Five marketing trends for 2021

I have decided to share with you my personal selection of next year’s marketing trends. Here are my must-haves for 2021:

1. STRATEGIC APPROACH

Basic. Basis. Something for everyone to start planning their activities with. At least in theory. My experience shows that a great many actions and decisions are made ad hoc, without a specific strategy and goal. Because someone had a cool idea or saw an interesting action at their competitor’s or wanted to do something creative. In today’s Covid and, hopefully, post-Covid world, a strategic approach should be the first step in planning activities for 2021. Brands with clearly defined marketing strategies that know what they want to achieve, can do much more than those operating without such a plan. 

At Valkea, the strategy department is involved in the vast majority of projects that we receive. Without a strategic view, we do not move on.

2. DIGITALIZATION

The year 2020, which many of us, for obvious reasons, will want to forget as soon as possible, accelerated the process of digitalizing everything we could. Including what seemed non-digitalizable before Covid. It’s a process with no going back and I think everyone is aware of it. Marketing communication starts online today. This is how most brands create their strategies. And rightly so. However, it is not always easy. Digitalization also brings many pitfalls and shortcuts to avoid. Especially when we go a little deeper into the marketing tools we have used so far in the offline sphere. Let’s take a simple example of a catalog or magazine that the brand has published in the traditional way so far. What to do with it now? Is it digital? How simple it sounds! Convert PDF and send it by email to customers? Embed it on a website and promote it in SM channels? Theoretically, only the distribution path of the same content changes. But the reality is much more complicated. 

What worked great for printing won’t work as well online. There are many reasons. First, the competitive environment in which a printed magazine is located is definitely different than when it is online. On the screen of a smartphone or laptop, it will fight for the customer’s attention with countless content that is just one click away. Secondly, the way of creating content for individual channels is a very sophisticated and tailored process that cannot be simply translated between them. At Valkea, we have managed to create a product that perfectly copes with the described challenges.

3. CONTENT MARKETING

It has been with us for a long time, but its role will be even greater in 2021. Consumers bored with traditional advertising messages are more and more demanding and hungry for the highest quality message. Only campaigns based on strategically thought-out and perfectly-produced content have a chance to appear in the minds of recipients and create a positive sentiment, without which a brand will disappear in a split second and fall into oblivion.

Everyone knows that Nike and Red Bull have built their brands based on unique content productions, but still few brands can skillfully use content marketing. Personally, it does not bother me too much, because for us, as an agency, it gives us a lot of room for the brands we work with.

4. WEB DESIGN/MOBILE FIRST

This point seems obvious, but it is enough to click through the pages of a few large companies for a moment to see how big the problem is. Appearance and UX are of course only one side of the coin, it looks even worse from the perspective of Google. That is why this point is on my must-have list for 2021. Rebuilding the website, starting with the mobile version, should be the No. 1 goal for most brands in the coming year. Remember that the website is our own kingdom, which neither Facebook nor Google can deprive us of. If we build and promote them properly, it can play a fundamental role in many sales and image processes, which we so easily transfer to our profiles on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube.

5. INFLUENCER MARKETING

With most consumers still trusting and believing content from their favorite opinion leaders, influencer marketing is in full swing. If we add to this the lower cost of building reach than in most other media, the possibility of presenting the product in a non-obvious, natural way, which is in vain to look for in other channels (maybe except for content marketing), then we have another must-have marketing in 2021 for many products and brands. Of course, it is worth paying attention to the details, choosing the right people for cooperation and, together with the agency, refining the way a product is displayed.

Of course, this is my subjective opinion. Regardless, however, in choosing them, I was not guided by personal taste, but most of all by efficiency, innovation, and the opportunities they bring. And although some of them have been on the market for a long time, I am mentioning them because, in my opinion, in 2021 they will play an absolutely key role.

Tomasz Opiela 

CEO of Valkea Media – a marketing agency in Warsaw.