Did you know that the average person checks their phones 58 times a day?
Whether you are average or above average, there is no doubt that our interdependence on smartphones has made them a valuable commodity for every industry. From retail owners to grocery shop owners — everyone can reach us via our smartphones.
Be it with a sponsored Instagram post or with a subscribed newsletter — marketing today has found a news outlet. After newspapers and televisions, we have reached the age of digital marketing using portable media.
Digital Marketing refers to gaining and converting regular users into customers by using digital media for communication. From automated email marketing to drip campaigns, Digital Marketing continues to evolve and find new ways to attract customers.
Read: 9 Most Advanced Techniques of Email Marketing
What started out with sending mass emails to prospective clients has now turned into a 199 billion INR industry. Automated marketing tools have made it possible for even small businesses to engage in digital marketing. So, how do you stand out amidst such a crowd?
The answer is simple — you need to keep up with the latest trends! Let’s take a look at why digital marketing is important and how you can use the latest trends of 2021 to your benefit.
Why is digital marketing important?
With Digital Marketing and its various trends, brands today use a variety of trackers and servers to find out user patterns. Automated emails can remind customers of their abandoned carts. Drip campaigns can send out conditioned emails when users make specific purchases. A/B Testing can help developers understand what users find more attractive and engaging.
Digital Marketing helps businesses reach out to a more prospective crowd. After all, everyone is looking for a good ROI. And with Digital Marketing, you can identify prospective customers who can channelise your energy towards them, rather than running generic marketing campaigns.
Essentially, Digital Marketing can help with:
- Identifying consumer patterns.
- Zeroing down on prospective consumers.
- Managing large subscribers with little capital.
- Retaining customers by understanding their areas of interest.
- Measuring your traffic and success.
With various digital marketing tools brought forward by brands like MailChimp, GetResponse and even Facebook, understanding customer patterns is now a simple game of graphs and charts.
Top Digital Marketing Trends in 2021
But, the average person receives around 121 business emails per day. The average ad exposure of a person is around 5000. Yes, 5000 per day ranging from billboards to sponsored posts to unskippable videos!
Here’s how you can stand apart from the crowd with the latest Digital Marketing trends.
1. Artificial intelligence and Machine learning
Most digital marketing tools today have incorporated AI and machine learning features. They can track user clicks, purchases, screen time, etc to provide brands with a better understanding of what they need.
However, while AI can provide you with information — it is up to you to make the right use of that information. Conversational marketing and personalised emails are some of the top outcomes of machine learning.
You can use the metrics that your AI tool provides to:
- Understand user segments and send out personalised emails to them.
- Understand the customer buying patterns and when they are most receptive to newsletters.
- See protected buying patterns and create the best campaigns based on them.
- Understand their most-used platforms and thus change your strategies accordingly.
It can also make managing transactions and user data easier. While you can get software platforms to do these for you, with some knowledge about machine learning, you can customize your own software as well! Join 10,000 other students at upGrad’s PG Diploma in Machine Learning and AI course.
2. Shifting platforms
Did you know that the shelf life of a social media link such as Facebook or Twitter is only 3 hours? However, the shelf life of a video on Youtube is as much as 7 hours!
Different platforms have different shelf lives and every year, newer platforms come to the fore! This includes TikTok, Houseparty, Snapchat, Caffeine and more. These platforms understand better than anyone the idea of capturing user attention within a span of 7 to 15 seconds. Many digital marketers have tried experimenting with various platforms to reach out to different user demographics.
If you are selling a tool mainly used by teenagers, perhaps choosing Tiktok over Facebook could deliver better results. Brands should not be afraid to move from one platform to another, as users too hardly remain in one place for long.
3. Customer segmentation and personalisation
There is nothing better than receiving a personalised offer on your birthday! With email automation tools that offer drip campaigns, you can create personalised deals for long-term users. However, a newcomer might prefer a welcome deal that promises more if he gets on the subscriber bandwagon.
The idea here is that customers are not a statistic. They are unique and individual and should be treated as such. This is where customer segmentation enters. Customer segmentation refers to the process of separating customers based on various tags and filters.
For example, you can separate customers as one-time buyers, long-term buyers, customers based within a specific state, customers with their birthdays in November, customers who specifically buy from one section, and so on. And then, you can send out customised newsletters to each segment, appealing to their tastes.
With proper segmenting, you can send out targeted ads to your customers which will make them feel valued.
4. Use of geo-fencing
Geo-fencing refers to sending targeted ads based on a user’s location. As such, it is another form of customisation itself. Geo-fencing helps in targeting users when they are most likely to make a purchase or subscribe to such functions.
For example, by using marketing tools, you can create a working funnel and introduce a condition in it. The condition can be something like this — if the user comes within a 5 miles radius of a jewellery store, send a targeted ad regarding the purchase of jewellery. Another way in which this can be used is, if someone is on a long road trip, advertisements can be sent for rest stops whenever they drive near to a gas station or restaurant.
Of course, geofencing is possible only if one’s smartphone or laptop is connected to the internet with their location on. As a growing trend, geo-fencing has immense potential for marketing and it will be interesting to see how brands use this to their advantage.
5. Ads that respect consumer privacy
With pretty much everything being available on the internet now, data theft and privacy have emerged as a prime concern. The recent privacy concerns over Whatsapp’s policy saw a major portion of its users shifting to other chatting apps like Signal and Telegram.
In fact, large data breaches from major sites often make it front-page news. And why not? Retail stores, healthcare facilities, education facilities and offices store huge amounts of user data. Any e-commerce site is privy to several personal details like payment card information and user addresses.
Incorporating stringent privacy policies into your marketing scheme can make users trust your brand more. Would you prefer to sign up for a free trial that asks for your credit card information or for one that simply asks for your Google login ID?
Sign up forms are one of the leading lead generations tools used by digital marketers. However, privacy concerns have made people wary of signing up using these. Do not ask for any information that is not necessary. You can ensure that your ads receive a better reception by creating an atmosphere of trust and safety.
6. Conversational Marketing
Time is money, and if there is one thing people hate unanimously — it is waiting! Customer support services and help centres are making waiting times lesser by introducing chatbots on to their sites. Chatbots are essentially programmed AI tools that can feed user conversation from a set of pre-programmed responses.
The aim is to provide a humane and realistic “conversation.” Chatbots are not only used to solve queries — they can carry out transactions, help users with picking out items, and make their searches more streamlined.
You can further develop these by adding voice search features to your domain or platform. In fact, after SEO, we are now moving towards VSEO where the V stands for “Voice”. The good thing about conversational marketing strategies is that they are platform-independent. You can introduce them across multiple platforms be it an app, a web page, or an email.
To conclude — It’s all about the customer!
In a lot of ways, digital marketing is a constantly evolving field that aims to offer a unique and personal experience to each user. There are still some extremely new features like Neuromarketing which aims to study a user’s brain to determine their activity patterns.
The rise of user experience and service design shows that it is important to understand the individual experiences and mindsets of the users. With these few trends, you can surely take your brand one step ahead of your competitors.
However, it is important to remember that while following trends is great — what matters most is the customer and their needs, pain points, interests, and preferences. As with any digital marketing model, it is the customer feedback that determines its success. So, pay extra attention to your customer to better understand how you should design your digital marketing strategies.
