4 Marketing Trends to Outrank the Competition in 2021

Marketing dynamics have changed dramatically in the past year, in the wake of a global pandemic, providing an ever-growing reason to be aggressive in your marketing strategy and find the pockets of opportunity dotted across the new terrain. With a reduction in the size of the global economy and the number of entrants remaining high due to government support, competition within the global economy has never been higher. Thus, providing evermore reason to consider an overhaul on your current marketing strategy. Here are some of the biggest marketing trends to look out for in 2021 and capitalize on the upcoming opportunity.

The Year of the Chatbot

The explosive growth of the eCommerce market has seen the need for online support grow ten-fold. Chatbots’ use has become ever-growingly popular, with companies who use Chatbots saying they saw a 50% growth in sales.

Since an automated system can handle common customer questions and basic tasks, the use of Chatbots can cut costs by up to 30%, allowing companies to produce higher profit margins and maintain a high level of customer satisfaction. Using an automated system allows more questions to be answered within a given time, whilst delegating the more complicated tasks to support professionals. IBM says that superior software development has seen that Chatbots can answer 80% of standard questions. The increasing use of Chatbots sees the enhanced utilization of professionals whilst still speeding up customer response times.

A recent survey by Drift shows that of respondents, 37% of people chose to use a Chatbot to gain an answer in an emergency because the service provided a quicker response time than their human counterparts. It’s becoming clear that people are becoming more time-pressed to get answers to questions, hence diversifying the range of communication tools to increase customer satisfaction.

The Popularity of Short-Video Content

With more people confined to the four walls of their own home, people were looking for new and creative ways to stimulate themselves, to cope with the ‘new normal’. A new trend that became dramatically popular overnight was the use of short video content.

A survey by HubSpot shows that of survey respondents, 80% of video marketers claim that video has “directly increased sales”, indicating that short videos are becoming widely popular. The curation of short videos published across a wide range of media could see the acquiring of customers from different areas beyond the traditional.

Now that videos also show up on Google and other search engines on the results page, this is a great time to incorporate your video marketing content into your SEO optimization program.

For instance, watching the rapid uptake of TikTok has provided invaluable evidence that this trend is increasing amongst the younger generation. TikTok’s global penetration is currently standing at 18% of global internet users. With 32.5% of those aged between 10 and 19, incorporating video content into your marketing campaigns could be crucial if your brand’s target audience sits at a younger demographic.

Statistics show that people’s attention span for irrelevant content is shrinking with the average Facebook video watch time to be 10 seconds. Effectively meaning that if you are looking to gain new customers or get a message across to a disinterested or new audience, doing so in under 10 seconds is your best way to do so.

The curation of Instagram reels supports evidence that short-length video content is viral and is here to stay. Currently, many of the content is individually created and was initially designed to express themselves during the pandemic. Still, the whole market is yet to be capitalized fully by the commercial industry.

Virtual Life is here to stay!

The explosion of Zoom and other virtual event hosting platforms seems like it is here to stay. The new way of connecting with friends, family, and co-workers has tapped into a completely new market, bringing about a whole new level of convenience to those who prefer their ‘at-home’ comfort and convenience.

With virtual events lacking the need for transportation to and from, no lodging and being much more affordable for smaller businesses, the appeal in virtual events has never been higher to both the company and the customer.

A new market has been discovered, and it looks like it’s here to stay. Although it might not tap the same type of audience, 52% of organisations say they see the same or more attendance than expected to see at an in-person counterpart.

By incorporating both in-person and virtual events into your marketing strategy, you are diversifying and expanding your hosted events’ reach.

Shoppable Social Media

If 2020 has taught the world anything, it’s that online shopping is the future; expecting consistent growth over the coming years. The pandemic has seen the rise of shoppable posts where content is posted to social media with a direct link or opening a pop-up window for purchase within the same app. The process of scrolling your social media to purchasing a liked product has never been more straightforward.

This trend has seen the extensive use of social media influencers, who are the main subject of this marketing trend. For instance, the growth of eCommerce has increased by 44.5% year-over-year due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Popular platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Pinterest all uphold colossal power when capitalizing on influencer marketing and social media marketing. Businesses effectively now can create their entire physical store into a social media account, heightening the convenience to the customer again.

To stay ahead of your competition, creating a digital presence is essential for building customer relationships and adding to the ease of online shopping.

The marketing world will never sit still, especially in such volatility. If there was ever a time to capitalize on the opportunities available, attracting new customers and expanding revenue – then now is a perfect time.

Creating the perfect marketing strategy encompassing the latest and upcoming trends can be complex. Robotic Marketer represents the pinnacle of marketing strategy development and can help businesses of any size encompass these new and upcoming trends of 2021 to stay ahead of the crowd.