Today I’ll be going over effective internet marketing methods in 2021 and beyond; what works, and what doesn’t. This will be a general overview to familiarize you with current marketing trends and methods. 

Instead of taking the time to learn how to do it all yourself, consider letting us help your business by visiting simpledevco.com or shoot me an email at jordan@simpledevco.com and make sure to include the keyword “simple” to receive a special introductory rate.

There are many different avenues of internet marketing that are constantly grabbing for your attention and pulling you away from a more effective means of marketing. I’ve included 7 of the most effective ways of marketing your business in 2021 and beyond. This is going to be the first in a 2 part series, so be on the lookout for part 2.

I’ll be introducing the following methods:

• Chatbots
• Conversational marketing
• Personalization
• Video Marketing
• Influencer marketing
• Social media stories
• Browser push notifications

Chatbots

I remember being 7 or 8 years old on AOL Instant Messenger, and whenever any of my friends were offline, I would message the chatbots to pass the time. Now, fast forward to 2021, Chatbots have been and will continue to be a vital part of digital marketing in 2021 and beyond. The AI-based techn uses instant messaging to chat with customers or visitors in real-time, any time of day. 

Surveys show that: 

• Chatbots made up over 80% of all customer service in 2020
• Top benefits of chatbots are 24-hour service, instant responses to inquiries, and clear answers to simple questions

A large portion of people actually prefer talking with chatbots because they’re available 24/7, give instant answers, can accurately recall your entire buying history, are grammatically correct, and are never impatient. 

These virtual assistants offer incredible customer service by meeting expectations and, conveniently automating tasks – which opens you up to focusing on more important tasks.

You can find this chatbot technology with major brands already – Lyft, Amazon, Facebook Messenger, Slack, even Pizza Hut and Staples, all the way to Sephora. They all use chatbots with great success.

This may seem like more targeted to customer service, but you can set up chatbots on your website to automatically respond to specific questions that site visitors may have. This speeds up the time that it would normally take for a potential customer or client to reach out to you with a question they have. Not only can it automate these tasks for you, but it can also serve as an effective filter for clients that may not be qualified for your business.

Conversational Marketing

With Chatbots, the reality of the effectiveness of modern marketing is crystal clear: it’s more conversational. Brands have moved more towards what the people most interact with, and it’s working. When a consumer has a question they need answers, over 80% of them want a response immediately. 

I’ve gotten spoiled when it comes to making buy decisions, and if I have to wait more than 3 minutes for a chat conversation to be ready, I get antsy and I may just leave. If they would have responded quicker, they would have made a sale, so it’s all about being there to fulfill a need when it arises. 

“Micro-Moments”

When a consumer has their “micro-moment”, they are ready to buy immediately, and are extremely impatient. The more time that goes by before you satisfy that need, the more likely it is that the micro-moment will fade, and the sale will be lost. 

Conversational marketing is a one-on-one connection in real-time between a marketer or provider, and its customers: usually in the form of AI, again, using chatbots, just a little more in-depth. 

David Cancel, founder and CEO of Drift says that: “Today’s buyers expect to find what they’re looking for now, not later. As we prepare for the future, it will be more important than ever for businesses to be available across a broad spectrum of channels, and to make sure you’re communicating the way people prefer to communicate.” 

The main goal of conversational marketing is to effectively be enhancing the user experience through a measurable feedback model which creates higher engagement, and higher customer satisfaction.

Personalization

Standing out in 2021 and beyond is all about making things more personal. If you’re blasting generic content, people will know. Some people may not care, but the majority of people prefer to have a much more personalized experience. This means that your content, products, emails, marketing material, videos, etc all need to be more personalized for your ideal audience. 

Consider the following statistics: 

Over 60% of consumers find generic ad blasts irritating.

80% are much more likely to patronize a company has more personalized experiences 

90% say personalization is appealing to them

Personalization in Action

If you’re having a hard time thinking about this in action, take a look at Netflix,  Amazon, or Hulu with custom tailored recommendations of products, shows, or movies. 

Some examples of companies that are effectively using personalization today: 

EasyJet has an email campaign that is driven by user data which uses their customers’ travel history with them to build a personalized profile. This profile then suggests where they are most likely to travel next. Today, at least 12.5 million unique, individual emails have been sent and has resulted in a 25% increase in CTR (click through rate) when you compare it to a generic ad campaign.

Cadbury made a custom, personalized video campaign which matches a flavor with their consumers that is based on data from their Facebook profile which includes age, interests and also their location. This campaign successfully generated a click-through-rate of 65% and resulted in a 33% conversion rate, which is undoubted proof that providing a personal touch is beneficial for your business. 

And what’s more, Starbucks started using a mobile app a few years ago that’s gamified. It draws on purchase history data and location to get as personalized as possible, and allows a consumer to customize their drink order, and further encourages app use with its rewards system. This has resulted in a revenue increase of $2.56 billion for them.

Video marketing

Video marketing is the biggest and most important trend in the modern age and likely will continue to dominate over the next 10 years, and for good reason. 

The following statistics show the absolute importance and value that adding video content to your digital marketing strategy will provide in 2021:

• 70% of consumers say they have at one time or another, shared a brand’s video
• 72% of businesses say video has helped them improve their conversion rate 
• 52% of consumers say watching videos on products before they buy them makes them more confident in their purchasing decisions
• 65% of executives visit the marketer’s website immediately following finishing a video
• 39% of executives will call a vendor after seeing a video 

In terms of popularity, video content is by far the best way for customers to learn about your business’s new products; and don’t immediately think only of YouTube. There are various different platforms and avenues to drive higher engagement directly from your video content marketing. 

Recommendations

You can use live broadcasts on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, and you can post short videos to TikTok or make use of Instagram TV with longer videos, the list goes on.

What doesn’t work nowadays due to the increased shift to mobile devices are long-form sales pages and the horrible long emails of the previous decade when smartphones weren’t as popular. 

However, a targeted video that is well executed has the capability to present the exact same information in a format that works on any device you view it on. 

If your website includes video content, it is 50X more likely to drive organic search results when compared to text. I’ll say it again, if your website includes video content, it is 50X more likely to drive organic search results. 

This is the case because users across the board find video content way more compelling than reading an article, so Google ranks pages and websites that include videos higher in the search results. 

A huge bonus in terms of video content marketing is how easy it is to reformat your content for different platforms. If you’ve recorded a YouTube video, here are some other ways to get the most out of the content for marketing: 

• Transcribe it so you have a text version of the video to publish to your website as a blog post underneath an embedded YouTube video to rank higher
• Upload the original video with the transcription turned into subtitles directly onto Facebook (videos uploaded directly to Facebook get more impressions, shares, and engagement vs sharing a YouTube link)
• Turn the transcription into a blog post and add more relevant statistics and images 
• Rip the audio out and turn it into an episode for a podcast
• Use your video thumbnails with your email marketing campaigns, and include the word “video” in subject to increase open rates by 20% 

More Examples

Some more video content marketing that’s gaining traction: 

• Live videos are particularly popular with a growing number of businesses who use it mainly for interviews, product demos, or behind-the-scenes
• One on one video is another one where businesses or marketers make personalized videos as messages instead of making phone calls or sending emails. 

Film equipment costs are only going down and almost everyone has a smartphone capable of taking 4k videos, so there are no more excuses. If you’d like to learn more about entry-level equipment for creating high quality videos, there’s a link in the description with products that I myself have used and recommend, all are very friendly to your wallet.

Video SEO. YouTube and other videos are displayed in the SERPs (search engine results pages), so video optimization is only getting more important – use text overlays, closed captions, an optimized description, title and even the names of your video files. 

Subscribe and click on the notification bell to look forward to a future video on YouTube SEO, and subscribe to our newsletter to be notified of an upcoming course all about creating an effective YouTube channel to grow your business, which can be found on thebecourse.com.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is similar to referral marketing, but with an extra initial push. It focuses mainly on using key leaders in the social media sphere to increase your brand’s reach to a larger market. 

An influencer may be a well-known celebrity, but it’s more likely they are well known on Instagram or YouTube with a huge following in their niche and can help spread the word about your company’s brand or product through their own social channels. 

Influencer marketing is, whether you agree or not, objectively more authentic than corporate advertising. Over 60% of consumers trust an influencers’ opinion of a new product way more than what brands are saying about themselves. 

Over 50% of consumers purchased a new product in the past six months directly because of an influencer’s recommendation for a buy. 

Real Life Example

Because of this, Iceland, which is a well-known British supermarket chain, changed from utilizing advertisements with celebrities, to a campaign that featured real moms. They then teamed up with a YouTube channel called “Channel Mum”, and it now works with various vloggers to continue to promote its products using authenticity and social proof. 

To further back up this amazing marketing decision, the research showed that over 30% of mothers trusted online videos over traditional advertisements. 

Influencer marketing is not simply a trend: a study done by mediakix predicts the ad spend of influencer marketing will top $10bn by 2022.

Social media stories

Social media stories are excellent methods of increasing brand awareness, providing constant engagement that is not only cost effective, but also has the capability of reaching the youngest buying market. 

In the beginning, Snapchat released “My Story”, and then Instagram & Facebook stories, then YouTube hopped on the bandwagon. 

Because these stories disappear usually within a 24 hour period unless they are saved to your page, they create a fantastic opportunity to instill FOMO or (fear of missing out) which can lead to impulse buys, again, capitalizing on a consumer’s “micro-moment”. 

Take the time to get some ideas of ways you can use social media stories for your business. You can use polls in an Instagram Story, add links to your social media stories, utilize Snapchat geofilters, add location tags, mentions for other brands or your fans 

Also consider giving live video a whirl when you create a story, and invite followers to further explore your brand with clear CTA’s (call to action).

Browser push notifications (I hate them, but they work!)

I picked up my wife’s phone to answer the phone when her mom was calling and her phone was flooded with notifications from so many different websites I had never heard of. She wasn’t sure where they came from, and I let her know that whenever a browser asks to give notifications, you should usually just click “no”. However, this just shows the effectiveness of browser push notifications, even if they seem a little predatory.

Browser push notifications are only getting more prevalent, with over 85% of online stores adding them to their sites. 

Consider this: Twice as many consumers will sign up for browser push notification when compared to a newsletter. 

Really only 5-10% of the most effective email marketers will achieve a newsletter sign-up rate that even comes close to matching the performance of a browser push notification. 

It takes 6 and a half hours on average for a recipient of a newsletter to open it, or delete it; but in the case of a browser push, they’ll see it the next time they open their phone, or immediately if they’re on their computer. 

To add to this, the younger age bracket of consumers prefer to engage with a brand with less effort and touchpoints than ever before. 

To engage with users on multiple channels, you’ll continue to see browser push notifications being adopted by more and more brands in 2021 and beyond. 

Not Yet Convinced?

To further drive this point home, using a personalized push notification will increase your conversions: 7% open rate for browser push notifications compared to 3% open rate for a generic, broadcast advertisement which is a 2x improvement. 

Over 50% of users convert from a push notification, compared to just 15% for a broadcast message or ad which is a 3x increase.

Notifications that are triggered by behavior are now being utilized to re-engage consumers that have shown interest but abandoned their cart. This has shown to have massive success and if done effectively, will drastically increase your sales.

Wrapping Up

So that was part 1 of what works for internet marketing in 2021. If any of the methods piqued your interest, but you have no idea where to start, consider hiring us to effectively market your business by visiting us at simpledevco.com, or send me an email at jordan@simpledevco.com, and as always, make sure to include the keyword “simple” to receive a special introductory rate.