Three main trends – TikTok, covid19, lockdown. In 2020, marketing has developed in a fantastic and unpredictable scenario. The trends of 2021 can be divided into three broad areas: personalization and nativeness, customer focus. The emergence and development of the most unexpected marketing trends used in 2020 took place in these areas.
Personalization is the key
The stake on personalization is to be as close to the buyer as possible and to more closely match the basic needs of your target audience. Nativeness – to be an integral part of the life or environment of the target audience, and not annoying “head-on advertising”.
Nativeness of ads is a way of ad integration into the main context of the story. Here, unobtrusiveness and subtlety are appreciated in advertising, which does not sell head-on but expresses the author’s opinion, prompting the user to use the advertised product.
Trends to increase the number of channels of interaction with the target audience in marketing are gaining momentum. An active business tries to be on the sites where its target audience is present as quickly as possible. In the presence on the sites, it is important to comply with the specifics and format of the site and to make high-quality content.
Quality content is the foundation
- The growth of the descriptive (text) component of the content – but this is more a story for robots and algorithms that perceive not only the reading of an image from an advertising creative, but also a text component that reveals the meaning of the content. For instance, if you are a musician, then you should put content on Spotify and SoundCloud. You can buy Spotify streams and add very good descriptions to each track. These are the main things for quality marketing growth in 2021;
- Decrease in the descriptive part for the target audience – in pursuit of the speed of perception of information by the target audience, motivation to make an impulse purchase, there is ease in the presentation of information – visualization of data and texts, the introduction of diagrams, emoji to highlight information in the text, a general reduction in the descriptive part of advertising posts, transfer of texts to screenshots and publication sequentially together with the advertising image.
- The growing demand for video content. The use of video in advertising and marketing is only increasing from year to year. The platforms that are growing in popularity are also related to video content (TikTok, YouTube, Facebook Live, Netflix, even IGTV on Instagram).
- Demand for vertical video. If some time ago this direction was characteristic only of certain social networks (TikTok, Instagram), now it is developing into a trend and there are stories or the opportunity to place a short vertical announcement already in all popular video platforms. And while horizontal video still holds its position as the most popular video resolution format, vertical content production is expected to grow.
- Growth of user-generated content in advertising, work with brand ambassadors and influencers. Guided by the nativeness of advertising, the strong influence of opinion leaders on the audience, the demand for just such an advertising format is increasing. Instead of super-quality, bright, creative and high-budget advertising videos of a manufacturer brand, often a greater sales effect is obtained from an unobtrusive story of a blogger who has taken a product on his smartphone. In this case, the quality of the video often loses to the advertising video, and the fact that the plot is not presented as an advertising one, but simply falls into the context of the blogger’s video as a kind of recommendation, and there is native content.
