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Almost one year ago I wrote a blog on “Digital Marketing During COVID-19“. It is hard to believe that almost one year has passed since we went into lockdown. Times have surely been challenging for many. The pandemic has changed the marketing landscape and some businesses had to pivot their marketing communication quickly. My previous blog addressed that “Augmented Reality Is Becoming The New Reality“. To piggyback on this, what are some of the digital marketing trends that we should look out for in 2021?

Digital marketing is an ever changing landscape and new innovations are always on the horizon. Social Media will continue to grow from top channel for discovery towards purchase. For example, Pinterest has recently rolled out shopping ads as more consumers will want to discover, engage, and shop on social platforms. According to Pinterest’s internal global data September 2020, the growth of Pinners engaged with shopping surfaces on Pinterest had increased by 85%. Visual discovery, personalization, and ease of shopping are three key concepts moving forward. 

This is also an exiting development for merchants. If you have a product to sell, jump on it!

Digital marketing has become more dynamic and fluid and consumer touchpoints have increased. To optimize campaigns and ROI marketing automation will gain in importance for more precise attribution. You have Pardot, HubSpot, Adobe Campaign, and Marketo for example. Here’s a list of other automation tools you might want to learn more about. 

Voice search will see rapid growth and it’s important to position your brand for this inevitable development. See our blog “Making Your Brand Voice Search Ready” to learn more. I do see a rise of visual search on the horizon as well. In 2017 Google released Google Lens. It’s an image recognition technology that will still need time to perfect itself but the potential is already present. If you have an eCommerce site it is important to have your site optimized for this growing potential. You need to have plenty of high-quality images for your products, mark them up properly, and maximize SEO. Visual SEO will be high in demand in the coming years. 

One example of visual search’s potential is finding a “similar” item online for purchase. Let’s say you see a pillow you like. You can point Google Lens at the pillow and find similar pillows online for purchase. 

Pinterest’s (they are apparently quite innovative) mobile app has a lens feature that will give you shoppable pins suggestions based on the image that you have snapped. Brilliant! Here’s a visual example of how this works:

Visual search is a trend to follow closely in 2021 and the accuracy of this technology will improve over time. 

Another trend we will see more of in 2021 is customer segmentation marketing. Smaller marketing campaigns will be created that are bespoke and tailored to specific audiences. We will see digital marketing campaigns break up into smaller customized pieces. We will also see Connected TV (CTV) trends accelerate in 2021. CTV’s advertising potential is so fascinating that I wish to dedicate a blog to it in the near future so stay tuned! 

What’s hot today can be cold tomorrow but the perpetual appetite for innovation and the capitalization of new advertising revenue potential is invariable. What new trends will we be talking about in 10, 15, 20 years? Time will tell. COVID-19 is phasing out. It’s about time! Together we will heal and remember. If you have any questions, drop me a line here. For now, be good to each other and never stop learning. Cheers!   

Photo by Tomasz Frankowski on Unsplash