Evergreen digital marketing trends that are still relevant

On By mattroyseIn Digital Marketing

While marketing is the backbone of every industry in 2021, only 61% of all marketers believe their marketing strategy to be effective. Nonetheless, the remaining 39% is still a considerable portion of the market. Now, there’s a difference between what’s effective and what’s believed to be effective; however, this doubt isn’t always without a cause.

The biggest challenge is the return on investment (ROI) of marketing strategies. Seeing as how businesses are setting aside 10% to 50% of their average annual revenue as a marketing budget, effective is not good enough. To be valid, a method needs to be cost-effective. With that in mind and without further ado, here are several evergreen digital marketing trends that provide a great yield in 2021.

1. Targeting and segmenting audience

There are some people who won’t become paying customers no matter what you do. Then, others might find a way to buy from you, even if you don’t invest any effort to make conversions. There’s a broad spectrum between these two groups that you need to segment and learn how to target properly.

Targeting qualified leads (low-hanging fruits) will give you an incredible ROI. Since these people are already willing to listen to your branded message, the chances are that they won’t need much persuasion. This means excellent conversions with a minimal amount of time, resource, and effort investment on your part. Reaching potential customers with a targeted digital marketing campaign should be your top priority.

2. Focusing on return customers

Another group worth your attention are return customers. According to numerous studies, it costs you five times less to make an old customer return than to make a new conversion. Other than this, if a customer is satisfied with the first purchase, they have a 27% likelihood of returning the second time. After two purchases, the chance of them returning for the third time rises to 45%. When they buy from you three times, the likelihood of returning for the fourth purchase skyrockets to 54%.

Alongside return purchases, the average value of a shopping cart grows, as well. This is only logical, seeing as how the purchase is a matter of trust. If they had positive previous experience, they would feel comfortable interacting with your brand. They would also feel comfortable spending more money on your e-commerce website. All of this combined creates a scenario in which just 8% of all your customers make up for 41% of your profit.

3. Web development and best SEO practices

Proper development of your web design can contribute to both the first impression and its SERP. According to numerous surveys, you have between 2 and 9 seconds to capture the attention of your audience, or you risk losing them for good. A well-designed page is responsive, which means that no time will be wasted. Also, a sleek-looking website testifies of a brand’s professionalism and boosts its trustworthiness.

As far as your SEO goes, it’s important that you understand how proper development of your web pages improves your SERP. If your pages are intuitive, visitors can easily navigate through them, which increases the number of pages visited. If the page is well organized, this will also improve the duration of the visit and reduce the bounce rate. Most importantly, a professional digital marketing agency can optimize the page’s architecture and improve its metadata. This will make it so much easier for search engines to find and index the page.

4. First-hand data for message personalization

In the past, a lot of marketers used third-party data for the personalization of their branded message. The biggest problem with this concept is that it raises some privacy concerns. Tier-1 authorities like GDPR regulations and The California Consumer Privacy Act are likely to put a stop to this for good. The only way to handle this for good is to rely on the data you harvested yourself. Internalized data caches and analytics, therefore, seem to be the only way going forward.

5. Lower customer acquisition cost

Previously, we talked about the cost of converting a new customer being higher than retargeting a previous customer. However, the figure of five times more expensive isn’t necessarily the case. You see, by default and on average, these numbers are solid. Still, there are numerous methods to lower your customer acquisition cost. For instance, methods like B2B conversion rate optimization are one technique you can consider. A similar thing can be achieved through the creation of stronger Google Ads campaigns.

Just keep in mind that your initial estimate of customer acquisition cost (CAC) needs to be accurate. Once you have the number, you should compare it to industry averages to see whether you’re above or below. Like with any project, whether or not you’re getting disappointed in the end greatly depends on your expectations. Also, we need to stress out, once again, different industries have different averages. So, comparing your business to a faulty counterpart (an enterprise in a completely different field) will give you a flawed reference point.

6. Content marketing is still going strong

The reason why the blogosphere is still as strong as it ever was is that – blogging works. There are, however, some evergreen digital marketing trends that a lot of people in the blogosphere are not using as much as they should have. For instance, 2000+ word posts are incredibly effective, yet not many bloggers actually take the time and invest the research required to write them. The average writing time for a blog post in 2020 was 3 hours and 55 minutes, yet, one-in-five bloggers spend more than 6 hours per piece. These are the bloggers that get the best results.

Images are also quite relevant, alongside graphs and visuals of any other kind. Using 7+ visuals per post is an effective method to increase the interest in the post and make it easier to skim through the content. Collaborating with others in the blogosphere is incredibly important. This is why having guest bloggers to help you out and contributing to other people’s blogs are incredibly important. Lastly, when it comes to promoting your content on social media, turning to influencers has proven to have the best effect.

7. Chatbots drive conversions

Chatbots are a huge part of customer service in 2021, and their influence seems to be growing. The strongest selling points of this trend are 24/7 availability, instant response to inquiries, as well as the ability to resolve some of the simplest customer service issues. In 2021, it’s harder than ever to pass a Turing test, but as long as this service is effective, the customers don’t care if there’s a person or a bot at the other end.

The role of a chatbot is that of a personal assistant, and there’s really no better way for an online brand to provide their customers with a bit of special treatment. In the majority of industries, the use of chatbots is indispensable, and they can handle the majority of the simplest tasks with ease. This helps drive conversions and improve the overall user experience.

8. Video marketing

In terms of format effectiveness in digital marketing, video marketing is second to none. As many as 70% of all consumers share videos of brands that they like. With the emergence of smaller video formats (Stories on social media, etc.), this content format is more popular than ever. Another wildly popular video marketing format is live streaming. The appeal of this format lies in its spontaneous and seemingly unscripted nature.

About 65% of executives visit a marketer’s website after viewing a branded video in terms of ROI and sales. In this manner, it dramatically boosts all your business to business (B2B) activity. Furthermore, as many as 39% of these executives follow up with a call.

9. Printed media

While more and more people are turning from old-school in favor of digital, printed media is still essential in the digital world. This allows you to reach out to your audience in a familiar way and even play on the nostalgia card. Due to the nature of printed media, this is one of the simplest ways to generate value for your audience early on.

Printed media spends more time in front of your audience’s eyes and, by default, has a longer audience retention rate. As far as where this fits in with digital marketing, well, first, you can add social media handles, URLs, or even QR codes to your brochures. A brochure can also serve as an inspiration for an infographic and vice-versa. In other words, there are plenty of ways your printed media can enhance your online footprint.

The reason why some trends stand the test of time is quite simple. They generate value for the customer. In order to generate value, a method needs to be either pragmatic, efficient, entertaining, or informative. If a method checks most of these boxes, its longevity is most likely. If a method checks all of these boxes, its longevity is guaranteed. Even search engine algorithms are constantly striving to adjust to users, which is why focusing on user experience is never a bad strategy.

This guest blog post was written by Stacey Shannon. She is a freelance writer and a yoga enthusiast. You can follow her on Twitter.