The beginning of the year marks a spike in interest in digital marketing, trends, and technology associated with it. With the right answers, digital marketers and agile businesses can unleash the potential to turn the year around. All you need to is to ask the right questions and look in the right places for answers.
Digital Marketing Technology For 2021 and Beyond
Here are some of the core technology themes for marketers who are looking to adopt digital marketing in the upcoming years.
Consumer Consent
Consumer Consent and Privacy is a significant upcoming technology. It is important because we saw the trends in 2020 that giants like Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Facebook increased user privacy controls.
Artificial Intelligence For Marketing
Machine learning and AI for marketing are far from enjoying the light of the day. It is traditionally avoided because marketers are not very keen on trying AI for Business. This is the condition despite the number of vendors offering AI and machine learning solutions.
Many businesses are still in their baby stages of digital marketing and technology. Hence most of them don’t have the bandwidth to include AI as of yet. Nonetheless, Machine learning can boost your sales by a significant level if you are ready to explore it.
Conversational Marketing
It is a feedback oriented technology recently launched in the digital marketing world. It is mainly used to improve user engagement and to boost customer loyalty. Technically, this helps to grow your customer base and eventually the sales and revenue. Therefore, conversational marketing has taken importance overnight in the marketing arena.
Email Automation
The flair for writing emails is soon to be completely replaced by automating the entire process. With the right set of email automation tools, you can easily create opportunities for lead generation, sales, and ultimately revenue.
The flair for writing emails is soon to be completely replaced by automating the entire process. With the right set of email automation tools, you can easily create opportunities for lead generation, sales, and ultimately revenue.
How New Technologies Are Being Applied to Digital Marketing Activities
Search engines and social media marketing are two significant spaces that need your attention. These two channels are super important to marketers while display advertising still has a role to play.
Monitor Core Updates and EAT for Organic Search Results
The core updates in 2020 had a great impact on the organic reach for many businesses.
According to Google, “Each day, Google usually releases one or more changes designed to improve our search results. Most aren’t noticeable but help us incrementally continue to improve.
We aim to confirm such updates when we feel there is actionable information that webmasters, content producers, or others might take about them”.
The quality of your content can adversely affect the EAT signals – Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Therefore, if you are serious about contesting for the search engine rankings, then you need to benchmark your content. Grab the latest copy of search engine guidelines to help you set the bar: Google SEO updates 2021.
The Paid Search: Digital Marketing Optimization Through Machine Learning Technology
The majority of businesses may avoid Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning internally. However, some of them use it as an external service. It is a huge part of the paid and organic searches and particularly offers options in Google Ads.
The SMART prefixes in Google services denote artificial intelligence. The most important goal is to assist businesses in managing the complexities of ad targeting. This is required to boost ROI.
Smart campaigns in Google tend to help out small businesses to handle Google Ads.
At the end of the day, businesses should embrace machine learning technology and include them as part of their digital marketing strategies.
Adopt New Design Tech
Design Systems
The trend of increased focus on design systems should send a message across. Inside Design identifies the trend as a “collection of reusable components, guided by clear standards, that can be assembled to build any number of applications”.
The obvious list of benefits includes cost reduction and better conversion rates via common web design elements. From the user's point of view, they just need to understand and learn lesser interfaces.
However, you need to remember that design systems are much larger than the scope of website patterns and style guides.
Designer Siw Grinaker explains “A design system maintains the visual and functional elements of your organization in one place, to fulfill your brand principles through the design, realization, and development of products and services. It may include a sketch library, style guide, pattern library, organization principles, best practices, templates, codes, and more”.
New technology in interactive designs
Innovations in interactive designs and video making can boost conversion rates by a significant rate. Hence, here are a bunch of interactive options marketers should be aware of includes:
- Animated illustrations
- Asymmetric layouts
- Micro-interactions
- Virtual and Augmented reality
- Visual storytelling
Additionally, videos are also a significant part of the media that is used to grab the attention of the user. Hence they increase the conversion rate to a great extent.
Align content marketing with customer needs
The pandemic has taught one thing – you are not practically alive if you are not online.
While most sales and businesses have moved online, it is obvious there are more to come. Therefore the competition is inevitably growing. You have to spend more energy, time, and money for your content to get the right attention.
However, one thing about content marketing is that creativity and flexibility can overthrow larger budgets.
Here are some key points about content marketing in the digital and technology era:
- Remember that content is a part of the buyer experience with your brand.
- Focus on content-driven personalization.
- The inclusion of streaming video content popularizes the website.
- Multi-channel marketing is the need of the hour.
Conclusion
Grasp all the digital marketing opportunities available and make use of technology to stay on top. A digital transformation aims to help you sustain 2021 and beyond. Hence you need to develop a roadmap to increase and improve your digital capabilities and skills.
Additionally, always integrate the ever-green digital marketing technology for your product and business marketing activities.