Can You Keep Up With How Digital Marketing Will Change In 2021?
Digital marketing is changing a lot in 2021.
What has been working for you may not continue to work as well or may not work at all in 2021.
If you want to find out everything you need to know about how digital marketing will change, then keep reading.
Because today, we’ll be going over how digital marketing will change by the end of 2021.
It’s no secret that the marketing landscape changes a lot every single year. And 2021 is one of the most significant years as competition heats up.
As we look forward to the second half of 2021 and beyond…
…you’ll want to stay on top of these changes in the digital marketing world to see continuous growth in your business.
With that said, here are our top 9 tips to help you prepare for all of the changes that we’re going to see in digital marketing.
And more importantly, how you can leverage them effectively.
9 Tips To Prepare You With How Digital Marketing Will Change In 2021
Digital Marketing Is Moving To An Omnichannel Approach
Practice Conversion Rate Optimization
Content Marketing Won’t Be As Effective As It Used To
Podcasts Are Taking Over
Social Media Will Become A Top Channel For Purchases In Addition To Discovery
Voice Search Is Becoming The Preferred Search Method
Search Engine Optimization Is More Important Than Ever Before
1. Digital Marketing Is Moving To An Omnichannel Approach
The first change that you need to know is that digital marketing is trending towards an omnichannel landscape.
Omnichannel marketing is defined as the process of creating a seamless message that adjusts to your customer.
And this is based on their behavior throughout your sales funnel.
A great example of this would be tactics like abandon cart emails.
An abandon cart email is an email sent to someone who adds your product to their cart but does not continue to complete their purchase.
In this instance, the customer interacted with your website which is one channel.
And then they will see communication from your business through another channel which in this case is email.
This is considered omnichannel marketing approach.
And it is because your communications with them are personalized based on their user experience with your business.
This places your customer at the core of your approach instead of your product.
By using omnichannel marketing, you are providing your customers with the most personalized customer experience they can have.
This is because your customer is at the core of your approach instead of your product.
Omnichannel marketing focuses on consistency in your user experience with your customers.
Whereas, multichannel marketing focuses on maximizing your engagement on all channels.
Now a part of how digital marketing will change is that it will become more customer-centric, in order to maximize your success, you’re going to have to do both very well.
And in order to be successful, you’re going to have to fully understand your funnel and your customers.
If you don’t, it will be hard to craft the most relevant messages to send at the right time.
So to start to learn more about your customers:
Put yourself in their shoes.
Get feedback from your team members that interact with them.
Try to get feedback from your customers so you can craft a personalized experience that satisfies them.
2. Practice Conversion Rate Optimization
Here’s the truth, the cost of digital advertising is not getting any cheaper any time soon.
This year, it is expected that digital advertising spend will increase to $171 billion in the US alone.
And by 2024, that amount is going to increase to $242 billion dollars.
This means that everything – SEO keywords, pay-per-click advertising, social media news feeds, and so much more are going to be much more competitive.
And as competition increases, so will advertising costs.
So in order to manage your costs and gain more results, conversion rate optimization is becoming more and more popular.
Conversion rate optimization is the process of increasing the conversion rate on your website.
In other words, you want to increase the percentage of website visitors that convert into customers or take a desired action on your web page.
For example, let’s say you spent $2,000 and generated 200 visitors to your website.
Of those 200 visitors, 2 people purchased your product or service. So that’s a 1% conversion rate.
But what if you did not change your spend at all, and converted 4 new customers instead of 2? That would mean you’d have a 2% conversion rate.
But wait, how exactly do you accomplish that?
Three words – conversion rate optimization.
If your web pages are better optimized for conversions, you’ll see more conversions.
This means more revenue, which means more money to cover the increased advertising costs.
To improve your conversion rate, you are going to need some analytical skills.
You will need to identify key areas of your website that may influence conversions, benchmark how those pages are performing.
And then create variations with improvements as a test.
Then as you test these different variations of your web pages, you can use Google Analytics…
…to determine which one of the variations has the highest conversion rate.
For example, you can start with your homepage.
As you already know, your homepage is what makes the first impression on your website visitors.
You could experiment with:
various buttons,
features like chatbots, or
better organizing the page content
…to help provide information about your products or services.
Another great place to implement conversion optimization is on landing pages.
After all, landing pages are already designed to get people to take action.
There are different approaches you can take for landing page optimization.
And that depends on what action you want users to take when they reach that landing page.
For example, if your landing page is designed to get people to register or sign up for an event…
…it can be optimized by including a video from the same event from the previous year to get people excited for the event.
And ultimately, sign up for it again this year.
Or maybe, if your landing page is designed to get visitors to download a guide, you can include a small preview.
This is so that they will know what to expect upon downloading.
Lastly, you may want to look at optimizing your blog.
By including calls-to-action throughout your blog posts, you can entice readers to learn more about your blog topic.
This can be done by providing you with their email in exchange for a free report or ebook.
By optimizing the conversion rate on your blog, you’ll be able to convert readers into leads.
3. Content Marketing Won’t Be As Effective As It Used To
The third thing to note when it comes to how digital marketing will change in 2021 is that…
…the content marketing space is becoming more and more challenging.
The main reason is that the internet is just brimming with content. Everyone wants to be an Influencer now.
There’s more content than eyeballs to look at it now. So in order to stand out, you have to create really good content.
Your content has to have an edge. Everyone is producing similar content these days.
But in order to have a content breakthrough today, your content must be more relevant, more entertaining, or more informative than the next person.
Great content is what inspires others to share your content on social media which helps boost your following and build brand awareness.
Without the best content, you’ll begin to fall behind your competition.
Make sure that you have a great content marketing strategy to remain competitive in 2021.
Currently, there are 850,000 active podcasts and more than half of all U.S consumers above the age of 12 listen to podcasts.
90% of podcasts listeners say they listen to podcasts from the comfort of their own home, and they also listen while they’re on the go.
64% of listeners choose to tune in while in a car or truck. 49% listen to while walking around. And 37% choose to tune in whilst commuting.
Combine all of this with the fact that 45% of people that listen to podcasts have a household income of over $75,000.
This means that people that listen to podcasts are more likely to buy from you.
That is when compared to other marketing methods because they statistically have more money to put towards purchases.
Therefore, podcasts can certainly be a worthwhile investment.
However, keep in mind that podcasting takes time before you can really start to see the results of your efforts.
If you’re going to jump on this trend, make sure you commit to it and be patient.
This is so that you can start to see all of the great things podcasting can do for your business.
5. Social Media Will Become A Top Channel For Purchases In Addition To Discovery
So far in 2021, we have witnessed social media platforms like Facebook refine the process the consumer takes after discovering a product in the platform.
It is starting to become easier than ever for consumers to go from discovery to purchase without ever having to leave the social platform they’re using.
This notion is known as social commerce.
Social commerce has taken off due to an increase in features added to social platforms as well as what took place in 2020.
For example, Facebook launched Facebook shops to allow small to medium-sized businesses to bring their storefronts to the internet.
Here’s our post on Facebook shopping report if you want to learn more about it.
Instagram released Instagram Shopping which helped streamline the purchasing process on the platform.
As you can see, it is easier than ever for a user to discover a product and make a purchase without ever having to leave the Instagram app.
The bottom line is social commerce is continuing to grow rapidly and is starting to become scalable.
In fact, the number of social commerce buyers is expected to increase by 12.9% in 2021 after having just grown by 25.2% in 2020.
Make sure you include social commerce in your 2021 digital marketing strategy so that you don’t end up falling behind the competition.
6. Voice Search Is Becoming The Preferred Search Method
Voice search is becoming the preferred search method.
Therefore, it should be considered when creating your marketing strategies.
Although voice search was viewed as more of a novelty feature in 2011 when Google first introduced it, it has started to become more and more popular.
It is predicted that it will become the preferred search method over typed-out search queries.
In fact, 27% of the global online population is already using the voice search feature on their mobile devices.
In the U.S alone, nearly 40% of internet users, which is a third of the entire U.S population, use voice search.
And this is expected to increase by another 9.7% by the end of 2021.
With that said, if you want to do well in 2021, you need to be leveraging voice search.
Think about phrases or questions that people may be voice searching as they relate to the product or service you offer.
And then, optimize your site to appear for these search queries.
How can you do this?
For starters, make sure your website is HTTPS. In other words, your website should be secure.
Second, you want to make sure that your site speed is optimal and that your site loads fast.
If your site loads too slow, you will not achieve optimal results with voice search.
Third, you need short, concise, and to-the-point answers to questions people are asking online.
When internet users perform a search, they are usually using more terms to help the search results be as specific to their query as possible.
If your answers are a paragraph long, you won’t do as well with voice search as you will if your answer is one or two sentences long at most.
Despite users using more terms to search, you need to use less words in your answers.
This is to provide those performing searches with quick answers to their questions.
So, what is a marketing funnel?
A marketing funnel is a model that is used to help you understand the process of converting new leads into customers.
If you can picture a funnel, you know that it is at its widest at the top and gets thinner as you move towards the bottom which is the thinnest point.
For a marketing funnel, awareness is at the top because your marketing efforts are designed to attract as many qualified leads as possible.
Then, as you nurture each potential customer through their purchasing process, each stage of the funnel narrows until they ultimately convert.
The first step for any marketing funnel is to build awareness.
You do this through social media advertising, email marketing, SEO, videos, and other online advertisements.
As leads come in and begin to progress through your funnel, your marketing methods will become more and more personalized until a sale is made.
Remember, think about omnichannel marketing.
In the past, companies have been able to just buy ads and would wait to see how many sales they were getting.
Now, in 2021, you need a personalized approach, outlined by a funnel, to succeed.
You’ll need to consider things like your conversion rate and the lifetime value of a customer to design a good marketing funnel.
You need to be able to track everything from a new website visitor all the way up until the conversion point.
This will help you measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts by measuring the conversion rates between each step in the funnel.
If you don’t already have a marketing funnel in place and want to set one up but don’t know where to get started, there are tools out there that can help you.
One of those tools is ClickFunnels which is an online tool that helps you build high-converting marketing funnels.
8. Video Content Is A Must Have
Video content is the future. More and more people want to engage through video.
In fact, 6 out of 10 people would rather watch online videos than television.
And by 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic which is 15 times higher than it was in 2017.
Facebook has over 8 billion video views per day and video promotions have become equally as popular as photo promotions on Facebook.
On LinkedIn, video campaigns have 50% view rates and LinkedIn users are 20 times more likely to re-share a video post.
And as we all know, YouTube remains the king of video.
YouTube is the second most popular website after Google.
More than 1 billion hours of videos are viewed on YouTube each day and over 1.9 billion people use YouTube which is about one-third of the internet!
In the past, video has been a method you could leverage to get ahead of the competition if you were using it correctly.
Now, a video marketing strategy has become a prerequisite to even compete.
And, it is going to continue to grow in popularity as a means of engaging with your audience.
9. Search Engine Optimization Is More Important Than Ever Before
With inbound marketing becoming one of the leading ways to grow the attention you receive from your target audience…
…the ninth and final change to expect in 2021 is the importance of SEO.
SEO has now become more important than ever before.
As the brick-and-mortars move from offline to online, SEO is becoming more competitive than ever before.
Of course, you could just use PPC ads to advertise your business on search engines.
But while PPC ads are a great option, it does not fare well in terms of long-term, sustainable growth. This is why SEO is a must.
After all, SEO is organic traffic which means it’s free traffic!
With a proper strategy and patience, you’ll be able to work your way up the SEO ranks quicker than you might think.
And while you work on your SEO, you will also be simultaneously improving your user experience.
Improving things like your web design, content, load speed, and more will not only improve your SEO rank…
…but, it will also drastically improve the user experience of your site.
Now, when customers visit your site, they know what they want and they want to get it fast.
So you need to provide an optimal user experience for them to increase the chances they purchase from you and not one of your competitors.
So far in 2021, SEO has driven an average conversion rate of 14% from organic website traffic.
This is much greater than traditional outbound marketing methods that have an average of 1.6%.
With that said, you can clearly see that customers are more likely to make purchases when they feel like they are in charge.
Be Prepared With How Digital Marketing Will Change In 2021
That’s all we have on how digital marketing will change in 2021.
Make sure you leverage the strategies that we mentioned and you’ll be sure to see continued success for your digital marketing efforts in 2021.
Or, just like what we said above, you can also hire a digital marketing agency to help you with your marketing campaigns.
If you do, LYFE Marketing is definitely one of the best choices out there. Check out our digital marketing services today!
The post How Digital Marketing Will Change In 2021 appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog.
Read more: lyfemarketing.com