Trends Changing the Phase Of Digital Marketing Marketers are seeing a budget cut which in a way will benefit and inspire to explore cost effective and more flexible channels

By Abhishek Aditya Sharma

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The year 2020 was an eventful year as the entire world faced the wrath of COVID-19. This led marketers to think out of the box and strategies according to this unprecedented event. Because of the pandemic and market scenario the digital marketing evolved drastically. The trends which picked up rapidly during the period were:

Market from Home: Deploying campaigns from home, coordinating with the teams and keeping the marketers engaged with various apps.

Engaging audience with more empathy: Listen to your customers, use real-time data to better understand their current situation and needs.

Personalize digital communications: Accelerate digital channel adoptions, deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

Optimize budget spends: View unified marketing performance and make real-time decisions to minimize the negative impact.

As it goes without saying that the AI is the future of the digital marketing industry. With the help of AI data analysis can be done that inspires entire campaign are generated from sales, transactions, Web/app analytics, search, social listening, usage of attitude data, context, testing and campaign data. The data from these sources will enable teams to own an understanding of the target audience: their profiles, preference and expectations. To develop personalized messages that really connects with the audience and right moments for delivering these messages.

The voice search has existed for quite a decade, but it's not considered as important as other tools due to its low quality and its improper recognition of words. But today, Web development has grown drastically, and analysts predict that fifty of the requests are going to be made by voice search and lots of online services will redo their content and can implement voice queries on their webpage.

Trends in digital marketing industry that makes things worthwhile in 2021

Marketers are seeing a budget cut which in a way will benefit and inspire to explore cost effective and more flexible channels such as the programmatic advertising where the consumer presence and the available impressions are increasing. Digital display ads, the social media platforms, and online video are channels that the majority likely will increase within the short-term media plan.

Out-of-home advertising like metro billboards will have much lower exposure thanks to most of the people staying reception. Event marketing has come to a quick stop, and we'll likely see that marketing budgets cease or shift towards online ads. There are some B2B brands are increasing digital advertising spend to catch up on the affiliated leads as they otherwise would have picked up at the events. At present the major concern is that nobody knows when the pandemic will be over, and everybody can return to their normal lives. With increasing subscription base OTT platforms has also emerged as another option for the marketers to look at it.

Due to affordable mobile data rates and rapid adoption of smartphones, the active internet users is expected to reach 829 million mark by 2022. The affordable mobile data is giving a boost to the Indian mobile gaming industry as well and according to Google-KPMG study the Indian online gaming segment will grow by $1.1 billion by 2021.This gives an opportunity for the brands and marketers to reach younger target audience. The rapidly evolving world of mobile gaming enables marketers a new opportunity to reach customers based on their personal interests and behaviours.

Chatbots are going to be a crucial part of digital marketing in the year 2021. This AI-based technology will further help in instant messaging to talk in real-time day or night together with your customers or visitors. Consistent with the survey, chatbots will power 85 per cent of customer services are going to be powered by 2021.

Digital marketing is very rapidly evolving and the year 2020 has brought a paradigm shift in the way brands and marketers look at their audience and gave a humanitarian touch as well. The data analysis will hold the key for future to understand the customer and ensure maximum ROI to the clients.

Abhishek Aditya Sharma

Head-Marketing Strategy, Social CTR Solutions

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