2020-21 will be regarded as the year when everything came to a near standstill, except for digital marketing, thanks to COVID, the mother of all disturbances that turned life upside down. Even though no transaction was made, digital marketing was in trend to promote brand awareness.
While millions of users flocked to the internet and various online media platform for longer periods of time during the lockdown, setting higher targets for businesses, it provided fertile ground for new digital marketing strategies and make it more effective, to look forward.
Brands are consistently competing to beat one another in all three areas of digital marketing: finding the correct demographic groups, catching their interest, and engaging with them via effective communication. Let’s see what fascinating new digital marketing trends they may expect in the future to help them create their campaigns effectively.
#1 We’ll start our list with Voice Search
In its most basic sense, Speech Search is a key innovation that recognises a voice inquiry and provides the appropriate response. The user is relieved of the burden of typing the question – which is necessary for particular scenarios or circumstances, as well as adding to the comfort and convenience of using the Internet. Nearly 27% of web users worldwide are already adopting mobile voice search.
We’ve already seen the technologies make some headway into the home appliances industry under the title of “voice assistant,” which is available from a variety of brands, including Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana, to name a few. When they are still stand-alone products with embedded links to their source databases, google search is using the same technology to make it more interactive and diverse.
The Google Voice Search or Voice SEO practice is rapidly growing rapidly among users online since it allows for quicker, faster, and more conversational searching than standard query input. Here are some details on Google’s voice search.
A voice search, unlike a web search, does not require a screen to assist users to scroll, choose, or type. It is conversational in nature; it anticipates a direct query and responds accordingly. In order to interpret the inquiry clearly, voice search needs lengthier phrases. We choose short and to the point phrases of keywords when searching online and rely on the search engine for all relevant results.
Like search queries, which provide a list of possible choices to pick from, voice searches only provide one answer. Despite using keywords to find the closest match in a web search, a voice search contains the featured snippet.
#2Featured Snippets is in second place.
Now next big item on the way is the Featured Snippet, sometimes known as no-click search. Featured Snippets are text samples, frequently with photos, that Google considers being the most authoritative answer to a question and hence places at the top of its search results in a box.
The advantage is that the user gets the best information from Google without having to click and read through other websites links. As relevant information is displayed even above the # ‘1’ slot on the SERPs, the Featured Snippets box is sometimes known as ‘position 0’ by SEO specialists.
Definitions, tables, and lists are examples of Featured Snippets that are retrieved organically by the Google search algorithm from the web pages in its index. Google prefers content, which are Featured Snippets (voice) based search in its Google’s voice SEO strategy, which is expected to be a top trend in 2021.
Featured snippets are Google’s favoured norms, and they’re valuable in digital marketing since they can help you get more focus than your competitors, even if your organic result is less.
Some experts may call it manipulation, but the reality is that Featured Snippets provide a fantastic potential for a website to gain significant organic traffic simply by focusing on high-quality content and not enough on search engine optimization (SEO).
#3 3rd on the list is Visual Search
One more great upgrade is Visual Search, which is a substitute for writing a search query into Google Search, is projected to be available in 2021. Users are able to utilise Google to search for information on anything by submitting a snapshot of the object via google lense.
If you post a picture of a plant, for example, Google will answer with its full botanical description on its statistical information, or a featured image will be displayed. If a product picture is submitted, Google will return information not just on that product, but also about related products and where potential customers might buy them.
Google operates in deep neural networks to decode the product image, taking into account its shape, colour, and size, and then serves info on the most relevant object, place, or whatever the aspect of the search item is all about.
Visual search is an AI-based technique that has the potential to boost eCommerce marketing while also revolutionizing internet browsing. Google Lens and Pinterest Lens are two prominent apps that provide some incredible capabilities for incorporating visual search technology into our daily lives.
For example, if you want to know more about a restaurant in a new location, simply scan a photo of it using Google Lens and you’ll be loaded with all relevant data on the restaurant in a matter of seconds.
#4 is Video Advertisement
In the digital domain, video marketing has a traffic and conversion ratio. Today users are consuming video material in a variety of ways, from news feeds to social media and journals. Since the COVID shutdown was imposed, the popularity of videos has ramped up, and it is likely that it will grow in 2021.
Video marketing is rapidly being used by businesses to improve user engagement and conversion rates. The following are the six most interesting video marketing trends for 2021.
- Animated Explainer Videos
- Streaming – Live Video
- 360-degree Videos
- Shoppable Videos
- Storytelling Videos
- Vlogging
#5 Chatbots for Personalized Conversations
Due to their human-like brilliance, 24/7 availability, capability to recall your overall purchase history, rapid response-ability, and incredible patience (sympathetic and compassionate at any stage), AI-powered Chatbots have become extremely popular in digital marketing field.
However, customized chats are another feature of Chatbots that has helped them to become a trend-setter.
The enormous popularity of Chatbots has brought to light the secret to current marketing success: a customized interaction. People want fast, empathetic, and result-oriented reactions to individualized dialogues, and as a result, businesses are investing in increasingly powerful Chatbots.
According to surveys, by 2020, 80% of firms will have an AI-powered Chatbot on their websites. If COVID prevents that goal from being accomplished, 2021 will undoubtedly exceed it. Through learning and satisfying the needs of customers, these AI virtual assistants will assure a significant increase in customer happiness.
#6 Stories from social media
Snapchat popularized the trend of social media stories, focused on short videos, photos, and augmented reality interactions. This was an instant hit with Gen Y and was quickly mimicked by other platforms as well. When it became all-pervasive, Instagram and Facebook were among the first to adopt this concept.
The audience’s attention is no longer restricted to news streams. They’re engaging with stories more and more when they’re seeing it as a trendy means of communicating and share their content.
People are fascinated by stories. The trend of Social Media Stories is drawing a lot of interest from people on social media. Businesses will undoubtedly put good use in their operations and marketing strategies in 2021.
#7 Google My Business Listing
What a beautiful thing! Google’s tremendous daily search traffic, free local business listings on Google will undoubtedly be a major hit in 2021. Electric and plumbing services providers, other types of shops, chartered accountants, gyms, restaurants, and other local businesses can still get a Google Verified Listing.
This is also known as a Business Profiling, and it will feature all important information as well as the geographical locations of the firms on Google My Business sites, making it easier for potential customers to find, about us, and connect them, for a better user experience, information such as a location, open hours, reviews, star ratings, and so on will be available on the company profile page also.
However, businesses must optimise their pages by confirming with Google to update their best and latest features, offers, and so on. Google verification will be required.
- It marks a stamp on businesses’ reputations,
- It ensures that no one can falsely claim ownership of a firm,
- It makes sure that no one can illegally claim ownership of a firm, and let business owners manage their information using Google’s search, map, and other tools.
#8 Bidding For Online Ads: Automated And Smart
It’s also known as targeted advertisements and is projected to totally replace manual bidding by the end of 2021.
To know the advantages of targeted advertisements, we must look at the activities related to manual bidding.
Usually, keywords search is manual advertising campaigns (perhaps those supported by professional tools) that spend the majority of their time examining data in a detailed manner, changing and adjusting keywords, ad phrasing, choosing the ideal time of day, locations, and so on, in order to achieve the highest possible results. There are labour-intensive procedures like calls for bids, tenders, estimates, and negotiation, which may easily overwhelm a business owner in planning an ad campaign.
Using artificial intelligence, programmed or smart bidding simplifies the internet ad to simplify the buying experiences. Real-time bidding on the Google Ads campaign, is the best example of, is using machine learning to automate all of the important operations in order to achieve the best potential results. Smart bidding is not a new concept, but most business owners have been hesitant to use it in order to fulfil their business objectives until now.
#9 Push Notifications in the Browser
Notifications provided to your website users via desktop and mobile web browsers are known as browser or push notifications. The goal is to keep active users, occasional visitors, or perhaps one-time visitors notified about your goods or services even if they don’t install your app, which isn’t really done without the visitors’ approval.
This is a quite successful remarketing strategy that necessitates users opting in to get updates. These alerts, which are similar to alert messages, are delivered to visitors’ desktop or mobile screens, making them an excellent marketing tool.
#10 Business Messaging Apps
Since the launch of WhatsApp for business, a new trend has emerged: the use of messaging apps for business. WhatsApp provides businesses with their own instant messaging network that is private and secure from hacking.
This will be highly helpful to firms with remote and mobile staff who need to communicate quickly both inside and outside the corporation (to customers, suppliers, etc.). Each user will have their own branded business profile, which will allow customers to quickly identify who they are conversing with or who has supplied them that information. Additionally, users receive delivery information as well as information on which messages have been sent.
Conversational marketing is another increasing trend in the use of commercial messaging. Many organisations’ sales and support people, for example, respond to product and service-related questions with detailed and immediate messages.
Wrap Up
Digital marketing is constantly setting new standards, keeping marketers like us on our toes, as more and more marketing automation tools and solutions are included. If someone were to ask what the future of digital marketing is, the most appropriate response would be that it is the only future.
We are one of the top digital marketing agencies in India, specialising in reputation management for businesses of all sizes. By harnessing the newest technologies and advances in marketing techniques and business processes, we help firms stay ahead of the competition. If you want to expand your business even further, contact us and we’ll show you how.
