Online Marketing Trends to Follow in 2021

online marketing trends

The ongoing process of marketing never gets too old or monotonous due to the ever-changing marketing trends. You can never keep up with a trend for too long, or you will feel left out. To be relevant and visible in the online world, you have to adjust your marketing to the ongoing trends continuously. So, here are the top online marketing trends of 2020 that you should be following:

 

Programmatic ad buying / advertising

Things have been automating fast in the recent years. The IoT (Internet of Things) is a proof of how the objects we use daily will soon become independent in taking decisions without human involvement. Programmatic Advertising is yet another form of that same autonomy and automation.

Today, companies don’t have to hire humans to help them buy ads in the best advertising spaces. Instead, they can take advantage of programmatic advertising or ad-buying. Companies can now use software programs to enter the KPIs, and other important particulars of their advertising needs and the program will automatically buy an ad space that best meets those requirements.

This process is fast and quite affordable in the long run. Programmatic ad-buying is not only affordable for companies, but it also does away with any discrepancies associated with old advertising methodologies where human involvement gave rise to favoritism and corruption. While this system has its discrepancies, most advertisers have adopted it due to its ease of use. According to eMarketer, nearly 84% of all the digital advertising on mobile devices will be programmatic soon enough.

 

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing has been gaining popularity for several years now, and it doesn’t seem like the trend is going away any time soon. The trend is so popular that you can now find influencer marketing platforms using blockchain technology at their cores.

One of the reasons behind the rise of influencer marketing is the decline in the effectiveness of banner ads. Marketers have been treating the influencer marketing as an integral part of their campaigns for the past several years with more than 80% marketers agreeing that at least one of their digital marketing campaigns includes this type of marketing.

influencer marketing

A new trend in influencer marketing is the use of micro and nano-influencers. Brands have gained awareness of how influencer marketing works after several years of spending their money on this type of digital promotion or hiring an influencer agency. They believe that while influencers with millions of followers have a huge target audience, the level of penetration is much higher for micro and nano-influencers, i.e., the rate of engagement with the audience is high.

 

Content marketing

Google algorithm updates continue to deceive marketers into believing that content marketing is going away. However, anyone who understands SEO (Search Engine Optimization) at its core knows that content marketing is not going anywhere. It is content that flows in the veins of the internet. The only thing that has changed about this over time is the type of content that matters. In the past, text-only content was enough for companies to market their brands. However, the shift toward visual marketing is clear today.

Video content is the most valuable type of content for marketers. You can see that social media have also realized the importance of video content as they have launched features that play videos automatically as soon as a user hovers over them.

 

Native advertising

As the world continues to become smart, ads have become smart too. It would be safe to say that native advertising is one of the smartest ways of advertising today. It takes user behavior into account, and this particular aspect makes it extremely useful.

In native advertising, your ad becomes a part of the website on which you display it. Its form and factor match the theme and form of the website. Your ad then seems as though it is a part of the website’s content. If the page has thumbnails with annotations on them, your ad will look like that. If the page has a useful article about something, your ad will appear in the article as text-only.

native ads

The essential part of this type of advertising is that it has to be contextual, i.e., the text-only ad that appears within the text of an article must be relevant to the content of the article. You don’t want a detergent’s ad to appear in a blog post about graphics cards for PCs as that’s basically fraudulent advertising.

 

Mobile marketing 

Mobile marketing combines two concepts in one. First, you use mobile-specific communication for marketing purposes and second, you optimize your advertising according to mobile devices.

The most powerful method of mobile marketing is sending SMS to your target audience. An SMS approaches your customers on a personal level like an email. As for optimizing your marketing for mobile devices, it all starts with your website. You have to create a mobile-optimized or a mobile-dedicated website.

monile marketing

A responsive website conforms to the screen on which the user opens it. Location-based marketing has also gained popularity in the last five years. Because of this, companies now use software tools to automatically generate ads that appear on the user’s mobile screen as soon as he enters a specific location.

The next big thing in mobile marketing is AR (Augmented Reality) marketing wherein users can see a business’ name, menu and much more through their mobile’s camera.

 

Final word

Your marketers have to be at the top of their game at all times to be relevant in the modern virtual world. While the internet provides great ways for businesses to access their target audiences at a much more personal level, it also creates an information clutter that forces the customers to forget things very quickly. Take into account the two essential ingredients for a successful online or digital marketing – data and consistency.

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