Digital Marketing Trends for 2021
I work with many charities and recently delivered a presentation on Digital Marketing Trends on behalf of The Clare Foundation. But why look at digital marketing trends if you have an experienced team? Isn’t it all just hype? Not at all. The Chartered Institute of Marketing says that marketing should identify, anticipate, and satisfy customer requirements. Keeping up to date with current trends helps you identify and anticipate the how, why, when and what of successful customer communications. Enabling charities to stay competitive by adapting to a more digital savvy audience. Let’s look closer at the most significant 2021 digital marketing trends.
Social Media – Testing is Key!
Whilst there are many new trends in social media marketing, it is important to test to see what works best for you – and what doesn’t. For Instagram test out videos, gifs images and reels and see what performs best. If you are looking to engage a young audience TikTok could be a great channel for you. 75% of consumers are now happy to receive text messages from brands they engage with. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram offer in-app purchasing, meaning users don’t even need to leave the platform. Chatbots and Messenger are becoming commonplace providing an immediate response, any time, as well as offering the ability to send reminders to users. LinkedIn is becoming more conversational and your content need to reflect this to engage users.
Quick Email Marketing Tactics
With 300 billion emails sent each day it is easy to get lost in the ‘noise’, but with some clever management email can still be a great way to reach your customers. Segment your audience, personalise your emails, and target your content to their specific needs. Analysis the data on how, when and with what consumers are engaging. Email Automation helps remove a lot of the hard work in terms of scheduling and can trigger automated emails based on consumer behaviour. Find out how to make email marketing work for you.
Smarter Content to Boost your SEO Performance
It is worth spending the time creating an SEO strategy and doing some keyword research to not only establish short, punchy keywords, but also explore your long tailed keywords. This helps your content appear in search engine results when your audience are asking a question, looking for a more detailed answer or when using voice search – which we’ll come onto later. For your articles to appear in Google results make sure they are 300 words or more and try and write quality long form content (min 3000 words), which Google loves! All content should be engaging, interactive and ideally includes video and/or graphics and with strong call to actions. Keep in mind the Google EAT principles – Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness whenever you are trying to improve your SEO performance.
Video Marketing
Non-profits have been using video marketing for a while but 2021 is likely to be the year that if you are not using it you will be left behind. Video provides a personal touch and can be an effective way to communicate your message. Video can also be immensely powerful and show the impact that donations can have.
Content Marketing – Tell A Story
The content you create and share allows you not only to tell a story but to build a community – including input from your target audience as well as guest writers. This content can take a variety of forms, not just webpages, such as courses, webinars, videos, podcasts. So how do you know what content you should use? There have been some great improvements in AI (Artificial Intelligence) that help you predict your customers’ need and improve the customer journey by providing what they are looking for. But it’s not just about the content you create, you also need to consider how and when you engage with other content.
Increase Donations to your Charity
So many things are now much quicker and easier – most of us have experienced the ‘one-click buying’ on Amazon. Consumers now want that ease of completion everywhere, online and on mobile. This is especially so for new and/or younger donors who are often tech savvy. Voice Search is the latest addition to the tool kit reducing the amount of physical interaction required with a device for example Google, Siri, and Alexa (see next section). Remembering donor details also makes repeat donations easier to achieve and helps to re-engage with lapsed donors. In connection with social media, we are also likely to see more charities using brand and celebrity affiliations (‘influencers’) to increase awareness and drive donations.
Voice Search
I have already mentioned Voice Search, but it needs a section to discuss it further. Voice Search allows people to search the web using voice commands instead of typing into a device. It is estimated that in 5 years’ time 50% of searches will be done via speech or image search. Ensuring your website is ready for this is vital – can Google read your pages easily? Have you worked on your SEO? Have you used long tail, conversational words to help feature in results? As well as your website, any online business profiles such as Google My Business need to be up to date and offering as much information as possible.
Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality (VR) creates immersive and engaging experiences for users. VR can be a powerful way to raise awareness and personalise an issue through imagery, story telling and education. According to Gartner this year will see more than 70% of companies implement some form of immersive technology.
What Next?
Digital marketing is accelerating at a significant pace, so to get the best from your marketing team you need to be up to date with the latest digital marketing trends. There is not the space here to include everything in detail so if you would like more information, please get in touch.
We can help you with a range of marketing services including SEO, social media management, video production, content marketing and email marketing. We can work on a project or retainer basis and offer a number of packages for small businesses. If you are a charity looking for support please see get in touch!
