With 2021 upon us, pivoting digitally and following marketing trends isn’t a luxury – it’s the difference between success and failure.
Nationwide lockdowns in 2020 forced businesses from all industries to adapt, and as civilisation transitioned to working from home, digital marketing became critical for businesses.
Whether prepared or not, companies were forced to follow the online marketing trends, although not without its challenges. Massive industry shift sparked a significant increase in digital competition, with every Tom, Dick, and Harry frantically moving marketing efforts online.
Now, with 2021 upon us, pivoting digitally and following marketing trends isn’t a luxury – it’s the difference between success and failure.
Here are 5 key marketing trends for 2021 that you need to adopt:
1. Foster a community
Now more than ever, building a sense of trust with customers is crucial.
While analytical tools can track conversions and insights, they can’t measure the enormous potential of dark social — effectively 2021-style ‘word of mouth’ advertising (aka: emails, private messages, texts etc.)
With ad space competition at an all-time high, creating a community where members feel valued and included is a pivotal differentiator — be that through VIP Facebook groups, exclusive email lists, or in-person/Zoom meet-ups.
Besides stimulating brand loyalty, communities are excellent resources for gaining feedback and user-generated content, which can help inform current and future marketing activities for your brand.
2. Supercharge your e-commerce
Last year, we spoke about setting up e-commerce — fast forward 12 months and nobody could’ve predicted the rapid acceleration of e-commerce and digital marketing that swept the globe.
That dominant marketing trend isn’t slowing down, and this year you need to supercharge your efforts; 2021 is a time of testing, maximising, and enhancing your e-commerce offering.
How can you optimise the end-user purchase experience? Can you run ‘smart campaigns’ to attract new customers? Is more underlying success (profit, reach, retention) achievable by tweaking current offers, or do you need to throw out the kitchen sink?
Ask yourself these types of questions, run website speed tests, check for bugs, and trial a variety of different conversion tactics.
Your e-commerce might already be great, but it’s time to turn great into amazing.
RELATED: How small businesses can move their physical store online
3. Create a beautiful user experience
In 2021, marketing is a crowded, noisy space, and as more businesses shift online to keep up with marketing trends, the competition will only increase.
To stand out, less is often more. Complicated designs, enormous text blocks, and junky pop-ups can confuse and distract the customer from the point of sale (plus, pop-ups are so last year!)
Messages and visuals, whether print or digital, need to be clean, authentic, beautiful, and capable of engaging on a deeper level, working to put the user at the centre of the experience.
4. Advance your digital advertising
Advertising platforms are constantly changing and, that’s just a fact of 2021.
To maximise marketing budgets and harness the ever-growing potential of digital marketing, the content needs to stand out.
But before you can succeed, you need to understand; by experimenting with new techniques, new ad mediums, and different creatives that relate to marketing trends (such as trustworthy user-generated content), you’ll quickly learn what converts (and what doesn’t) for your particular target market.
Whether you finally want to look into programmatic advertising, or run ad variants to refine your marketing message, or if you’re keen to take a more agile approach to your advertising, 2021 is the year to do so.
With another tech-focused year under our belts, audiences have also now become hyper-aware of targeted advertising, which is why advancing your ad techniques is critical.
5. Optimise SEO for visual search
Long gone are the tunnel-vision days of text-centric SEO. In 2021, there’s another string in the SEO bow: visual.
Besides scouring the right niche and long-tail keywords with keyword planning tools, it’s important for marketers to implement a sound visual SEO strategy that embraces the increase in image and video searches.
If you can master effective alt text, produce high-quality visuals, and upload images to your sitemap, you’ll see your rankings skyrocket in no time.
Need help with your marketing for 2021?
If you need help refreshing your marketing presence or want to kick off the new year off with a dynamic marketing strategy, then Assemblo is here for you.
Assemblo is a full-service marketing agency based in Melbourne, with a team of highly skilled marketing professionals including strategists, account managers, designers, software developers, copywriters, social media producers, photographers, SEO specialists, and more.
To learn more, give us a call on (03) 9079 2555 or drop us a note via the contact form below.