2021 is here. The global pandemic in 2020 brought dramatic changes to every business. At the same time, significant developments have emerged on digital marketing, springboarding new trends. 

Social Media platforms will become major channels on purchasing goods or services. Consumers will make their purchases easier and more convenient.

Virtual events are the way to go after the COVID pandemic and will become the main choice  for many businesses. They can attract a larger audience covering all safety norms and because they don’t have huge expenses like travel tickets, visas and infrastructure, can be set up cheaper and faster.

Email marketing is – still – a very effective communication tool between businesses and customers. The 2021 trend for email marketing is personalized emails. Personalization happens when you are using specific names, situations, characteristics, locations and more. Open rate is noted to be increasing when at least the recipient name is used.

Video marketing – Customers want to watch video descriptions and reviews for products they are interested to buy online. Videos need to be crafted with powerful arguments and be professionally made with clear descriptions, attractive imagery and strong calls to action. Video contents had become one big trend in the previous months. Videos can create a brand trust to the consumers and will be the guideline for their online shopping.

Voice search – demand has increased in the last months of 2020. More customers are using it rather than text search in Google.

Data analytics / big data analytics is the main element of every advertising campaign. In that way, every business can monitor campaigns and make changes when necessary. On the other side, it is a prediction tool for future customer needs.

Online consumer behaviour. Online shopping is the way to make purchases for food or clothes for many people. Marketers will need to research more on discovering the exact online psychological triggers that lead to specific purchases. Identifying online buying patterns on specific target markets and on individual consumers will become more important in 2021.  

Marketing automations – AI applications – AI-chatbots is a very popular digital marketing tool. This type of chatbots can be programmed to answer the customer’s questions. in 2021, businesses will choose AI -powered chatbots with high learning and conversation ability for every digital channel like a website or messaging apps.

A virtual assistant, AI assistant or digital assistant is an application that can understand natural languages from the users. More trendy VA’s are Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri Google Assistant.

AI and machine learning are the significant differentiation for high-level professional marketers. Customer demand will not anymore be a hypothesis but it will be a fact based on data. In that way, every advertising campaign can be much more successful because marketers will know the exact customers preferences.

From a physical shop to an e-shop can be a fundamental transformation for many retailers. In lockdown period, customers have no other way of shopping except online. E-shop development, upgrading and improving along with a solid digital marketing strategy will be the central focus on many retailers.