Digital Marketing Trends in 2021

Last year, companies worldwide had to change their shopping and business experience due to COVID-19. After adapting over the past year, people have learned how to effectively and efficiently shop online, and companies have enhanced their online presence to keep up with their customers. Due to the influx of companies’ online presence, competition on the internet has skyrocketed recently. Many startup companies have been employing digital marketing companies to help them compete in today's digital advertising market.

Digital marketing has been around for years, so it isn’t like there is a brand new strategy that is taking the world by storm. However, due to the foundation of digital marketing, many companies have been able to leverage it to use efficient channels to reach potential customers that need to stay at home. Today we are going to go over some new and “newish” digital marketing trends and the old reliables that have been effective in 2021.

New 2021 Digital Marketing Strategies

In-email Purchases

Email marketing has been around for years. Originally companies would add links to the email to direct traffic to their blog page, landing page, or specific products. MailChimp has taken it a step further. Now MailChimp is offering an experience that is similar to apps, embedding videos and other interactives. MailChimp has access to more user data, which allows them to do specialized targeting, based on the user’s purchase history, Google searches, most visited websites, as well as the apps’ customer service, and more. 

E-Commerce companies leverage email to let users learn more about their products, receive feedback and generate sales. Companies are starting to make this transition on a small scale. Being able to reach out to customers and obtain sales through email is incredibly relevant in 2021. It also helps increase your business opportunities through cross-channel marketing.

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) is the use of computer technology to create a simulated environment. VR lets people experience and interacts in a 3D world. This technology allows consumers to dive into the authenticity of products, promotions, or videos and allows them to feel the experience. If VR is used properly, you can develop a range of competencies and talents. 

YouTube VR is a standalone app optimized for VR specifically. We already know what kind of powerhouse YouTube is. YouTube VR allows you to choose a video and dive right into that specific VR experience. This app also has a “theatre mode” which allows a bit screen experience. You can even watch the video and search at the same time. Pretty amazing right?!

Fulldive VR (FDVR) is different from YouTube VR. FDVR is as close as it gets to real life. This technology moves farther than a headset and allows a user to merge with the interface of a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). For example, someone that plays video games would be able to dive completely into the game they are playing and experience it from a true first-person view. Imagine being in the matrix, everything your character does, and getting to live all the senses, like hearing, taste, touch, and smell from the game you get to experience. The possibilities of this technology are endless. You can use this for leisure, training, or to show a property. Elderly people can set back the clock and dive into a world where they are back in their youth again.

Artificial Intelligence

Around 42% of marketers are not confident about segmentation for digital marketing. It is important for marketers to know their audience and most segmentations assume that people prefer one thing over another. AI helps marketers analyze behavioral and demographic data. So much so that it can do it more efficiently than most humans can manually. It can learn every detail of the user from profile information, purchases, demographic information, even browser history and apps used. 

Google has had an AI system in place for years, but only in the past few has it truly been integrating and pushing users toward using this effective advertising tool. Artificial intelligence can crunch numbers quickly and reliably and because of this and the proven success it has had, many companies are starting to employ it.

Voice Search

The great thing about voice search is that, as a consumer, your query is answered without needing to type, look or scroll through the results to find your answer. With voice search, the user is inclined to go with the first thing that pops up, which is usually the correct answer.

As voice search becomes more popular it won’t be enough to be on the first page anymore. The top spot of search results will be an even bigger priority than it is currently.

App Personalizing

With the power of AI and the massive amounts of data that it brings, you can create app personalization. The app stores, Google Play Store, and the Apple App Store are highly saturated as of now. Statista reported the number of apps on the Play Store and Apple App Stores were 2.9 million and 1.84 million in 2019. If a user installs your app there is a high chance of them deleting afterward due to an unsatisfactory first experience. If users find companies’ apps useful, there is an attention rate that needs to be applied to have users who are dormant become active again.

It's important to make sure that apps provide a smooth and personal experience to your consumers. Personalizing the app helps you stand out from the crowd, and helps consumers enjoy their experience of the app.

AI integrated apps are being used to improve app performance. And most app developers consider AI as an integral part of app development.

January Marketing Ideas

2020 was probably the crazy year we have had in a long time. Worldwide pandemics, an intense election, BLM movements, wildfires across the west coast and Australia, the controversy and rise of TikTok… it all happened this year. But, the great news is that despite the chaos, we have made it to the end of the year.  We can all see 2021 in the horizon and we’re hoping for a more cheerful time.

Everyone has been through a lot this year so let’s all just take a deep breath and give ourselves a pat on the back for being able to get through it. Let’s also create some strong positive vibes for the new year and 2021.  We're going to give you some tips to do that through your marketing strategy. 

Easy January Marketing Steps

Updating Your Google My Business Profile

Having a fully fleshed out Google My Business Profile is always important. This is especially true during this time and with so many new regulations. To get an impression when people are searching for your business vertical locally it is a must. Google my Business shows up in Google searches and in Google Maps, so having your Google My Business updated is critical. Make sure you are adding images and videos to show off your place of business. Have your Q&A question filled out so people know what’s going on, and make sure you respond to all your reviews.

If you want to learn more about Google My Business check out this blog where we discuss it in more depth.

Posts Previewing Promotions, Events, or Products

Leveraging social media has been huge in 2020. So if you are planning to have any events, promos or new product launches in the first couple of months in 2021, don’t be afraid to tease them via your social media. Creating hype around these three things gets your followers excited and talking about it beforehand. Then use boost to execute and hopefully along with it you’ll gain some sales or new clients.

Loyalty / Referral Program

Providing value to a customer is always a must. The more value you give, the more loyal your customer becomes. So building a loyalty or referral program for your customers is a great way to show value. Starting the new year with a brand new program can be a game changer.

If you are a storefront you can do the classic stamp card. After every purchase you can give out a stamp on a card and on the tenth stamp you can give either a discount, or free product to show appreciation for your customer’s return business. You can also give customers discounts or better deals for every new customer they refer. It's a win win. Or, if you want something high end, you can create a tier list rewards program based on the amount customers purchase with you over time. The higher the tier (the more money they’ve spent) the better the discount they get.
Once you have a loyalty program set up, make sure to share it periodically on your social media channels so that people who recently find you know the great deals you're providing.

Getting January Started Off On The Right Foot

Start With a New Year’s Resolution

Find a goal you want to achieve as a company and share it online. That way you can give your customers and community updates on how it's going and share milestones. You can even ask people what their new year's resolutions are to try and increase engagement on the post.

If you're looking to give to charity this upcoming year this is also a great way to announce it as a new year's resolution. Let your customers know 10% of all revenue is going to local homeless shelters or to a charity that is close to your heart. It shows that your company cares for others and that part of what people are spending is given back to the community.  

Check 2020 Game Plan

One thing to focus on in the new year is a review of the past years’[ data. Take some time to see what you accomplished and goals you set for yourself or your company over the last year. That way you can make sure to double down on success and reconsider what might have fallen short and how you can better execute in the future. 

Some things to look at are:

• What pages performed best

• What social media posts got the most engagement

• What campaigns drove the most profits and traffic

All of these can be looked at from the perspective of what underperformed. You can then compare the two and see what could have made it better. Were the images intriguing enough? Was the content you made targeted towards your audience? Or was the call to action not strong enough? There are multiple things to look at, expand upon or improve that you can take into the new year.

National Holidays & Observances in January

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

January 18th is the national holiday to celebrate Martin Lurther King Jr.’s birthday and acknowledges his Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in civil rights. This is a day to honor him and his legacy. It is especially important given the events of the past year to acknowledge this well-respected civil rights leaders and show support for related causes.

You can organize an event in your local area. If you do, announce it on social media.. It is a really great time to show unity in your community and demonstrate your business’ ethics and values.

Compliment Day

January 24th is Compliment Day so take some time to compliment someone. You can share a post and have your community tag someone to the post and give them a compliment. You can make the most of this day by thanking your community for their support or their loyalty. Or you can share a post complimenting your coworkers or company for doing so well or working so hard. 

There are multiple other holidays that you can partake in especially through social media to show support or awareness during this month. 

Hopefully these tips can help you get 2021 started with a bang!

Google Encourages Broad Match Keywords

Very soon you will start to see new recommendations from Google that will encourage you to use broad match while you're in Google Ads.

Smart Bidding Elevates Broad Match

Last Month Google published a blog post talking about broad match. “Using broad match and smart bidding together can help with relevant search queries that meet your performance objectives… By pairing this keyword with Smart Bidding, you can use auction-time signals to set the right bid for each of these queries. This means that you no longer need to anticipate and manage every potential search.”

To give you an example, the broad match keyword “men’s shoes” will be able to match “winter boots for men” or “men's footwear”. Google has been pushing the strategy of having keyword to query matching up to the algorithm. And as it progresses over time we have seen close variants continue to expand. 

Should we Trust Broad Match? 

If you feel skeptical about trusting broad match and smart campaigns together, you are not alone. 

Google has shared a couple of examples to show how strong this blend of broad match and smart campaigns works. Here is one:

“Advertising agency iProspect, a dentsu company, used broad match with Smart Bidding to generate long-term growth while keeping performance steady. “We had our doubts using broad match, since we’ve tested it in the past and found we had less control over search queries that impacted performance. With Smart Bidding’s predictive signals as the safety net, we saw an increase in unique search terms generated by broad match, leading to a 20% increase in conversions,” - Kasper Spanjer, PPC strategist.

For most digital marketers, the idea of using broad match keywords is a ludicrous idea. Most ppc marketers have spent years working around broad match and making  successful campaigns. However,Google made changes to search terms and how they are shown. This change makes it harder to get search queries, which now makes broad match keywords more important than ever. 

There are a few reasons why incorporating broad match keywords is something we should all consider and perhaps start using again. Google's changes constitute a drastic shift compared to its past approaches. These new updates are pushing us towards a place where segmenting will be less common and the Google algorithm will take over.

The ability to leverage smart campaigns as the filter for broad match will let you help keep out the drastic broad match keywords. This will be more than likely the new way for marketers to leverage broad match versus the norm of manual bidding. To start getting used to this possible new change, start by changing one adgroup to broad match and testing it.

Automated Bidding: Help Save Time in Google Ads

We all know that Google Ads are a taxing adventure. With daily optimizations, new test, tracking, and fine tuning campaigns there is a lot you need to do in an average day as a digital marketer. Leveraging technology in Google Ads is a great way to speed up your workflow. In today's blog we are going to go over automated bidding, which can help you effectively compete in Google Ads. 

Automated Bidding

Automated bidding strategies will help out dramatically when it comes to bid management. They will also help you to reach your monthly KPI goals. Automated bidding is defined as a bid strategy that automatically sets up bids for your ads to increase your clicks to conversions. Below is a chart of strategies around automated bidding that Google has released to help you understand what each strategy is capable of doing for you.

Automated Bidding Concerns

This sounds like the perfect solution to a big pain point for digital marketers right? However, a lot of people are having a hard time giving control overbids in  Google Ads. 

Can AI Really Handle My Bidding?

Adjusting keyword bids manually in Google Ads is a long and tedious process. Reviewing your ad performance, keywords, and making the necessary adjustments can be a full time job on its own. Since this process is something that you often need an expert to work on to ensure great results, it can be difficult to just let a computer do it. Can you really expect a computer to achieve the same capacity and same results? As we talk about auto bidding more you will see that AI can, in fact, help implement bid adjustments just as effectively if far less time.

Automated Bidding Isn’t New

Many people think that automated bidding is a new feature, however Google Ads implemented this a long time ago. However they are just now getting recognition for it. Google Ads has had auto bidding since 2010 and over the past 10 years AI has been learning the algorithm behind automated bidding. With this accumulation of data and learning it is safe to say that automated bidding now has enough knowledge to make optimizations and drive results.

Can Automated Bidding Increase Conversions?

To make a long answer short, yes, automated bidding can help you increase your conversions. There are several strategies that you can use to do this. If you’re targeting impression shares, you improve your visibility. If you maximize clicks you can increase your website's traffic. However, these two strategies are not conversion based. The ones that are conversion based are: maximize conversions, maximize conversion value, enhanced cost per click (CPC), target ROAS and target CPA. 

These strategies have been reoptimized and are continuously improving through machine learning to make them as strong as possible.

How is Smart Bidding Considered Smart

Google ads smart bidding optimizes for conversions in every auction. The machine learning behind algorithms uses this data on an immense scale and at lighting speed. It also focuses on any parameters it identifies, which are known as signals. Some of these parameters are: location, time of day, device, language, browser, operating system, demographic (for display), and product attributes (for shopping). 

Should I Be Using Automated Bidding?

Depending on your business and how your campaigns are doing, automated bidding might, or might not work in your favor. Just like anything else it requires fine tuning in order to make things work. Certain prerequisites also mean that automated bidding might be right for you. 

Compatible Businesses for Automated Bidding

If you have any of these prerequisites automated bidding should be something you consider: 

• You have conversion tracking in place

• Campaigns aren’t limited by budget 

• Targeting isn’t narrow

• Performance metrics aren’t too aggressive

• You have good campaign structure with adequate ad groups

Businesses for Automated Bidding That Might Not Work

If you have any of these prerequisites, automated bidding might not work in your favor:

• You don’t have conversion tracking

• Your budget is limited

• You have narrow targeting (demographics, locations, etc)

• You expect immediate results. 

Smart bidding/automated bidding takes time to be effective.

Automated Bidding Benefits

Now that we have more information regarding automated bidding and smart bidding strategies, we need to consider the best way to leverage them.

Hit New Growth & Goals

As a basic answer, automated bidding is designed to get you the best prospects possible to visit your landing pages. Some of these strategies will give you more traffic, while others will boost the quality of your traffic. By using these bidding strategies you will be able to identify and capitalize on opportunities you might not have been aware of, giving you a great return on your investment.

Improve Your Optimization Score

Optimization scores are how well your Google Ads account is set up to perform. If you have 100% in your optimization score your account is fully running, so it is a valuable metric to track. Google Ads give recommendations to your account and campaigns to help boost your optimization score. Since automated bidding strategies help the performance of your campaigns, applying these strategies will improve your optimization score. This, in turn, will make your account function more efficiently. 

Time Saver

Giving up your manual bidding will get you back hours to work on other tasks and responsibilities in your accounts. Automated bidding has the potential to make countless hours of data, and metrics to try and predict the right decisions for bid optimization, a thing of the past. 

Being able to have time to capitalize on other areas, like search queries, ad copy improvements, landing page testing, new campaigns, and better tracking can be a huge advantage in your business. If you don’t have the man hours to tackle these other tasks, Google’s Smart Bidding and automated bidding strategies can be leveraged to help you reach these goals. Just remember, it isn’t a perfect fit for everyone and it can take some time to get results. Hopefully this time saver can be a great use to you.

The Technology Behind AI in PPC

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for a long time, so why are we only just now exploring its applications for PPC?

Columnist Frederick Vallaeys explains the technology, its evolution in recent years, and what's next for AI in paid search.

What exponential growth means for PPC

So, if we’ve reached the point of PPC automation today where humans and computers are about equally good, consider that the pace of technological improvement makes it possible for the machines to leave humans in the dust later this year. That’s why it’s worth thinking about the roles humans will play in the future of PPC.

Build your own PPC intelligence

There are a lot of tools available to automate your PPC work, and multiple third-party vendors are starting to use AI and ML to provide stronger recommendations. But there are also many free tools from AdWords that are getting better every day thanks to advances in AI, like Portfolio Bid Strategies, Custom Intent Audiences, optimized ad rotation, etc.

For those willing to invest in connecting their own business data to AdWords and AI, I’m a big fan of prototyping solutions with AdWords Scripts because they provide a lot of customizability without requiring a lot of engineering resources. Unfortunately, simple scripts you write will fall into the weakest category of AI, where PPC intelligence is achieved through hard-coded rules.

But when you get a bit more advanced in your scripting abilities, you can use Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine to start enhancing your own automations with modern machine learning techniques.

The benefit of an out-of-the box solution like this is that you don’t need to learn many types of different models. But that’s also the downside because you won’t get total control over how you set criteria and thresholds to get results that are usable. Our team at Optmyzr tried several ready-made systems but eventually decided that we needed more power — so we’re building our own AI.

You Can Read the Full Article Written by Frederick Vallaeys published on Search Engine Land Jan 17, 2018