Thousands of businesses closed permanently due to the pandemic. But digital marketers had their hands full as businesses that remained open employed their services to increase their online presence as consumers shifted to buying their necessities through online marketplaces.
Even as marketers are using strategies that they’ve used for some time already, they have to update themselves as newer trends are expected to emerge in the digital marketing world. Here are some upcoming trends that will emerge in digital marketing.
Automation
One of the things digital marketers should look forward to is to continue using automation to allow them to enhance their marketing campaigns and make them efficient. Among the tasks that will experience automation are ad campaigns and email marketing. Aside from making these activities efficient, they also give clients and customers a personalized experience.
Automating marketing tasks allow marketers to save time, shorten sales cycles, and facilitate lead generation. Automation allows businesses to identify potential customers and convert them into paying customers.
With automation, the business can focus on its overall strategy and develop promising leads. With more leads, the business will have more chances of getting more customers. It also allows the company to see its potential customers’ behavior, which allows the business to know their interests. With this information, the business can customize follow-ups to encourage potential customers to buy their products or services.
The coming year will see affordable automation software due to advances in technology. Due to this, smaller companies will start adopting the software for their marketing campaigns.
Social E-commerce
Another digital marketing trend that will gain more traction in the coming year is social e-commerce. Social e-commerce is the use of networking websites to sell products and services. Since e-commerce thrived during the pandemic, social e-commerce is expected to flourish in the coming year.
This highlights the importance of focusing on social media marketing to meet the customers through these online channels. Many of these networking platforms rolled out updates that allow them to benefit from this upcoming trend. For instance, Instagram launched a new feature that allows the sharing and consumption of relevant information. The shared information is presented in a scrollable format.
Social e-commerce will see an increase in eye-catching graphics, promotions, user-submitted content, videos promoting products, and other things that encourage users to view the products and services offered by a business.
Social e-commerce focuses mainly on online vendors seeking to reach their market through these social networking sites. These sites allow vendors to showcase their products and services and respond to buyers’ fads and trends.
SMS Marketing
While it may be an old medium, industry watchers expect SMS marketing to become one trend in the coming year. This marketing medium is interactive and allows businesses to communicate with their target audience.
The messages sent through SMS are mainly marketing time-sensitive offers. The medium also allows businesses to send updates and provide alerts to people who consent to receive messages from the business.
SMS marketing complements the entire marketing strategy of a business. It allows businesses to remain connected to their customers through their phones. It is also an important component of a business’ omnichannel marketing campaign. Businesses may often use SMS marketing to find it challenging to reach their audience due to cookies embedded on internet browsers.
SMS marketing’s effectiveness lies in the fact that around 81 percent of adult Americans own a smartphone as of 2019. Additionally, this marketing channel works well together with email marketing. It is also suitable for emerging markets and has high engagement rates since the message goes directly to the customer.
Overhauled SEO
Many of the changes in the algorithm of Google were not significant, so many digital marketers paid little attention to them. But some updates had a significant impact on the search engine results page (SERP). The SERP is the page that returns to the users after sending a query to the search engine. The SERP normally shows the organic search results and the paid results.
Any updates on the algorithm resulting in changes on the SERPs make the work of digital marketers challenging. Due to this, they have to update themselves to make the necessary changes in the search engine optimization (SEO) campaign for their client’s website. Industry watchers expect more updates in the future, which means digital marketers have a lot of work ahead of them. They may even implement a major overhaul of the SEO campaigns they are implementing for their clients.
With more businesses entering the world of e-commerce, digital marketers will have a lot of work ahead of them, especially with the upcoming trends that will significantly affect the world of digital marketing.
