How Digital Marketing Trends Evolve In 2021 [ 5 Fundamental Shifts]
Looking forward, 2021 will be the year for digital transformations, which is absolutely good news! Scaling of digital transformations across businesses will continue along with the rapid changes we have already seen with this year’s COVID-19 pandemic impacting the world’s digital landscape. Understandably with the uncertain circumstances, many businesses have planned for a digital shift but haven’t prepared their company culture to fully transform.
When considering what happened in the digital landscape in 2020, digital marketers should be ready for an ongoing cultural shift in the online marketing industry. We should be preparing for DT-centric shifts in the IT service provider division, be evident about data governance, grasp AI and insight-driven transformations, and try more comprehensive perks of public cloud adoption. Let’s go into the details of trends in the transformation of digital marketing for 2021.
Utilising AI
Due to the increase in the number of online users, it is required to get some help from our machine friends. In fact, digital professionals say that AI will be the solution to handing over business outcomes with the digital revolution. AI is one of the latest technologies that will benefit and systematise the digital market with continuous developments and new applications. AI will impregnate every task, from sales and marketing to HR and finance.
Undoubtedly, machine-learning algorithms have continued to develop rapidly and extended over the past years. IT professionals should consider including them into their business-related data and analytics strategy to more swiftly and adequately combine insights. Machine learning and AI can also take advantage within the current data architecture pattern to automate and reduce the data handling issue – from gathering and cleansing through to extraction in an analytics-ready form.
Semantic Search
As we consider search marketing, so much of the SEO domain is of course shaped by the way users search for anything on the internet. And while that sounds like an easy task, it is embedded in something a bit more sophisticated, and that is semantics. Breaking it down, semantics is the research of the meaning of words and their rapport in different context.
In the upcoming year and beyond, not only keywords but semantic search will be rising in importance for search engines to use the countless data available to ascertain the context, intent, and significance needed to show users the most pertinent content possible. Semantic search is the way Google’s smart algorithm can take your grammatically wrong, apparently ‘random’ search query and get exactly what you were searching for.
Semantic search is as important as UX when it comes to SEO. Instead of needing people to use the proper, specific search terms to identify what they are looking for—that precise sequence of words—search engines are picking up meaning themselves and are learning to understand our misspelt gibberish, fragmented language, and complicated queries.
Email Nurturing
In B2B marketing, lead nurturing and the marketing cycle is very crucial, and this process can be supported by email marketing. The first step (understanding and lead capture) involves a nurturing course of action that means communication with various organisational shareholders to establish positive relationships and understanding of business goals. Depending on the size of the business, it can last for several weeks or even months. It is the ideal avenue for email lead nurturing.
Normally, lead nurturing has been restricted to the email marketing realm, but that is evolving fast. Nowadays, and specifically in B2B marketing, businesses can reach out and nurture leads via various channels.
Because lead nurturing isn’t restricted to email only, omnichannel marketing has become the current model. Think a combination of EDMs and direct LinkedIn messages. Omnichannel marketing is certainly a catchall for progressive nurture programs that work in favour of numerous touchpoints during a lead lifecycle.
Ethical Personalisation
The industry is taking remarkable strides from a technology point of view for what is possible to personalise when it comes to digital marketing. For example, in September, Adobe, SAP, and Microsoft issued the Open Data Initiative, which merges the potential of their technologies to support brands better by linking data across their companies and setting up a single view of the client.
Digital marketers must recognise that as personalisation becomes more progressive, privacy will take part in a fairly relevant role in the client experience. Due to procedures incorporating upcoming privacy laws, marketers must continue to comply with ethical data practices. Executing this is also necessary for client trust and brand reputation. As a result, a commitment to privacy establishes respect for clients and benefits them, helping them to understand the value of an organisation's proposition. The gravity of privacy also stretches outside of a company. Agencies should use transparent partners that are faithful to safeguarding the data that is handed over to them, and should be committed to using third party products with privacy in mind.
The Big Data
Big data is about to grow bigger. The issues with big data are not new, but the growing volume, speed, and diversity of data is escalating them. Now we utilise mobile data, voice data, sensor data, and more, the amount of data that requires to be saved doubles every six months. As big data is increasingly found in disorganised formats, this makes it severe to incorporate and synthesise into something substantial.
Inexpensive storage makes huge data collection possible, but not recommended these days. What’s more, new arrangements like the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) need more precise data management. Without appropriate preparation and administration of data streams going in, various accessibility problems can occur. Not only are they very much complex to get right, but over-preservation of data can end in serious data privacy and compliance problems.
Following these fundamental transformations in digital marketing will mean you have a leg up when more shifts come in 2021!