📖 This post is part of a blog series overview of The Digital Marketer's Almanac 2021, an essential guide for every marketing professional. We will cover critical topics from this resource to help SaaS, eCommerce, and Lead Generation marketers think strategically about the year ahead.
Challenges help us grow as they push us to find creative solutions. 2020 was full of challenges, with the first order of business being remote working—a phenomenon big companies weren’t sure was possible and never wanted to test out on such a scale.
While reviewing the year behind us and preparing for the year before us, we pinpointed digital marketing trends for 2021.
💡 SaaS solutions save the day. This year Software as a Service aka SaaS had a field day in terms of usage and spend and we are predicting more businesses in 2021 to use Artificial intelligence and mobile-first approaches in design.
💡 Online shopping grew exponentially. With more people getting the hang of online shopping from clothes to groceries (and everything in between) we predict marketers will use interactive tech to engage with their customers so that they are convinced to make choices and place things in their cart.
More and more businesses will be offering free shipping to attract and retain customers, and public marketplaces will eventually disappear as brands chose to directly sell to consumers.
💡 Crisis communication is essential. If 2020 has taught us anything, it's that anything can happen. Always have a strategic response for a crisis situation or a special situation even if everyone in the industry finds it unlikely to occur.
💡 Diversify your online offerings to reach more people. Make sure that you're evolving within the digital realm. It’s good that you're offering online workshops for people living under the pandemic lockdown, but it would be great if that workshop was an on-demand webinar that anyone could access whenever they had free time from work.
💡 Marketing must focus on better UX. With more people jumping the mobile device bandwagon, it makes sense that you would want to make your eCommerce site or app easier to navigate. A better user experience may just be the thing that gives you a competitive edge over a strong contender in the market.
💡 Be flexible with your marketing strategy. If there's anything we can be sure of by now, it's the fact that consumers are less trusting in the future. Thanks to the pandemic and such an unprecedented shift in affairs, society may treat words such as "plan" in a very different light. Campaigns based on promises will have little effect in persuading them to switch to your business.
Where other marketers will advise you to be prepared to pivot in the future, we say do it now!
Find out more in our Digital Marketer’s Almanac 2021 🔎
Whether you’re an eCommerce marketing novice, drafting your very first cross channel marketing campaign, or a total digital marketing pro, you’ll find critical information about new strategies and trends for 2021.