Possibly 2020’s biggest impact on the world of marketing was the fact that it showed the world just how vital digital marketing is. The digital sphere is pushing user experiences and digital businesses to the forefront when brick-and-mortar businesses are out of action. 2021 will continue the importance of digital businesses;however, digital marketing is not going to continue the same old tricks that were seen in 2020. What the experts are predicting is that the digital marketing trends of 2021 will be increasingly innovative and promising.
Conscious Branding
Those who are employing the help of a top branding company will already notice that environmentally conscious and socially conscious branding is now becoming a standard for brand implementation and strategy. For brands to properly maintain their relevance, especially with Millennials and Gen Zers, they will need to follow conscious branding trends in 2021 and beyond. Conscious branding incorporates sustainability and environmental awareness with other ethical concerns such as diversity of models in the fashion industry and transparency of data.
Beyond Personalization
The 2021 digital marketing landscape is set to evolve beyond personalization to enter an age that is being called personal commerce – where the consumer and the business are both agents in creating the customer experience. A cutting-edge customer experience will be one that is focused on reflecting the preferences of the individual at any specific moment. This goes beyond personalization, which consisted of brands finding and engaging appropriately with customers online. Personal commerce is all about brands telling consumers that with their company; they get ‘what they want when they want it’. If brands and their retailers are going to continue collecting such large amounts of data about their shoppers, they need to evolve their personalization experiences to action that data in meaningful and acceptable ways. Things like predicting what shoppers want to see next and automatically gauging where a customer is on the conversion funnel will be made a lot easier with big data.
Cutting Down on Social Media Platforms
A new trend is to actually reduce the number of social media channels that they are using as part of their marketing mix. This is a smart decision, as it can be a major drain of resources to try to stay relevant on all channels, not to mention some channels will not be favored among your target demographics.
A Shift to First-Party Data
Research from Silicon Valley’s Adobe, as well as social media companies like Facebook, is predicting a seismic shift in the world’s relationship with data. Some of this research predicts that first-party data will be more valuable than third-party, coming with an increase in how much companies spend on harvesting data themselves.
There will also be a rejection of the third-party cookie (the tracer on websites that is created by a company other than the owner of the site). Essentially, data is so valuable and data collection is so viable that it doesn’t’ make sense outsourcing your data collection when you have the ability to collect it!
This trend is expected to align with a call for greater digital transparency and pressure from consumers for brands to be more open and up front about the ways in which they use customer data.
Sunil Chandel
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