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2021 digital marketing trends

There is always a huge interest in digital marketing trends and innovation in marketing as we get closer to the new year. And rightly so, since reviewing innovation in digital marketing, technology, and platforms for the year ahead can help marketers identify new opportunities that agile businesses and marketers can tap into... if they're looking in the right place and know the right questions to ask...

Each year, for the last ten years, I have assessed the digital marketing landscape to help give recommendations on the digital marketing trends marketers should focus on in the future.

In this year's guidance on the Smart Insights blog I will cover what I see as the main trends across our RACE customer lifecycle framework which defines 25 key digital marketing activities that can be harnessed by businesses to drive growth through:

Improved reach via digital channels Increasing digital engagement of your audiences Better managing digital marketing to integrate it into marketing activities

Improve your digital marketing plans for growth in the year ahead Our Managing digital marketing research 2020 shows that many businesses don't have a planned approach to take advantage of the latest and evergreen digital marketing techniques. Our RACE digital marketing process gives a simple way to structure a digital marketing plan.

What digital marketing trends should we review? I believe it's important for all businesses to review how they can harness the latest marketing trends so they can apply the latest innovations through the 70:20:10 rule of marketing focus. Google's digital marketing evangelist Avinash Kaushik has explained the benefits of this mindset :

70% of the time we're going to focus on things that we know that are very core to our business. 20% is where we're trying to push the boundaries. You get into the known unknowns. And the last 10% is a true crazy experimental stuff. Trying to figure out how to do uncomfortable things that we're going to fail at more than we will succeed at. But with every success, you build a competitive advantage.

So evaluating innovations can help you push the boundaries, but also improve your digital marketing activities.

Truth-be-told, at a high-level, the trends across digital marketing tactics are similar each year - with a lot of the interest in search, social and email marketing, and new web design and content marketing techniques to engage and convert our audiences. Traditionally, technology innovations are the drivers of trends in digital marketing  including changes in:

Digital platforms: Innovations from the FAMGA businesses of Facebook Inc (FB), Apple Inc (AAPL), Microsoft Corp (MSFT), Google (GOOG) and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN) Martech vendors: In particular, the big marketing cloud players with the biggest R&D budgets including Salesforce, Oracle, HubSpot and companies with a larger user base targeting SMEs like Mailchimp Independent standards bodies: Including World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C— of which Tim Berners-Lee is a founder and current leader; Living Standard by Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, or WHATWG and the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF. Normally the trends are independent of economic factors, but that's not the case this year. Of course, the big difference affecting changes in marketing investment in 2021 is from the havoc that COVID-19 has wrought around the world. Although there have been winners in some sectors where demand has held up or even increased, many have fallen. Regardless of sector, low-cost or no-cost methods of growth are more important than ever. This perhaps explains why our research shows that the AI-based techniques which I will cover throughout this article are relatively unpopular.

Recommendation 1. Organic search: Monitor core updates and EAT During 2020, core updates have had a significant impact on organic visibility for businesses in some sectors as these 4 case studies on the impact of Google’s latest core updates shows.

In their advisory What webmasters should know about Google’s core updates Google explains these like this:

“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 advisory and the more recent case studies often reference the perennial importance of content quality affecting Expertise, Authority and Trust signals. So anyone serious about competing in search should grab a copy of the latest search quality guidelines to benchmark their content.

Recommendation 2. Organic search: Look at opportunities from structured data and the SERPs features. I respect Bill Slawski as a close follower of the latest Google patents and innovations. So, when he pronounces structured data will increase in importance and evolve it's worth listening.

In this article, Bluearray gives the predictions of how structured data will change in future. These predictions are already coming true as in Sept 2020 we saw a first example of structured snippets within SERPs which is evidence of a future trend.

Recommendation 3. Organic search: Voice search remains hyped but will deliver little for most businesses Sorry, I have to mention it since we so often still see the dumb recommendation that Voice search is the number one trend businesses must focus on. If you think back, you may remember the often misquoted 2014 prediction that “voice search will by 50% of all searches by 2020”. Well we're in 2020 and it's still being widely touted and of course, smart speaker use has increased dramatically, but the reality is that voice-based searches on mobile and desktop have a minimal impact on the practical execution of SEO for most businesses.

I agree with the views of Cameo Digital who explain the limited impact of voice search  when they comment that regardless of whether the uptake for voice search increases, the game stays virtually the same for SEOs. They explain that Voice Search involves using a spoken command to retrieve the information you want from search engines with two types of voice search, each differing in their type of output. Only the first of these, however, is relevant to SEO:

Type 1: When a user chooses to use spoken voice commands as opposed to typing a query into Google. This is treated as a normal web search, the data of which will be collected in Google Search Console, so SEO as normal. Type 2: When a user chooses to use a spoken voice command in order to receive a spoken answer. This is the case with many smart speakers such as Google Home and Amazon Alexa. These searches are not logged in Google Search Console and have very little relation to SEO. So, businesses can tap into any voice-based changes in search behaviour by focusing on the fundamentals of SEO such as keyword research, on-page optimization best practices, structured data and creating quality content with high Expertise-Authority-Trust to fit evolving search behaviours, including more conversational queries.

I would add that changes in keyword behaviour prompted by rising local voice queries are important to optimize for if you target local buyers.