Only the agile digital marketers, who can adapt their strategies to the needs of their small businesses, will succeed and survive. This is what marketers need to do to ensure that they can successfully adapt their tactics in 2021.
Read on to learn more about the digital marketing trends that will impact your small business in 2021. In the end, those who stick to their goals and have a solid plan for next year win.
One technology topping the list is artificial intelligence, which forms the basis of conversation marketing. Marketing for conversations has become so popular that it has brought together the world’s largest companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. Marketing through dialogical user interfaces, it serves as a way to go beyond traditional marketing tactics and use real-time communication skills. Despite the hype cycle of Gartner, conversation marketing is proving to be a crucial innovation.
According to the Gartner report, it builds lasting relationships, adds value, creates additional experience, and builds trust between customers and their business partners.
People no longer have the traditional marketing funnel to guide them through a painful, impersonal and too cold process. Even the conversion rate of landing pages has dropped to a meager 3%, cold calls are answered at a fraction of the cost, and multiple steps are sometimes unnecessary.
According to a recent study by the University of California, San Diego, conversational marketing consists of three steps: engagement, understanding, and recommendations.
Marketers learn a lot about the customer or buyer by having a precise context, and you can understand which features are useful and where the pain points lie. This lead conversion rate not only increases conversion rates, but also transforms your web portal into a more human, centered shopping experience, as it is no longer a general catalog.
By tailoring your customer’s insights, your conversion rates will be higher and you will achieve better returns. This shortens the time – up to – for the purchase of your products and services and the time for your customers to purchase them.
If your organization hasn’t yet introduced video marketing, don’t forget it in the next few years, because it’s one of the most important trends in digital marketing.
We can’t afford to miss the bus, and thanks to portable smartphones, it’s now possible to watch videos of everything under the sun at any time. Falling data costs allow consumers to watch more videos than ever before in their lives. When it comes to selling your services and products online, comparing video and text content is more than twice as important today as ever.
Statistics show that video marketing has become a very engaging activity, and we also see YouTube and Instagram influencers marketing products via live streaming. This vortex creates a powerful way of communicating products and services, culminating in the emergence of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
With the advent of social media, good old email has lost some of its charm and become a more direct communication with your customers and your customers “friends and family.
Email automation has also enabled email marketing to personalize the entire email experience. Billions of emails were sent, and if emails stayed here, it would probably continue on its current course. The point is that it is constantly evolving and getting better, and all because of email automation.
Personalized email marketing is not new and has been used for many years for better marketing efforts. When implemented correctly, personalization can be a great revenue generator for you, especially for small businesses with limited budgets.
Research suggests that personalized email campaigns can generate annual sales of more than $1.5 billion in the US alone. This has the potential to become one of the most important digital marketing trends for small businesses in 2021.
For a personalized email marketing experience, you need to collect customer data and create emails that are tailored to your customers “specific needs. If you plan and collect enough data about your potential customers, you can tailor your emails to a approximate customer profile. So remember, if personalization is missing from your email, it will be missing from your customer experience.
Facebook is the king of social media marketing, but according to Forbes’ research, more than half of its users are under 60. I’m not saying that Facebook is a thing of the past in social media marketing, but it’s certain that it has caught up with the younger generation. A few years ago, Facebook was the number one social network for young people in the United States.
TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram offer more interactive and visual experiences, and young people are more willing to try new products and experiences.
Add brazen political propaganda and fake news, and you have made people angry and frustrated with politics. Recall Facebook’s data breakdown in 2018: 1.2 billion monthly active users, 2.1 billion monthly active users in 2017, 3.5 billion in 2016, and 4.3 billion last year.
Marketers need to understand that while Facebook could have a significant share of these users, it also needs to ensure that the platform is credible and that it has all demographics and audiences at its disposal. Otherwise, wasted marketing money and spending can have a negative impact on your business, your customer base and your bottom line.
Facebook, the world’s most popular social media platform, currently has more than a billion users. Most of these users are over 30 years old, most of them in their mid-30s and older.
Research shows that 85% of marketing on TikTok is generated by celebrities on social media, generating brand awareness and sales. Influencer marketing is the most commonly used type of digital marketing and is becoming popular across national borders. Don’t just stop at Facebook, try other social media marketing channels that are popular with younger people.
The world of marketing is evolving, trends and buzzwords come and go, and they will evolve with you.
Despite age, the basic principles remain the same, and this has always been the case with marketing in the world of digital marketing, especially for small businesses.
Marketers need to connect with their audience and communicate with the USPs of their products and services. Consumer-oriented content would still be the best way to build a strong emotional bond with your customers.
But you also need to make sure that your message is not hidden in the media maze and accessible to all. So let’s focus our energy and efforts on delivering the best content to our customers, not just the most popular.
