6 Digital Marketing Trends for SMEs in 2021
What are the digital marketing trends for SMEs in 2021? Let’s look at 2020 in retrospect. 2020 was an unusual year in many ways. This was closely related to the Covid-19 pandemic. For instance, many companies had to move online to keep their employees working remotely.
Similarly, an impressive number of SMEs found that digital marketing can be a lifesaver for their businesses to stay afloat, gain new customers, and generate revenue. Migrating to a digital environment has practically become the best way for SMEs to stay on the map and this has greatly impacted digital marketing strategies.
By definition, digital marketing trends are any key digital changes in the direction of a company’s marketing landscape that is geared towards attracting more customers for the business. This is because effective digital marketing helps SMEs understand the online habits of their target customers so they can better cater to their needs.
Smart SMEs should not make assumptions when they can use digital tools to learn what their target customers search for and need. Digital tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMRush, and SurveyMonkey can help you identify what your customers’ interests are so that you can approach them easier, eventually, convert them into buying customers.
Digital marketing is constantly evolving, and one of the best things you can do for your business this year is to get on this moving train. We have seen huge changes due to AI implementation, as well as Google and Facebook’s increasing use of featured snippets. Many of these trends are free and very relevant to the SMEs’ digital marketing ecosystem as a whole. Below, we will outline 6 of the most prominent ones:
Optimizing Social Media Shops.
According to this study, back in 2018, the average time spent on social media in a day by an adult was 142 minutes. This rose to approximately two and a half hours in 2019, followed by a minimum of 3 hours in 2020, a figure bound to increase. The lesson here is simple: SMEs have more chances to generate sales if their products are available on social media platforms. This is a digital marketing trend that will keep on growing throughout 2021 and beyond.
Shoppable posts make the process so much easier for the customers to purchase items without even leaving their homes. These platforms also often integrate features that make it easy for brands to upload and showcase their goods. Fortunately, creating a store with social media is free and easy. You can choose the products you want to sell and share this list very easily.
Also, you could showcase products during live streamings for viewers to purchase directly on Instagram. Make good use of the Catalog features in Facebook Shops by grouping your products into different categories to create a better customer experience.
Google’s Local Business SEO Algorithms.
As an SME owner, understand that it’s extremely important to keep your digital presence prominent on SERP (Search Engine Result Pages). If you own a physical store, you are probably aware that most of your customers are drawn mainly on a local level. For this reason, a vital digital marketing trend you can utilize is to ensure that your store appears on “near me” Google searches.
Google data is highly useful to your potential customers. The company constantly updates their local SEO algorithm for various regions of the world and you should take full advantage of this as often as possible. Tools such as Google My Business can offer extremely valuable information about your business to your customers, but this can only happen if you allow it.
All you have to do is share your business property and get verified by Google. Then you can provide information about your business such as opening hours, location and services all of which will help your customers locate you faster.
The Use of Artificial Intelligence.
AI has been the major buzzword of digital marketing for the past few years, and for good reason. Back in 2018, a survey by Oracle pointed out that 80% of surveyed brands expect to serve customers via Chatbot by 2020, and 40% of millennials have reported that they have interacted with chatbots daily in 2019. Today, we see wider adoption of chatbots in more businesses as well as increasing use of AI in digital marketing: from automation, user segmentation, personalization, scheduling, and other possible applications.
AI offers marketers the power to collect valuable insights on user behaviour which they can use to optimize their digital marketing campaigns and overall communication with customers. Frizbit provides automated web push notifications, which is quite useful. Once a visitor to your site accepts to receive these, they would be able to receive future messages specially designed for them based on what they did, liked or bought from the site.
This makes it possible to provide a better customer experience in a more personalized context. With AI, you can easily make product recommendations to your site users and figure out what type of content is more effective for each person.
Improved Engagement and Interactivity.
In our modern digital society, marketing has become much more than the simple advertisement of products to a target audience. As an SME business owner, it no longer suffices for your customers to merely know of the existence of your products. They also need to feel engaged enough with it to trust your credibility.
You can engage your customers through live broadcasting, interacting on blogs or social media platforms, or by participating in several forums online. Also, you could do this by running periodic contests on social media or creating relatable stories on Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat.
As a digital marketing trend, this interactivity and engagement with customers are crucial to the success of your brand today. Your target audience should see how great the product/service your SME offers and they should experience it as well. This is necessary particularly in light of the fact that social proofs—such as online reviews— are aspects of this experience. Work with the right influencers if you can’t get this done yourself.
Reach out to successful entrepreneurs you admire for assistance here if necessary. Their input just might help you engage better with your customers while simultaneously getting your voice heard by them.
Video Marketing.
As far as digital marketing trends for SMEs go, video marketing is one of the best out there. If your business isn’t using video marketing in its operations, you are missing out in more ways than you know. Video marketing is any marketing strategy that integrates engaging videos into your marketing campaigns.
It can be used for everything from building customer rapport, to promoting your brand, services or products. There is no comparison between video marketing text content when it comes to selling services and products online.
Consumers all over the world watch more video content today than ever before. Watching videos about anything and at any time is possible now, thanks to our handheld smartphones. Video marketing is convenient and efficient for the consumer. It also provides marketers with an attractive, versatile, and extremely shareable medium to reach their audiences.
Diode Digital recently found that online video is a 600% more effective marketing tool than print and direct mail combined. These statistics prove that video marketing has become a highly engaging activity. It creates a powerful buzz around the product or services your business is offering.
Mobile Marketing
A consumer’s experience today is largely driven through a mobile device. It doesn’t matter whether they’re searching for the product or company, doing a price comparison, or buying a product. Mobile marketing is a multi-channel online marketing technique focused on reaching a specific audience via mobile devices. This can be on their smartphones, tablets, or any other related devices. You can make use of websites, E-mail, SMS and MMS, social media, or mobile applications.
It includes promotions sent through downloaded apps using push notifications and in-app or in-game marketing. Also, it can be through mobile websites or by using a mobile device to scan QR codes.
You can take advantage of mobile marketing to reach your customers based on time or location. An example is sending customers a discount code when they enter a store. Make sure you have a firm online presence. If you own an E-commerce site, make sure the site is mobile-friendly, easily navigable, and with mobile-friendly content. This way, you can take full advantage of the time consumers increasingly spend on their phones.
Conclusion
If you have a small business, you need to consider the above areas of digital marketing. The world of marketing is evolving. Consumer-focused content is the best way to build a solid emotional bond with the customer. Focus your efforts on creating customer-centred marketing and content strategies that connect deeply with users.
Formulate a plan and combine it with your other marketing efforts. But ensure that your message is not getting concealed in the maze of mediums. Some of these areas of marketing will be more important and effective, depending upon your business. You can even outsource if you don’t have the manpower to handle marketing obligations in-house. As long as you adopt any of these digital marketing trends and get moving.
