Seven trends in online marketing 2021

Trend 1: Search engines

2021 will be the year of alternative search engines - due to ongoing privacy and antitrust concerns about Google, more and more users are looking around for alternatives. Ecosia is becoming increasingly popular in Europe. DuckDuckGo is gaining market share, especially in North America, and is expected to be swallowed by Apple in 2021, as Apple's deal with Google as the default search on the iPhone fell through. Apple has to close the resulting gap and wants to strengthen its own data ecosystem in the process. At the same time, Asian search engines such as Baidu, which is considered the market leader in China, are growing.

What's more: In the search engine market, so-called no-click searches are playing an increasingly important role. These are image and text information in the upper area of the search results, in which all the info can already be found. This means that users no longer have to click on the results to get the data they want. The whole thing is even more convenient for users who enter their search queries by voice - digital assistants or voice recognition make it possible. According to TheeDigital, almost one in three Internet users now searches in this way.

Trend 2: Browser

In the new year, browsers are taking more control. Thanks to DSGVO and adblockers, browsers such as Google Chrome, Safari or Mozilla Firefox now play a key role in interaction with online users. This is because they decide whether user tracking is possible or not - and thus what information, for example, advertisers can still collect about their users. If the browser suppresses third-party and, increasingly, first-party cookies, it will become more and more difficult to measure the success of digital campaigns via third-party solutions or on publisher websites. Google's planned Privacy Sandbox means that only those who use the other Google solutions will be able to track their users in the Google ecosystem.

Trend 3: Social media

Something else is changing: 2021 will be the year of the micro-influencer. Now that some of the best-known influencers have built up as much reach as a medium-sized media publisher and are marketing their success accordingly, the targeting of advertising measures is decreasing with such trendsetters. So in the future, advertisers will rely more on smaller bloggers and social media experts who are close to their product range. In this way, they are trying to build up a network of micro-influencers who are thematically close to their own product range. At the same time, we are seeing more and more so-called "shoppable posts" in the social networks: click on the ad, enter payment data, and buy the product.

Trend 4: Analytics and tracking

In 2021, the gaps in user tracking will increase due to DSGVO consent requirements, browser tracking prevention, and adblocker developments. This is changing the entire online marketing ecosystem. We are already seeing a lot of tracking changes. A pure server-side data integration for campaign tracking is available via the Facebook API, as cookies no longer work. Other such APIs will follow. It is not for nothing that Google is currently trying to catch up here in the area of server-side tag management and tracking compared to the large competitors in the market - such as TagCommander or Tealium - with a payment solution in server-side tag management.

The Schrems II ruling also puts a stop to Google in this regard, as the group can no longer invoke the EU-US Privacy Shield as a basis for processing data at a US company. There are now many lawsuits here - it could be that marketers who rely mainly on Google Analytics/Google 360 for data collection will soon have to delete their existing data(ch)records, as they were not collected in a privacy-compliant manner. A similar fate is likely to befall those who rely on US providers for CRM, DMP and CDP solutions. By definition, personal data is processed here and comprehensive user profiles are created, for which there is often no user consent and even less of a viable legal basis for storage on servers of the US providers.

Trend 5: Depersonalization 

Now that the mantra of personalization in marketing has prevailed for 15 years (all the way to hyper-personalization), more and more marketers and platforms are experimenting with a depersonalization strategy. Let's face it: on the one hand, it's great that someone looking for a garden barbecue is shown barbecues from 20 suppliers in 100 stores minutes later. On the other hand, customers can quickly feel overwhelmed by such a large selection. The incentive to buy then dwindles because the message - however relevant and personalized it may be - is no longer received. In 2021, many marketers will start to play out personalized and depersonalized campaigns and use A/B testing to compare which measure achieves the most success (i.e., contribution margin) for which product and in which target group.

Trend 6: CDP - a new major factor in the marketing stack

For a few years now, customer data platforms (CDPs) have been used for personalization, enabling a 360-degree view of the customer. They can automatically play out campaigns tailored to a customer across products, devices, and channels - or not, if a higher contribution margin or customer value is achieved in the respective comparison group. CDP solutions also have the advantage that they can generally collect unstructured data from all areas and merge it via APIs, first-party and server-side integrations. Traditional DMPs (data management platforms), on the other hand, rely primarily on data from third-party cookies. This causes more CDP vendors to fight for market share in 2021. Above all, web analytics providers, e-mail marketing solutions, and DMPs are trying to jump on the bandwagon here.

Trend 7: Overarching customer value optimization 

In 2021, CDP will become the central solution within the marketing suite and customer-centric solution architecture. The convergence of solutions towards CDP will see many best-of-breed solutions merged into it. At the same time, machine learning and AI approaches in combination with campaign management within CDP will enable more and smarter automation in customer targeting. In interaction with the data warehouse and CRM, it then comes to the formation of new, even larger solutions that offer interface-based user interfaces for the most diverse marketing solutions on a big data basis. The real-time database (SQL or NoSQL) is becoming more robust and powerful, allowing it to take on more tasks. As a result, the different disciplines of web analytics, marketing analytics, business intelligence, and customer data management continue to grow together.

2021 will prove to be the year when marketers achieve many successes based on customer value optimization programs. At the same time, they will recognize the value of an integrated CDP and consent management solution, as this is the only way to comply with legal requirements. This will also ensure clean processes regarding data deletion requests as well as cross-platform and cross-channel consent management.