‘From a digital marketing standpoint, 2021 will be tightly connected to online meetings and a fancier way of communication.’
Sergey Aliokhin, Community Outreach Manager at Visme
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed a shift towards digital – a shift never before seen at such scale. Marketers around the globe had to adapt, brainstorm new strategies to continue to strive and get creative in using them so that the businesses they represented stood out from the crowd.
Sergey is a community outreach manager at Visme who doesn’t consider himself an SEO professional and even though he started working in marketing back in 2016, he told Seolium.com that he ‘keeps learning marketing every day and doesn’t feel that he can create miracles in terms of SEO/marketing.’ Maybe now he thinks of himself as more than that, after all, his Twitter bio writes ‘marketing specialist.’ 🙂
We hopped on a call with him to get the latest scoop on what stays and what goes in digital trends in 2021.
Shifting to online also meant exploring new tools, and this trend presented itself as an opportunity for both new brands and seasoned players. As Sergey very well explains, last year’s COVID-19 situation challenged everyone to adopt modern-day marketing.
When asked which were the lessons learned from last year, Sergey answered that
‘last year was pretty hectic due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This situation had a direct impact on online business as well. Before joining Visme (where I have been working for 5 months), I worked with a company that offers coworking management software. And thanks to this business opportunity, I realized that a modern-day situation forces marketers to find new ways to keep the business afloat. It means, never stop learning and applying new strategies in practice.’
‘If we’re talking about general digital marketing tactics, the basic ones like off-page SEO (building more backlinks), content marketing (both on our blog and guest posting), participation in various expert roundups (podcasts, interviews, YouTube video sessions) and building cooperation on a win-win basis’ are still in the marketers’ toolkit, expected to grow the ROI in 2021.
However, marketers and companies will have to continue to find new ways to achieve success, and strong team communication is essential. Sergey says that online meetings will be even more important in 2021, forcing teams to find new and fancier ways to communicate. This will also lead to having more video calls and online presentations. Meanwhile, there will be a huge necessity in creating visually appealing data reports. Since it will be the only way of tracking business progress.’
Example of a Data board highlighting main KPIs
‘I believe that a great virtual meeting shouldn’t have the following two issues – bad audio/video quality and video delay. Other than that, people should find the right time to schedule a call and hope that their Internet connection will be OK.’ says Sergey.
Apart from the basics, teams also need to continue to learn to navigate online meetings so they can enjoy the same fruitful insights once offered by face-to-face meetings – each member needs to stay focused and engaged.
As a Community Manager at Visme, Sergey is a crucial part of the marketing team, but his duties also include guest blogging and creating new means of cooperation with third-party resources. Besides the importance of fruitful meetings with the team, he underlines the importance of being focused, focus which in his case involves working on Visme’s brand awareness and showing how its tools can help ‘transform any kind of content into information that would be visually attractive.
What’s more, the blog and landing pages at Visme are prioritized in terms of SEO so they are indexed accordingly.
As such, in 2021’s ‘noisy’ environment, Sergey suggests that the key to success is to keep your audience engaged. Do your best to keep your content relevant to your audience. If you’re creative enough and get a bit lucky, you might even get to see your content shared by your audience and witness a conversation shift.
‘If you want to keep your audience engaged, you should have a dialogue with people. Ask their opinion on the topic, let them participate in the conversation. Don’t build your speech as some professor gives lectures to the students. Instead, there shouldn’t be a lecture but a conversation in a friendly manner.’
Apart from the rise of online meetings, content repurposing was another successful tactic most of us marketers employed.
First of all, let’s start with the idea behind content repurposing. We tend to repurpose content into other content forms when we want to give another breath of life to some outdated topics.
Sergey claims that the best decision would be repurposing your content in the following scheme “written blog post –> video format –> infographics (or charts)”.
It gives you the opportunity to illustrate the same topic from different visual angles. Plus, it allows you to direct people’s attention on some specific questions of the topic. Therefore, if you want to underline some stats from your piece of content, you should repurpose this exact section of the post into charts.
Example of carousel cards
If you want to draw people’s attention to some of the aspects of your service functionality, you should record a video.
Example of a video that brought great ROI
To sum up, you should repurpose your content for sure. The formats depend on your purposes.’
Learn what strategies digital marketing experts representing tech companies in Belgium are focusing on this year by consulting our newest ebook. Feeling that your content is underperforming? Test one of our 7 ideas to consolidate it.