Digital marketing is an improved form if marketing. Its aim is to help producers and service providers efficiently reach the right customers. To ensure its efficiency, this form of marketing constantly evolves. This evolution involves seeking better ways to meet the target audience.

Digital marketing trends are influenced by the most productive digital marketing techniques or approaches. These techniques are often refined, changed or dropped, depending on the reported outcomes of each of them. There are cases where two or more techniques are merged into one.

To keep you in the competition, here are 11 convincing digital marketing trends to follow in 2021.

1. Content Marketing

There is a saying amongst SEO professionals. It goes, "content is king". Going by the changes to digital marketing trends, you can still say that "content has not lost its crown". Even in 2021, content marketing strategy will remain a convincing digital marketing trend. Over the years, content marketing has evolved greatly.

In 2021, content gas evolved into user generated content. Content will also be highly interactive and centered around trends. Web users will be the ones calling the shots as regards the type of content they want to see. Website operators will merely be content enablers.

This implies that you will have to work with information when developing content. You should put out content that fosters interaction or debate. Your content should also focus on related trends. Your blogs and news pages should also have comment sections where web users can give their opinions, suggestions, complaints, etc.

2. Personalized Marketing

If you are still operating using generic marketing, you should be shot. You are not just getting things wrongly; you are harming your brand. The time where marketers use words like "hello there" or "hello customer" are long gone. The digital marketing trends of 2021 certifies this fact.

In 2021, digital marketers will be working with information. This will help them target individual prospective customers instead of putting all of them under an umbrella. Marketing emails will be personalized to address individual customers or prospects.

Even when placing customers or prospects under an umbrella, it will prospect who share a lot in common. In other words, they will possess similar buyer personas. Similar to the Woocommerce mix and match plugin, you should also present the right solutions to the right prospects.

3. Marketing Automation

Personalized marketing will be possible is because digital marketers will be able to outsource certain duties. These duties are usually repetitive tasks that can be boring and time consuming. The nature of these marketing tasks may even cause digital marketers to make mistakes.

Marketing automation tools have been around for a while. However, the demand for personalized marketing has seen them become even more popular. There are lots of marketing automation tools available for use. You can use them to to schedule marketing campaigns. By taking the burden of repetitive tasks, these tools allow you focus on more demanding duties.

4. Chatbots

As a producer or service provider, you have to be available to your customers. You have to be there whenever they need you. However, it is humanly impossible to be available 24/7. However, artificial intelligence is able to help you remain available.at all times. Before now, FAQs were the most popular forms of attending to customers.

However, they were very boring and lacked human touch. Like using the Woocommerce shop as customer plugin, firms were able to see things from the customer's perspective. This brought about the use of chatbots. Unlike FAQs, you make complaints or inquiries by chatting with a robot. The use of chatbots continues in 2021.

You do not need to remove FAQs from your website. Instead, use it to complement the chatbot. FAQs can form the foundation for developing a chatbot. There are tools for creating your own chatbot without knowledge of how-to code. You should ensure to use them and create your own chatbot. This will help you serve your customers better.

5. Multimedia Marketing

This is another dimension of content marketing. However, it does not take the traditional forms of content (written content). Videos were not properlyutilized until recently. In 2021, they are taking center stage. Besides videos, images are also playing major roles in marketing.

Many website owners are now opening YouTube pages and uploading videos. After uploading those videos, they now embed the YouTube videos in their website. Embedding the video instead of directly uploading it ensures your website still loads faster.

6. Influencer Marketing (Micro Influencers)

Influencer marketing is not exactly a new form of marketing. As a matter of fact, influencer marketing is a very old form of marketing. It started off with using anybody to market products and services. It soon moved to using faces of popular people for marketing and brand promotion. However, using popular people also came at some costs. These costs were something digital marketers could not afford.

One of such cost is the actual cost of getting a popular figure to promote your brand, product or service. Despite the huge sums these popular figures charge, they may not market these products properly. It is not surprising, considering that these popular figures do not have intimate knowledge of the product or service.

2021 is seeing to the employment of micro influencers in marketing. These micro influencers are more affordable. They also have intimate knowledge of the products or service. As a result, they will promote products and services better.

7. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is also nothing new. It is just another regular form of marketing that is taking a different approach. Most brands and business owners have social media pages. They are even easier to operate than websites. However, social media marketing has been abused of late. This abuse is one of the major reasons for this change in 2021.

2021 will see to minimal content spamming on social media. Unlike before, social media users can now block your adverts. Social media marketing will take a human approach in 2021. Top brands will create social media communities 2021. Through these communities, they will solve problems of social media users.

Solving these problems helps certify their products and services. This will cause more users to seek their products and services.

8. Image and Voice Search

On the aspect of search engines, brands are also making it easier to find them. In the past, web users needed to write down whatever they were looking for on the internet to find it. For example, you needed to know the name of an insect to search for it. You also needed to spell it when searching for it 2021 will see to a totally different ball game. Voice search and image search are some of the major digital marketing trends in 2021.

Search engines now make it possible for web users to find answers using voice notes and images. Web operators and owners will have to adjust to this new trend. They will have to install plugins that will enable them provide solutions to web users using pictures and videos when searching for results. This is very important as search engines will only show websites or webpages that can provide results to these images and pictures.

9. Customer Marketing

The changes in trends are also causing changes in behavior. In the past, firms were fund of always seeking new customers. Promotions were focused on prospective users. Little or no attention was paid to existing customers. It was a fisherman and fish approach. This is set to change in 2021.

Brands now understand that existing customers are as valuable if not more valuable than new customers. As a result, customer marketing be a major digital marketing trend in 2021. Customers are the best promoters of a products. In a bid to incorporate customers into their digital marketing campaigns, brands will engage in more customer marketing campaigns in 2021.

10. Omnichannel Marketing

Before now, the saying is "only operate via as many channels as you can operate". In 2021, it will become "manage as many channels as possible". Prospective users are scattered across different platforms. Limiting your brand to a handful number of platforms is not healthy. You will end up losing valuable prospects.

The beauty of marketing automation is that you do not have to do everything directly. There are tools that can easily convert your YouTube videos to audios. You can upload these audios as podcasts. You can further transcribe these podcasts into written content. The realization of this possibility is also shaping the direction of digital marketing in 2021.

11. Search Engine Marketing/Optimisation

Search engine optimization and search engine marketing will continue in 2021. Now more than ever, more people are trusting the internet for solutions. As a result, search engines will still call the shots in 2021. However, the criteria for SERP rating will revolve around the interests of web users. UI, UX, contents, keywords, etc. will decide who ranks first.

In a bid to rank as top results, brands will use paid or classified ads to boost their brands. It will no longer be trying to rank as number one. Brands will battle for the number "0" spot.

The summary of the digital marketing trend to watch out for in 2021 is "be more human" and "get help from. Machines". Digital marketing has become local and you have to satisfy needs to join these trends. Following the instructions provided will help you make the most of these trends.