Top digital marketing trends for 2021

A look at the priorities that will potentially drive global marketing strategies post Covid

2020 will go down as a year that altered the course of history. One of the major implications of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the fact that it has accelerated a switch to all things digital. The world has had to adapt the way that it communicates and does business – social media usage has skyrocketed, businesses have adopted a ‘virtual’ way of working and work from home (WFH) has become an accepted business practice. As we head towards the end of the year, there is no reverting back to the ‘way things were’. Here are the leading digital marketing trends expected for 2021.

Rise of the chatbot

If you’ve had an e-commerce transaction go wrong or had a food app order mishap, chances are you’ve had to deal with a chatbot. The growth of online and e-commerce purchases, coupled with a chatbot’s ​ability to interact with customers and mimic reallife interactions, makes it a very attractive go-to solution for businesses.

For marketers, however, this presents a unique opportunity whereby they can use chatbots to not only provide instant customer service, but also be a source of direct interaction for information and data collection. More recently, the use of chatbots has expanded, and they are being used in creative ways to help drive customer engagement and website traffic. Chatbots are not going anywhere and we will only see them becoming more prevalent as time goes on.

Voice activated search becoming the norm