Are you planning to step up your marketing efforts in 2021? If so, you’ll have to account for a rapidly changing world. The challenges that 2020 brought to the table have also created some new opportunities to reach potential clients and impress them with your message.

In 2020, social media, promo videos, personalized emails, and interactive content dominated the marketing landscape, the Digital Marketing Institute reported. Will these trends stick around in 2021, dominating the best practices for online product marketing?

The short answer is yes. Here’s the longer explanation that will acquaint you with some of the best digital ways to do product promotion in 2021 and the years beyond.

Your Best Strategies Are Here

Prioritize Personalization

No matter what digital marketing approach you opt for, personalization will be the key to successful reach and a high level of engagement in 2021.

You can personalize your campaigns in more than one way – sending segmented email newsletters to different consumer groups, creating content based on the feedback you’ve received from your audience, and even coming up with distinct loyalty programs.

If you’ve never attempted content personalization in the past, the following guide will shed some light on what it is and how it can be accomplished.

Personalized content is one of the first steps toward delivering a successful customer experience. There’s already a lot of research about its effectiveness. SaaS companies that earn about one billion dollars per year and invest in a personalized customer experience and can expect an increase in revenue of an additional billion within three years. Even smaller industry representatives can reap the benefits of personalization. Content personalization brings down customer acquisition cost by about 50 percent regardless of business size or clientele specifics.

In the realm of software as a service (SaaS), companies have seen highly positive results by giving clients personalization options. Companies like Slack can be viewed as an excellent example. Through various extensions and add-on recommendations, the company encourages users to “build” and access the digital product that makes the most sense for their needs.

If you aren’t doing personalization yet, the time may be right to start focusing more on this marketing approach.

As millennials become the main market segment, the importance of personalization is growing. Of all millennials, 70 percent feel frustrated when companies send irrelevant email content. In addition, their loyalty grows by as much as 28 percent whenever a brand puts some effort into custom content creation.

You don’t need expensive technology or analytical solutions to personalize your campaigns like a boss. In fact, much of the information needed can be acquired free of charge. Solutions like Google Analytics (tracking your website’s performance) and Facebook Insights (showing you information about people engaging with your page) can provide the data required to launch a personalized campaign and test its effectiveness.

Leverage Campaign Automation

Marketing automation has received a warm welcome, and in 2021, the scope of possibilities will increase even further.

Campaign automation is especially suitable for product promotion. It enables the streamlining of complex campaigns that could feature multiple elements. In addition, automation can also enable more focused communication with prospects and the delivery of some individual attention.

The goal of any kind of automation is to maximize efficiency. Hence, many repetitive tasks can be automated to handle the more strategic aspects of a campaign. Some of these tasks include reallocating budgets to the best performing channels, supporting customer interactions (email automation is one very simple example of this approach), and gathering campaign performance data.

To get started with product marketing automation, you have to pinpoint the right tasks, choose a solution bound to deliver effective automation, and train your marketing team to execute automation. Needless to say, the effectiveness of the approach will need to be reevaluated every so often in order to make continuous improvements.

Use the Power of Voice Search

There really isn’t any need to discuss search engine optimization (SEO) as one of the best practices for online product marketing in 2021. Google is a powerful tool for establishing brand popularity and every company should feature SEO among its core promotional approaches.

One aspect of SEO that will potentially be game-changing in 2021, however, is voice search.

The way we search for information when we type and when we speak is completely different. Smart assistants like Siri and Alexa are changing the rules of the game when it comes to ensuring the visibility of your content among search engine results.

Back in 2019, a third of the US population used voice search. The number of people using voice search is expected to increase to 122.7 million (a growth rate of approximately 10 percent) in 2021.

Voice search is especially important for product marketers. In 2020, 34.7 million people in the US used smart speakers to shop. This number represents an 11.8 percent increase on an annual basis.

So, what can you do to master voice search?

As a start, understand how people do voice searches. When typing, we’re more likely to submit simple queries. When speaking, we create more complex inquiries. And while keywords and key phrases are still important, queries optimized for voice need to be more complex and all-encompassing.

Let’s look at a real-life example within the eLearning and software industry. A company that offers digital courses may target search queries like “online learning” and “best foreign language online courses.”

When voice search is taken into consideration, however, the queries become more complex. Some of those queries could include “which company offers the best foreign language online courses” and “which online learning platform should I choose.”

Keeping these queries in mind, you should also create high-quality content that answers the questions in their entirety.

Use Digital Events for Reputation Establishment

Organizing digital events like workshops and webinars is a powerful marketing strategy to adopt in 2021.

In-person events are costlier to organize. The second wave of the 2020 pandemic that’s hitting many parts of the world close to the end of the year will create further complications for such brick-and-mortar projects to be launched.

Digital events are much easier to plan, more cost-efficient, and they provide opportunities to reach a larger audience.

A good webinar or online workshop should be based on your area of expertise and the industry you represent. Planning and carrying out a successful event can help you enhance your reputation as an authority in your respective field. This authority will contribute massively to branding efforts and differentiation from the competition.

Apart from giving you a chance to establish thought leadership, a digital event is an excellent opportunity to gain valuable audience insight. Every single interaction with potential customers reveals their interests and needs, as well as your company’s ability to meet them. Don’t underestimate the power of such interactions. Something as simple as hosting a Q&A session on the social network of your preference can help you sharpen your future marketing strategy significantly.

ON24 analysis suggests that webinars continuously deliver very high conversion rates. Communication-focused digital events have the highest conversion rates of 67.05 percent. Events that focus on training deliver 44.79 percent conversions and education webinars see 30.79 percent conversion rates.

So, What Will 2021 Online Product Marketing Look Like?

In 2021, you’ll have the freedom to employ numerous channels and approaches to meet your marketing goals.

For best results, focus on getting to know your clients and prospects. Collecting the right data will allow for personalization, which is setting itself up as the most important promotional element in the coming year. As long as you have sufficient knowledge about your customers, you’ll be able to employ the channels and the strategies bound to give you the highest return on investment.