Digital marketing is an ever-changing field. If you think you have figured out something, the very next day you will come across an update or a new technology that is going to diminish all your assumptions, insights, and premises.

Therefore it is only sensible to keep on updating yourself in this ever-changing field. The upside to the same is that if you are willing to up-skill yourself continuously you will never get bored of this field. Because new updates mean new work and endless experimental opportunities.

Well, we can’t predict what the future updates will be or which social media platform would go viral. But with the current data and information in hand, we can definitely predict the trends which are going to get popular in 2021.

So here is a list of the trends that I think every digital marketer should look out for in 2021.

1. Video Marketing:

There is a detailed statistical report that optinmonter recently published where 89% of video marketers say video gives them a good ROI. At the end of the day, all the marketing efforts boil down to making money.

And when everyone realizes that people are immune to still images and the videos are the only way to not only grab the attention but also give them the highest ROI they would want to get their hands on to that. So make sure you are well versed as well as prepared with the strategy around the same this year.

2. Live-stream:

This year due to pandemic we saw a lot of virtual meetups. Because of the scenario, the live stream gained a lot of traction. Watching celebrities live in the living room has become the new normal.

Twitch which is the market leader of live streaming saw a massive 62.7% increase in hours watched from Q1 2020 to reach 5 billion hours watched in the second quarter. This figure is enough to showcase the massive appetite and affinity the audience has for the live content. Therefore, brands and influencers should include live-streams as a part of their content strategy to appeal to their target audience.

3. User-generated content:

Amateur videos/photos create a relatability factor and that is why Tai Lopez loves making videos from his front camera of the smartphone. He sure can afford a Drock but that won’t create an impact and people will not feel relatable.

Therefore, he instead goes for a sub-quality video made from his front camera. The same kind of relatability can be generated through the user-generated subpar content.

The best benefit is that you don’t have to spend a penny on the same and you will get unlimited amounts of best quality content at your disposal. In addition, I haven’t even started talking about the word of mouth it will generate for your business.

4. Audio/voice:

Replace songs with podcasts was the best advice anyone ever gave me. My google morning alarm routine ends up with listening to the latest episode of The Garyvee Audio Experience. And there are a lot of people who are doing the same.

There are currently 850,000 active podcasts. That might look huge. But let me give you some perspective. There are 500 Million+ blogs and 27 Million+ youtube channels. So if you thought that the podcast market is saturated then let me tell you that it is far from saturation.

The podcast advertising revenues projected to surpass $1 billion annually by 2021 which is 10 times that in 2015. Therefore, making a strategy around audio is the only sensible thing in 2021 to get ahead of your competition.

5. Storytelling:

When Kevin O’ Leary in an interview with Gary Vee recently talked about the Digital Pivot, the majority time was spent about storytelling and hiring resources to execute the same. That is when you exactly know that everyone has started taking storytelling very seriously.

Seth Godin has been saying that all marketers are storytellers for a very long time but now brands have started pivoting towards a marketing mission and their brand communication always points towards that mission with the help of various wonderful stories. Having said that, I feel 2021 will be the year of storytellers.

Pandemic has pushed us, shook us, woke us up and most importantly showed us that nothing is permanent. So, we have two options: either go obsolete or start riding on the trend.

Well, I have made this simple for you to tap on the trends which are going to pick up so what are you waiting for? Just google it and get ahead of everyone!