Seven Essential Digital Marketing Tips for 2021 (And Beyond)

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Seven Essential Digital Marketing Tips for 2021 (And Beyond)
June 1, 2021
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Guest post by Atreyee Chowdhury.
Nearly every business has a digital marketing strategy, whether documented or not. But some become wildly successful while others struggle, switching from one approach to another. What sets them apart?
High-performance digital marketing campaigns are a mix of proven strategies that yield results and a deep understanding of the market landscape.
Without competitor and audience intelligence, customizing campaigns to reach maximum business potential is difficult. What follows is loss of resources, energy, and enthusiasm.
But what if there was a simple (not necessarily easy, but simple) solution to this? A proven system that yields results, regardless of industry segment?
Here are this year’s top-performing digital marketing tips that will give you the best chance of reaching your campaign goals.
Seven Essential Digital Marketing Tips for Your Business in 2021
Digital marketing isn’t rocket science, but it’s no cakewalk either. The real mastery of digital marketing is in keeping up with change. What worked yesterday might not work today. This makes updating your marketing knowledge essential for sustainable success. Here are the top seven digital marketing tips for business success in 2021 (and beyond).
1.   Create content your audience loves.
Content is at the core of digital marketing. But getting this right is far more challenging today than in the past, due to the vast quantities of new content being produced every day.
In this time of content shock , when all of your competitors use content to reach their audiences, standing out is difficult. So, does that mean content marketing is dead? Hell no. In fact, quite the opposite. Here’s what you need to do in 2021.
Choose your core content format: The typical anatomy of viral content often features a common trait, a content framework that 80% of the target audience love. This means if your audience is primarily on LinkedIn, go for text posts. If they’re on Instagram, create visual content, while if  Youtube, produce videos (obviously).
Be heavy on video content: If your company is a laggard in producing video content for your audience, this is the year to step up your game. But it’s vital to develop a strategy first.
There are two criteria that combine to deliver results: value and experience. While audience behavior can reveal potential successful topics, you need to know how you design your content. Is it optimized for experience?
Pro tip: You could use a subtitle generator to ensure that your audience can watch your video without sound. Happyscribe’s subtitle generator enables you to add subtitles to your videos in minutes. You just need to upload your files and the tool will automatically create subtitles for your videos. You can easily access the finished, subtitled videos and publish them.
Diversify your content: Although your core communication channel, along with video content, will take your brand to new places, that’s not enough. Your audience today hangs out in multiple locations online. And it typically takes multiple interactions to turn targets into prospects, and prospects into customers.
Studies indicate that a potential lead needs to have a minimum of seven interactions with your brand to trust you enough for a transaction. This means diversifying isn’t only crucial for maximum outreach but for higher conversions, too. One of the best ways to scale your reach is by repurposing your existing content in multiple formats in other channels.
2.   Use email marketing to maximize sales.
There is a big reason why email marketing still is one of the highest performing strategies in 2021. One study found that for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you earn $44 . That’s a 44x ROI. But to reach this potential requires looking into a few finer details. Here are a few elements that you should check.
Create an irresistible offer: Your offer is the core of your email marketing campaign, so it must provide a compelling value to your subscribers. The best way to achieve this is to empathize with your audience’s pain points and highlight those benefits of your solutions in the email.
Create context: Time is the most critical element when it comes to email marketing success. No matter how great your content or offer is, your email marketing campaign will fall flat if your audience is not ready for it. This means you need to focus on developing context for your offer. Personalized messages that trigger authentic conversations are a great strategy here.
Work on your email delivery: Sending an irresistible offer at the optimal time should do the magic on your subscribers, right? Not yet. No matter how good it is, your content doesn’t matter if it doesn’t reach your subscriber list. It may as well have never been sent. It’s even worse if it ends up in your subscriber’s spam folder.
To get this right, always use a professional email service provider. Don’t rely on Gmail here. Mailchimp is a great choice when it comes to deliverability.
3.   Engage with prospective customers on social media.
Staying connected with your customers and sales prospects, via email and social media, is critical. But for your social media activity to successfully yield results, you need to do more than just broadcast content. Here’s what you can do beyond self-promotion.
Use microblogging: In a time when your reader’s attention span is lower than a goldfish (8 seconds) , creating long social posts can be a risky game. You need to think strategically. Keeping posts short (less than 400 characters on LinkedIn) can increase your response rate by 16% .
Short, bite-sized content pieces from your blog posts aren’t just more shareable but easy to consume. Think of it like showing a movie trailer to your audience. It intrigues them enough to find out more.  What follows is a traffic spike in relevant, high-quality visitors to your blog post.
Do extensive hashtag keyword research: If your content is not searchable, it is not scalable. This makes keyword research for hashtags critical in social media. With the right keywords in place, you wouldn’t just attract new eyeballs but get an opportunity to create brand equity in the long term.
Use automation tools: Technology is making producing high-quality social content today easier than it’s ever been. With automation tools like Buffer and Zapier available, you can put the robots into work.
4.   Create experience-heavy marketing.
Brands today run on the attention economy. Creating an unforgettable brand-customer experience takes a lot of work from different areas. Here are a few places to start.
Optimize your site for a mobile-first audience: Your website is almost always the first encounter that your audience has with your brand. The first impression matters. Don’t let it ruin your chances to foster a potential long-term relationship.
Having a responsive, fast-loading website is one the top requirements for your website to work as a sales machine.
Observe your audience closely: Understanding your audience is vital to your company’s success. You can’t read their minds, but you can use technology.
With tools like Hotjar, you can precisely find out how your visitors are navigating across your site. The heatmaps the tool provides give you detailed data about the maximum hovering areas, highest clicked buttons, and more. This makes optimizing your site for conversion easier.
Create exclusivity: Having rich audience data means nothing if you can’t transform that into actionable insights. Use your observations to create personalized, exclusive experiences. From discount offers to content, curate every experience for an individual audience. This is where account-based marketing comes in.
5.   Be aware of data regulation policies.
Your can leverage customer behavior data to create powerful personalized marketing . But what if you lose access to this powerful tool? As web users grow increasing skeptical and concerned about how their information is being used, data collection is becoming a big issue.
With multiple privacy laws being enforced by different countries, this challenge just gets larger and thornier. But all is not lost (yet). Here’s what you can do.
Data privacy knowledge: While you can’t do anything about data privacy laws being upheld, you can ensure you know what you can and can’t do. Staying updated on data privacy laws is the first step. Osano’s CCPA vs. GDPR guide is a detailed guide that can help you understand the broadest regulations in the data privacy landscape.
Permission marketing: Even though your audience today has trust issues about how their data is being used, they still want a personalized experience. Use this need as leverage to collect audience data. But remember to state the purpose of your data collection clearly to your audience.
Automate data privacy compliance: While staying inside the loop of the current updates and seeking your audience’s permission can make impactful improvements on data collection, you can automate this process too. Using powerful widgets like Preeco and social media tools like Smashballoon that are data-privacy conscious goes a long way.
6.   Influencer marketing goes a long way.
Using influencers to market your brand is a great strategy. But doing it right is tricker than any other form of marketing. Done wrong, you will end up spending significant dollars to generate little if any ROI.
Here are three approaches that can improve your influencer marketing success.
Micro-influencers: Don’t underestimate the value of micro-influencers (social media users with small but focused and active followings); this is among the most common mistake companies make in influencer marketing. Although they don’t have millions of followers like macro-influencers, micro-influencers have more authentic engagement with their followers, which is ideal for conversions.
Macro-influencers: While micro-influencers should play a role in your strategy, relying only upon them likely won’t generate substantial business growth. There’s no better option than collaborating with a macro influencer to drive massive new traffic.
Guest blogging: Although guest blogging has been around for a long time, its power hasn’t diminished. However, you need a different approach today than in the past. Target your outreach to blogs that complement your brand and will help you reach a valuable new audience. If your product adds value to theirs or vice versa, it’s an ideal place to post a guest blog.
7.   Build your social currency with a robust PR strategy.
Building trust with your audience takes time, effort, and investment. But PR can speed up this process. Here’s what works in 2021.
Sponsored content: Sponsoring content pieces on popular news sites like Forbes or Inc or any channel where your ideal audience hangs out is a great exposure opportunity for your brand. Also, it immediately establishes authority for your brand voice.
Be open to collaboration: There are good reasons why affiliate marketing is so popular, but you need to be selective about whom you partner with. Hordes of bloggers may want to collaborate with you for the sales commission. But your objective should be to not only generate traffic and sales, but to build a sustainable brand. This means each partner’s vision and core values should align with yours.
Get listed on public review platforms: Feedback is a critical currency. What your buyers write about you and how they rate your offerings is going to shape your business’s future. This makes your early adopters more than customers. They are the foundation of your business. You can utilize public review platforms like Quora to get reviews from early adopters. If you are a SaaS company, G2 is a great choice.
To Conclude
These seven digital marketing strategies can help improve your business success this year, and into the future.
Digital marketing in the next few years is and will continue to be centered around original, high-value content; email marketing; social media engagement; experiential marketing; and influence.
The above tips provide a roadmap to help you make informed decisions, but championing and ultimately succeeding with any of the strategies comes down how well you understand your audience.
Atreyee Chowdhury works full-time as a Learning Experience Designer and is passionate about writing. She has helped many small and medium-scale businesses achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted content that is both informative and engaging. She lives in Bangalore, India with her husband. You can reach her on Linkedin or write to her at atreyee.c@gmail.com .