5 Hacks to Flourish Your Digital Marketing Campaigns in 2021

Digital marketing is a fast-evolving field. Technologies move like the wind, search engines launch updates every second month, and customer interests and behavior are hard to predict. In 2021, when most brands chase innovations, you can’t stand on the sidelines. The same old methods for your digital marketing campaigns won’t work forever.

For your business to thrive, it’s critical to not only stay up-to-date with marketing trends but also understand how to implement them. Do this in a way that would benefit your customers in particular. If you’re wondering how you can ensure your business survives in this age of innovation, follow these five digital marketing hacks.

1. Design alternative content types

Content design is not only about writing blog articles and creating regular posts or ads for social media channels. As a marketer, you know that most users don’t trust brand ads anymore. They choose authentic businesses, those communicating like humans and appreciating their audience’s values. To become such a brand for your customers, start designing content types that would engage and motivate them to interact with you.

First and foremost, become an active Instagram story maker. With tons of mockups and features available, it won’t be hard to create original content that would fit your brand. If your target audience prefers Facebook or Snapchat, feel free to practice the “My Story” format there. (As you know, even YouTube has launched its Story format, “Reels,” a few years ago). “Shorts” is another feature launched in the recent years and businesses can embed YouTube shorts on the website easily.

There are many benefits of social media stories for your business:

• Stories are cost-effective and more engaging than feed posts.
• They increase brand awareness and bring more traffic to your web pages.
• It is a perfect chance to reach younger audiences.

Second, start designing interactive content that offers your audience an immersive experience. It can be quizzes, polls, AR ads, embedded calculators, and anything else that serves to communicate your message. Users like interactive content because it’s original and makes them feel connected to a brand.

And finally, make the most out of user-generated content (UGC) for your digital marketing campaigns. Encourage customers to create images and videos mentioning your brand, write blog comments or testimonials on your website, participate in your contests or giveaways, etc. According to the latest surveys, UGC influences buying decisions more than any other form of advertising. 90% of shoppers admit its “extreme influence” on their decision to purchase a product.

2. Embrace video marketing

Do you know that video content “eats” about 82% of all online traffic today? Indeed, it’s one of the driving forces for digital marketing in 2021. Largely due to the fact that YouTube has turned into the world’s second-largest search engine after Google. If you need more reasons to consider video marketing as a vital part of your campaign, please welcome the statistics:

The demand for video content grows drastically: 

72% of users admit they would rather watch a product video than read about it, and 95% say they remember video calls to action better than text ones. More than that, videos increase conversions by 80%! Using text to video tools, businesses can now convert written content into powerful video assets that drive higher engagement and sales.

It’s all thanks to the interactive nature of video content and its visual superiority over text. Most of us are visual learners perceiving information via images and storytelling, and that’s where video content rules.

The two most popular trends in video marketing today are live and branded videos. To generate more engagement and traffic, you need to address the pain points of your target audience, optimize a video with relevant keywords when uploading it on YouTube, and design it so that it would stand out from the others on similar topics. With Mediamodifier’s design templates for creating YouTube art, you can achieve that faster and easier.

3. Optimize emails in light of new rules

Is email still relevant in the era of chatbots and social messaging apps? The short answer is yes. More than half of us check email before doing anything else online, regardless of what age group we are.

After 2020, when most consumers had to spend time in a remote environment and shop online, the role of email marketing doubled. Brands use it as a powerful business channel. It combines personalization and automation to speak to the audience and communicate their ethics. More than that, 72% of consumers admit they want to get sales content via email, compared to just 17% willing to do that via other platforms.

All this makes email the best option for product promotion. The hack here is to optimize email content so the targets would like to interact with it.

First and foremost, emails should be even more personalized now. Segment the audience according to their interaction with your brand and send targeted emails respectively. The good news is that this process is easy to automate now. Implement AI to your email marketing, and it will do all the organizational work for you (segmentation, subject lines writing, cleaning up mailing lists, send time optimization, and more). In that matter, you could put effort into maintaining high-level security, employing an SPF record checker, and taking other necessary steps.

The integrated power of AI can also help you optimize email content for sure-fire conversion. For that, use the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) technology, allowing you to integrate interactive components within emails. Add polls, GIFs, design mode options, shop buttons, gamification elements, interactive carousels showcasing your products, and other elements that engage users into action.

Additionally, consider enhancing your email communications with professionally crafted and branded email signatures. Tools like Newoldstamp provide an easy and effective way to create visually appealing signatures that leave a lasting impression.

4. Consider conversational marketing

People need brands that wouldn’t just talk about themselves but listen to customer problems and resolve them individually. They want you to hear them. Moreover, 82% of them want an immediate response to their question from a brand. Conversational marketing is a method that will help you satisfy consumers, build loyalty and trust, and convert more leads via individual interaction where each user feels heard.

Chatbots in social media messengers, live chats with website visitors, and social media monitoring to react to brand mentions timely and properly are your instruments of conversational marketing in 2021. Unlike traditional strategies, it’s available across multiple channels and allows a customer to reach you when and where it suits them best.

Conversational marketing speeds up the communication process and helps you resolve customer issues faster. Not only does it allow you to build relationships with as many consumers as possible, it also serves as an instrument to gather customer feedback. Just set your chatbots or customer service software to ask users to rate interactions and provide feedback if they want to.

5. Think About UX

In 2021, user experience (UX) is a direct ranking factor influencing your brand’s visibility in search engines, your traffic, and sales in the long run. More and more people work and shop online today. You need to organize your website to provide a strong customer experience on every page.

It’s not only about your website design, its colors, and fonts for better readability. Besides design, UX is about many factors, including navigation, usability, adaptability, and value. All if these impact a user’s impression and judgment about your brand. It also affects their decision to do business with you.

So, before you plan and start implementing your next digital marketing strategy, ensure your website is UX-friendly. It should have fast page loads, be mobile-friendly to showcase your content on different digital screens, integrate voice-based UI, and be optimized according to the latest SEO trends to meet user search intent.

Final words

So, now you have them – the top five hacks to flourish your digital marketing campaigns this year. All are pretty extensive, time-consuming, and sometimes even cost-intensive. Yet, you can’t ignore them if willing to succeed. Technologies grow, new trends arrive, customer behavior changes – and we need to embrace all that to gain the upper hand and thrive.

About the author:

Anna Chupryna is a digital marketing expert at Crello with a background in content, SEO, PR, and email and social media marketing. She has hands-on experience in running digital marketing campaigns and gladly shares it with the audience.