Digital marketing in the Philippines is no stranger to the drawbacks brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. As a cash-based economy, most businesses and stores are still wary of pivoting their strategies into the digital space.
Whether you’re a brand marketer or part of a digital marketing agency, it’s crucial to note how consumers will settle in the Next Normal.
Here are the four digital marketing trends to watch out in 2021.
Livestreams & other video formats to dominate content
Video will continue to maintain its position as the top medium for producing quality digital content in social media marketing.
According to Social Bakers, Facebook Live has become the most engaging format by the last quarter of 2020, closely followed by regular video content. Instagram viewings surged by 70%, while TikTok had 33 times more users than its closest direct competitor just last year.
This boom is also set to grow even more; Wyzowl reports that around 89% have gotten good ROI from videos through increased sales or leads. With this in mind, we can expect video ad space prices to become more competitive soon.
Social commerce to boom further
The pandemic has drastically affected consumer behavior in many ways.
With widening competition overseas and a shrinking sales funnel, industry giants also began optimizing their platforms—Facebook now has a Shops tab, while Instagram continues to improve their e-commerce efforts through Reels & IGTV.
Shopify also describes in its annual global report how retail e-commerce sales growth ballooned at 16.5% worldwide. Certain regions like the Asia Pacific are also expected to grow further through the first half of the decade.
Structured data to gain more importance
Machine-fed data is often either easy or tricky, but this may all change very soon in the coming months.
Structured data strategies for SEO in the Philippines and worldwide will be more common as Google increases its preference towards the JSON-LD schema.org markup and an updated structured data testing tool.
Just last year, Schema.org had also released updates for version 8.0 on its experimental vocabulary. This version will allow new types and properties to test on creating structured data. Some articles have also noted how structured data can now influence snippets in Google’s SERP.
Optimized chatbots for customers
Chatbots can either be clunky or convenient—however, the latter might occur more this 2021.
Marketing Dive details how three things can make a consumer keep coming back to a particular product or brand: it’s the connection, convenience, and value. Having these three qualities in mind can help us achieve customer satisfaction even in conversational support.
According to Intercom’s 2021 Customer Support Trends Report, chatbots drove significant gains by being 60% more likely to improve resolution times & 30% more likely to increase customer satisfaction. 68% of the support leaders who already use bots are also planning on investing in even more AI support this year.
2020 has been a tumultuous year for most. There’s no guarantee that a quick bounce back will be entirely possible in many industries. But with easing restrictions and vaccine updates, shifting onto a more humane yet no-less-efficient approach to people might be our Next Normal.
