Friends, hello!
In a few months, the New Year will come, which means it’s time not only to take stock of the years, but also to look into the future and, with the help of my trends, render it right now. There is a magic number 21 on the date of the new year, which means that there should be at least 21 trends. In general, I love everything new and I really want something new in 2021, but I still want to learn about this new thing now.
Is it worth trying to look into the future and predict trends after the coronavirus pandemic suddenly turned everything upside down this year and showed how naive and unreliable assumptions and plans are? The world has reminded us of its unpredictability, but, fortunately, at least the digital marketing sphere is still relatively stable, because it is online, where there is no coronavirus. Of course, she is also capable of presenting surprises, but already now we can talk about some trends that are highly likely to play a significant role in 2021.
And so to your attention the new digital marketing trends of 2021, which will be in demand by all cool brands around the world in the new year.
1. AI + ML + Marketing
A few years ago we only saw robots and smart spaceships equipped with lots of sensors on TV, while watching science fiction. Today, people demand smart automation in their life: starting from smart vacuum cleaning, to pet monitoring and lighting level in their home. Even mobile applications are choosing music it’s user will be listening to. And all that thanks to progress in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Lots of global giants, like Walmart or Amazon, already equipped their marketing departments with AI and ML to be able to collect customers data, track behaviour, analyze data to be able to offer local highly targeted advertisements when and where the customer is located, predict shopping items based on the weekly or daily habits and behavior patterns.In other words, brands are spending tones on money for getting informations on what we like, how we like it, when we need it, and where we are most likely would like to get it.
2. Chatbots + Marketing
Not only AI and ML are helping in building intelligent digital marketing systems, but also helping to build human-like chatbots to provide better customer support service and increase sales. You might say that chatbots are an old and hackneyed topic. But guess what? It is not and in the near 5 years is not going to be. Brands are spending lots of resources to provide high quality 24/7 customer support across the globe. Who can be better at 100% polite and 24/7 available customer support if not a chatboats. They are everywhere: in social media, on every site selling goods, and even some government related websites.
3. Marketing + Digital personalization
Personalization is one of the most important features brads can provide for their customers. That’s why most of the marketing departments spend lots of time to be able to catch what clients want, how they want it and make everything possible to be able to provide it. There are two different verticals of the marketing world regarding digital personalisation: the first thinks that it’s the most important and worth spending money on; the second one prefers to keep it on trak and to engage new audiences that would help to raise sales. We can see digital personalization in advertisements, video suggestions on Youtube, notifications coming to our mobile devices via apps we are using.
4. Native advertising on social networks
Native advertising will not surprise anyone already in 2020, but in the new year it will still remain one of the key digital marketing tools. It’s not just about affiliate materials or sponsored posts – native advertising is evolving at the speed of light and offers new ways to attract users to interaction. Interesting formats include funny Instagram masks and filters, branded stickers, native advertising on TikTok, which is becoming an increasingly effective platform. Simple, interesting and most importantly useful content on social networks popular and close to the audience helps to increase brand awareness, trust and consumer loyalty. For example, Netflix is actively developing the entire Swoon channel on Instagram and on YouTube in order to attract audiences to its new direction – Asian TV series.
5. Marketing + Video and visual storytelling
It’s simple: people love to watch videos. It is a serious mistake not to exploit their interest in this format. However, the competition in this area is growing rapidly, and we have to invent more and more original formats in order to compete with those who make truly professional content to attract an audience. Among the pros is the Chanel brand, which recently released a video with the famous actress Marion Cotillard and accompanied it with a series of videos about how this video was filmed, how they recorded a song for it and how the actress did her makeup.