping campaigns; The new update combines standard Shopping campaigns with display remarketing to simplify management, maximize conversion value, and expand coverage.
16) Google Analytics 4
It’s time to say goodbye to Google Analytics as we knew it and welcome Google Analytics 4 . The new version seeks to analyze the behavior of users regardless of the digital platforms they use, and among many other novelties, it replaces sessions with events as a unit of measurement. The big news will be the App + Web property, focused on better understanding the customer life cycle.
17) Shoploop
Shoploop is a new Google platform that combines TikTok-style videos with ecommerce . Thus, users can view product demonstrations in video of up to 90 seconds that are played in a loop and easily purchase them from the application itself. For now, it focuses exclusively on the beauty and cosmetic sectors.
18) YouTube Video Builder
Creating videos for digital advertising campaigns is still an expensive and costly process for many brands. To facilitate this, in April of this year Google launched YouTube Video Builder , a tool that makes creating videos as easy as possible even for users without any prior experience.
19) Limiting the number of ads in Facebook Ads
Less is more … Or at least that’s what those responsible for Facebook seem to think, who have implemented a limitation on the number of active ads that a page can have . The goal is to improve advertising performance by having more information about the performance of each ad.
20) Self-service advertising on TikTok
TikTok has been the great digital marketing trend of 2020 and it seems ready to repeat itself in 2021. Its latest great novelty has been the incorporation of a self-service advertising platform . Of course, the ads have to follow the style that has made this network famous.
21) Spotify Studio Ads
Who said podcasts could only include audio ads? Studio Ads, Spotify’s new advertising solution, allows you to include video ads in a variety of formats, both horizontal and vertical. One more opportunity to connect with the users of this network.
22) LinkedIn Stories and Twitter Fleets
Stories have forever changed the way we create and consume content on social networks. Now, LinkedIn joins this marketing trend with its own Stories , which work much like Instagram. Its objective is to stimulate social relationships on LinkedIn and give more prominence to creativity.
Twitter has also joined this trend with its Fleets , content in images, video or written that are volatile and only last 24 hours.
23) Shopping on WhatsApp
The Facebook messaging application has been the last to incorporate an in-application shopping option, integrated with the Facebook Shops solution. One more tool to become an essential application for the ecommerce sector.
Marketing trends for 2021: content marketing
24) Interactive content
Questionnaires, surveys, games, videos, interactive ebooks … The new content marketing trend does not conceive of the audience as something passive, but rather seeks to hook them and get them to interact with us. In this way, we manage to capture your attention and make you remember us.
25) Pillar pages and topic clusters
The latest digital marketing trend of 2021 is about the way we structure and plan our websites. As search becomes more and more semantic, we begin to organize content around big topics and not specific keywords.
With this new structure, we create ” pillar pages “ that collect all the essential information on a topic of interest and in turn point to “topic clusters” or collections of pages that expand the information on each subtopic.
