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Digital Marketing in 2021 – What Can We Expect

Digital Marketing in 2021 – What Can We Expect

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There is no doubt that 2020 was one crazy year. The impact that pandemic had on the world struck almost every aspect of society. Quarantines and social distancing forced people to seek refuge online, increasing the number of internet users. On the other hand, that has led to some structural changes in the digital world, from algorithms to people going against companies like Facebook for having a monopoly to voice search controlling roughly 50% of the searches in some parts of the world. But 2020 is over, and we're almost in the middle of 2021. What can we expect in the area of digital marketing?

In essence, all of these businesses have been pushed online and thereby made super competitive, so everyone is leveraging digital marketing nowadays. So how do you get a leg up on the competition and win in 2021? There are a few trends or quarks that can be highly beneficial to your digital marketing strategy.

Rocket illustrationDefinitely, one of the first trends you have to have in mind is page speed. It's going to be more critical than ever, if not already. Not only do we see an increase in conversions that is causing sites when they improve their page speed, but we also see that it increases their traffic and their rankings. You can do a lot of things to improve your site speed, with, for example, loading your non-static files from CDN-s (or Content Delivery Systems).

Short(er) But More Informative Content

The second trend that we're seeing is content length won't matter as much. And we’re talking about text-based content. Everyone used to create content based on the length being like: oh, if we want to rank at the top, it needs to be super long, we need to have all these keywords in there, this percentage. One thing you can try in 2021 is to make your video and audio length longer. We're witnessing an exciting trend of audio and video length that's over 10 minutes perform better than shorter versions that are only three, four, or even five minutes. On the flip side, making your audio and video length 20, 30 minutes doesn't mean it will have a higher impact than just having it 10 minutes.

Trend number three, how high you rank, will matter more than ever! If you look at older data, it shows that, hey, if you're rank at the top of Google, you're going to get more clicks than if you ranked number two, three, four, or five.

Backlinks won't matter as much. From user´s perspective, does it matter if a site has a million backlinks or two million backlinks? Not really; what really matters to users is a more relevant site.

Wrap

Many of these trends identified were already happening before the pandemic, but COVID-19 has pressed the accelerator and shifted mindsets. 2021 might continue to be a challenging year in marketing. Still, with targeted digital investment, intelligent use of data and marketing technologies, and putting customers firmly in the center, you will be better placed to win this year and beyond.