E-commerce Marketing

Innovate and Resonate – New-age Innovation Trends to Lookout for in 2021

By Indrani Pati
January 22, 2021

Digitalization was being adopted at a steady pace until the year 2020 brought a sea-change and accelerated the rate of digital transformation. With technology and innovation bringing in new developments almost every day, businesses will need to hone a wide variety of digital skills to take on 2021. Right from video marketing to artificial intelligence to augmented and virtual reality, this year will demand a lot of commitment from marketing managers to ensure better interactions with their consumers and achieve the desired results in the long run. Here’s a quick look at five innovative trends that will help give businesses that extra push in 2021.

Grow with New-Age Intelligence

Research reveals that AI will grow into a massive $190 billion business by the year 2025. In any case, Artificial Intelligence has already made a huge difference in how brands interact with their consumers. It also plays a significant role in managing marketing strategies; from speech recognition to chatbots, it has moved on to detecting the changing patterns in how customers interact with the brands by analyzing their online behavioral patterns and collecting data in real-time. This trend has successfully opened up a plethora of ideas and possibilities for businesses to stay abreast with the latest trends in the market. This year will also see AI’s integration with Instant-Messaging platforms which will become a key driver in the growth of chatbots for boosting brand awareness. It will help churn out the sales and leads numbers. Further, customer support will see a new face in this aspect. For all kinds of B2C/B2B businesses, automated real-time conversation and engagement will begin from the very start of the customer journey. It is also being said that AI will majorly help in cost-cutting and deliver higher returns to companies.

Dive into Augmented Reality

With social distancing becoming the new normal, AR and VR will have a major impact on retail, education, automotive, and the gaming industry in 2021. The boundaries between reality and fiction will slowly be blurred with the help of immersive technology and businesses will try to use it in a way that will make interactions look very easy-flowing and conversational in comparison to being machine-driven. Studies reveal that Augmented Reality (AR) will continue to dominate Virtual Reality (VR) as it did in 2020; with AR holding on to a big chunk of the market share standing at almost $140 billion in comparison to VR which stood at $80 billion. With the entrance of 5G, connections will become faster, more reliable, and have near-zero latency, which will help brands in improving their use of AR & VR implementations. Some good examples are brands like Sephora and Timberland who have already become game-changers in the domain of augmented reality and continue to upgrade by integrating it on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat to create a depth of experience.

Optimise with Position ‘Zero’

The position zero trends will come up as an integral part of modern SEO as it will provide answers to the user’s query directly in the SERP, without having to click on any links. Even though search-based trends and search engine optimization have been around for quite a while now, the rank zero aspect will take it one big step further. The power of voice search will also become much more popular in comparison to previous years as voice-searched answers will be featured as snippets at the top of the search results. These ‘Position Zero’ snippets will directly provide answers to questions without the user having to click on different links. Research tells us that in all probability, around 30% of searches in 2021 will be screenless and pro-voice searches. Further, to make online searching easy for customers, businesses will make use of VSEO or Voice Search Engine Optimization. They will also optimize their webpages to get a higher number of click-through-rates and try to get more traffic to their websites.

Amplify with video marketing

The demand for customized and localized virtual events is expected to see an upward trend in 2021 with 67% of businesses planning on investing in web conferencing software. To make the audience feel like they are a part of the interactive process, 360-degree videos will become more common than before. They will make the consumers feel like they have control over the content which will help in increasing trust and loyalty. Businesses will have to work-out new and interesting ways to be different and better than their competition. Another important aspect is resonating with their target audiences to hold their attention and keep them engaged. This year, live videos and real-time shopping will be frequently coupled on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, wherein marketers will be able to push their sales numbers in the moment. Linkedin Videos will become highly popular with integrated features like interactive backgrounds, better templates, AI filters, personalized addition options etc. Video marketing will definitely be an important weapon for businesses of all sizes.

Connect via Micro-Moments

For micro-moment presence in 2021, mobile optimization will be the key and it will give brands that much-needed edge with voice-based searches. As per research statistics, around 91% of consumers look for instant solutions to their problems on their phones, and about 62% of them act on their impulse and make purchase decisions. Therefore, having an in-depth understanding and knowledge of how customers behave in these micro-moments will help brands in providing an exceptional and smooth customer experience and also getting good ROIs in the future. Further, a strong SEO presence will put brands at an advantage in the micro-moment platforms to gain visibility and popularity. It is a new-age trend that will help in empowering brands to reach out to a wide and right range of target audiences so that they can look after their requirements by acting on intent-based actions. So these were our top five picks of innovation trends that you will surely see in 2021. Therefore, it would be wise to build your digital marketing strategies around them as they will definitely help you in evolving side by side with the market and achieve your target goals efficiently.