Maximize Your Digital Marketing Strategy in 2021

A recent survey of 2,500 digital marketers revealed that email marketing generates the highest ROI, followed by content marketing, social media marketing, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.  Maximize your digital marketing strategy to ultimately maximize your short-term and long-term profits.  In this article, we will discuss the top digital marketing tips you can use to boost your small business’ digital marketing ROI in 2021.

Main Objectives

The three main objectives of digital marketing are: (i) aligning sales & marketing teams, (ii) tracking the customer’s journey, and (iii) measuring your marketing ROI.  Sales and marketing departments can often work in silos.  So, the first step is to break down those silos and set shared goals and objectives.  The next step, knowing where your prospects and customers are on their journey is about finding out how much they are willing to spend, when they are looking to make a purchase, and how they like to be reached – for example, via their mobile devices.  In addition to tracking your prospects’ and customers’ journeys, you must simultaneously generate quality data throughout the sales process to accurately measure your digital marketing ROI.

Getting you data right begins with determining the right questions and metrics, which should always be consistent, timely, relevant, and accurate.  Better integration of the company’s marketing data is where many managers are focusing today to improve the quality of their actionable information.

Top Email Marketing Trends

We have seen a seismic shift in business and consumer digital adoption since the onset of Covid-19 and this has elevated expectations about a business’ digital marketing capabilities.  Top email marketing trends small businesses are incorporating into their email marketing strategies today include: (i) using hyper-personalized messaging, which can improve engagement by 75%; (ii) segmenting customers based on the frequency of their company interactions; (iii) incorporating more automation, include AI;  (iv) embedding interactive content and videos directly into its emails; and (v) using bright colors or “text only” email messages to stand out.  Another popular strategy being is employing an omnichannel marketing approach, which uses a combination of digital and traditional marketing tactics to convert prospects and customers.  Emailing marketing has increased since Covid, so do not overdo it, as studies have found that five unwelcomed emails will decrease future prospect and customer engagement.

Content Marketing

In terms of content marketing, statistics reveal that it gets three times more leads than paid advertising; and 55% of marketers have identified blog content as their leading content marketing strategy.  Top content marketing trends can be incorporated in one’s business in different ways: (a) by engaging in interactive, conversational marketing; (b) incorporating more video content and podcasts;  (c) aligning content with practical solutions; (d) clustering content to build a position of authority; and (e) using content marketing to seek feedback from your audience – for example, by sharing content on social media.

Social Media

Social media is important because 63% of its’ user’s value social media reviews, approximately 70% of them believe customer opinions, and 87% of e-commerce shoppers use social media to help them make purchasing decisions.  Social media can, furthermore, be a way to focus on social issues, as 56% of consumers today do not it like when companies are silent on important social issues.  As for new trends, “live” social media and Instagram carousel posts have all increased in use this year.  Increasing your social media activities is also important because it can help boost your search engine rankings.

Pay-For-Click

There are also significant changes transforming how marketers view pay-for-click (PPC.) Because marketers are trying video ads and social media platforms to accomplish their PPC campaigns and  Amazon’s expansion into paid advertising, Google Ad revenue was down in 2020.  Other PPC trends likely to continue in 2021 consist of the rise of “smart bidding,” “audience segmentation,” “Google snippets,” and “pay per conversion.”

Tracking

It is hoped that these ideas will help guide you in creating your digital marketing strategy in 2021.  After crafting your company’s digital marketing strategy, you will need a dashboard to track you digital marketing ROI.  As previously mentioned, done correctly your analysis should lead to accurate, real-time actionable business insights about your email, content, social media and PPC marketing initiatives to help you maximize your marketing ROI in 2021.  Single source marketing reporting tools gaining in popularity like Adverity, Cyfe, Google Data Studio, HubSpot, Klipfolio, and Tableau can help you create useful dashboards, impactful visuals, and tailored, real-time analytics to help you measure and continuously improve your marketing ROI.