The new year is just around the corner, and keeping the trend alive, marketers are busy analysing digital marketing strategies that may demand our attention going ahead. Consumer behaviour changes in a blink of an eye and we must keep our eyes and ears open to these subtle changes to invest effectively and gain an edge in the market.
Digital marketing in India is continuously evolving, and marketers never stop looking for new and innovative ways to reach their target audience. Owing to the consistent hit and trial, we came across several influential digital marketing trends in 2021.
Digital automation: We have often witnessed businesses talk about automation to become more agile, and the marketing world is not lagging when it comes to eliminating mundane jobs and manual labour. However, digital marketers are gradually concluding that automation might not be enough. To leverage that data and translate it into profitability, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotic process automation is seeping into SEO to analyse data and make critical decisions automatically.
Digital automation simply means employing machines to make decisions based on how consumers interact. For example, personalised messaging, deals and recommendations garner a consumer's attention the most, and devices can learn that in a short period.
Video content: Video content has taken over the throne on the world wide web, and nothing can take its place anytime soon. Video consumption has skyrocketed, and more people than ever are consuming videos on platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram reels. Unfortunately, social media platforms are becoming content dump yards, and it's only convenient to watch a short video over a long article.
Chatbots: There has been a steady growth in businesses employing chatbots to interact with customers on site visits. Chatbots are instrumental in onboarding automation, mitigating manual interaction expense, and allocating more budget on essential areas. One of the most prominent advantages of having a chatbot enabled on your website is that it can cater to several visitors at once. Moreover, chatbots offer 24x7 service and immediate responses.
Personalisation: How am I making my consumer feel special is one question every business owner must ask themselves. If you want to set your brand apart in the market, personalising the communication throughout your content, emails, products and services is a must. Audio and video streaming channels were the first to take on personalisation with recommendations for each user. Personalisation is on its way to becoming the new industry standard as repetitive content continues to fail at grabbing consumers' attention.
Shoppable content: Simplifying the user experience is at the core of marketing, and shoppable content is the next step towards achieving it. Shoppable content is any content that contains a link to the product landing page. This makes the entire shopping process more seamless, from spreading awareness through content marketing and making it easier than ever to buy the product through the direct link.
The writer is Sahil Chopra, founder-CEO, iCubesWire
