The Outlook for Digital Marketing in 2021
DataReportal’s chief analyst, Simon Kemp, recently teamed up with Statista for a webinar exploring the key digital trends and developments that will help to define marketing success in 2021 and beyond.
This presentation builds on essential headlines and findings from our ongoing Global Digital Reports series, adding a wealth of additional context and analysis to offer richer insights into the outlook for marketing over the coming months.
You can watch the full presentation in the YouTube video below, but read on below for a complete transcript of the video’s talk track.
You’ll also find the complete set of slides used in this presentation as a SlideShare embed at the bottom of this post.
Video Transcript
Thanks very much, and thanks again to all of you for joining us today too; it’s great to have you with us.
Over the next 35 minutes or so, we’ll take a deep-dive into 5 essential trends that are shaping the outlook for digital marketing as we head into 2021.
We will have time for Q&A at the end of today’s presentation, but if you’d like to send me your questions as we go, or if you’d like to connect with me for future updates, you’ll find me on Twitter and LinkedIn as ‘eskimon’
Just a bit of context before we start; I run a management consultancy called Kepios that helps organisations all over the world to make sense of what people are really doing online.
And a big part of our work builds on the Global Digital Reports that we produce on behalf of We Are Social and Hootsuite, for which Statista is one of our key partners.
These reports reach millions of people in more than 230 countries each year, and are designed to help you keep track of all the latest trends in how people use the internet, mobile devices, social media, and ecommerce.
What’s more, we make all of these reports available completely for free over at DataReportal.com, so the good news is that I’m not here to sell you anything today.
Here’s what I will be covering in my presentation:
We’ll start off by looking at how digital adoption has accelerated around the world in recent months, and how people are spending more time doing more things with their connected devices.
We’ll then explore how to adopt a more strategic approach to building your social platform mix, based on some fascinating insights into people’s evolving social media habits.
After that, we’ll dig deeper into people’s changing search behaviours, and what these new behaviours mean for marketers.
We’ll then go on to look at how ecommerce behaviours have evolved over the past few months, and make sense of what these changes mean for you.
And we’ll finish up by looking at how Asia’s increasing digital influence is reshaping global consumer expectations, and why the Asian opportunity is already too big to ignore.
As I mentioned, we will have time for Q&A after my presentation, so do note down anything you’d like to explore in more detail – or anything you’d like to challenge – and share those with us using the questions feature in your webinar interface.
But with that, let’s get stuck into the content, starting with a look at how digital adoption rates have been accelerating over the past few months.
1: Digital adoption is still accelerating
Now the big headline from our Digital 2020 July Global Statshot Report is that more than half of the world’s total population now uses social media [note that you can find even more up-to-date stats in our ongoing reports series by clicking here].
Kepios research shows that 3.96 billion people were using social media in July 2020, equating to roughly 51 percent of all the people on Earth.
But these impressive numbers aren’t restricted to social media use.
Nearly 60 percent of the world’s population now uses the internet, and two-thirds of us already have a mobile phone.
However, despite these already impressive figures, our research shows that digital adoption rates have actually accelerated over recent months.
Internet user numbers are currently growing at an annualised rate of more than 8 percent, with 346 million people coming online for the first time during the past 12 months.
And social media adoption is growing even faster, with the latest data indicating that global user numbers have increased by more than 10 percent since this time last year, with 376 million people starting to use social media since this time last year.
That equates to an average of more than 1 million new social media users every single day, which means that roughly 42,000 people should start using social media for the very first time during today’s webinar alone, which is really quite incredible.
But the big numbers aren’t limited to user figures.
The typical global user currently spends around 40 percent of their waking life using connected tech, with the latest data showing that people spend an average of more than 6½ hours online each day.
Roughly a third of that time is spent using social media, but we’re increasingly using connectivity to power our other media habits too, whether that’s streaming TV content though platforms like Netflix and Disney+, streaming music through Spotify or Apple Music, or powering the ever-growing range of apps that we use on our smartphones.
The picture does vary meaningfully by country, though.
At one end of the spectrum, people in the Philippines spend almost 10 hours a day online, but people in Japan only connect for an average of 4 hours and 22 minutes per day.
Now it is worth noting that the median age of a country’s population seems to be one of the biggest determinants of time spent online each day, and countries with older populations tend to see lower averages when it comes to time spent.
However, all of that time quickly adds up.
Based on the data that we published in our January 2020 reports, humanity was set to spend more than 1.25 billion cumulative years using the internet in 2020.
Now that might seem incredible, but it quickly makes sense when we consider just how pervasive digital has become in people’s everyday lives.
Even if we just look at what people are doing on their mobile phones, it quickly becomes clear that there’s practically no part of our lives that remains untouched by connected tech.
In effect, our smartphones have become ‘remote controls’ for our everyday lives.
We’re using them to stay in touch with friends and family; to watch movies and TV shows and listen to music; to play games; to do our shopping; manage our finances; stay fit; and even find love.
So perhaps it’s no wonder that people are spending so much time online.
However, data shows that people have been spending even more time online since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially during the initial wave of lockdowns, when people were largely confined to their homes.
More than half of us say we’ve been spending more time watching streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+, while more than 4 in 10 of us say that we’ve been spending more time using social media and messenger platforms.
Research also shows that much of this additional activity has taken place on our mobile devices, so it’s perhaps no surprise that we’ve been spending more time using mobile apps too.
But perhaps even more interesting is the fact that many of us expect to continue with these new behaviours, even after the pandemic ends.
Once again, the data suggest that content streaming and social media should see the biggest enduring uplift in activity.
However, a meaningful number of people also expect to continue spending more time using online learning platforms and playing video games.
And the clear take-away from all of this data is that digital’s role in our lives will only continue to expand
But what does this mean for marketers?
Well, as we’ve just seen, connectivity is helping people all over the world to make their lives easier and better.
And marketers need to keep that context in mind.
The real opportunity is to deliver similar benefits and outcomes via our digital marketing activities as well.
And that means going beyond using digital simply to deliver more efficient interruptions.
Sure, online ads represent a great opportunity, but the much bigger opportunity is to use connected tech to actively add value to our audiences’ lives, and to proactively help them to make their lives easier and better.
But with social media already accounting around a third of our connected time, it’s worth spending a bit of time to explore this opportunity in more detail.
2: The importance of a balanced social mix
And one of the most obvious trends in social media over recent years has been the ever-growing number of platforms available – both to users and to brands.
Our research shows that people are using a wider variety of social platforms than ever before, with people’s ‘portfolios’ expanding even further as a result of COVID-19 lockdowns.
And as you can see here, that means that marketers can now reach huge audiences across a wide variety of different social channels.
Facebook still dominates at a global level, with more than 2½ billion people around the world using the platform each month.
Meanwhile, a total of 6 platforms now claim more than 1 billion monthly active users, while many more report audiences in excess of 100 million.
But these numbers can be a bit misleading, because – even at this high level – it’s quite clear that many people must be using more than one social platform.
And in fact, our July report shows that the average social media user around the world now has an account on almost 9 different platforms, with significant numbers of these users actively engaging with or contributing to these platforms every month.
But this results in significant overlaps between the audiences of each individual social platform.
And many marketers will be surprised at just how big these overlaps are.
Our analysis of the latest data shows that barely 5 percent of the audiences on the largest platforms are unique to each platform, while that unique audience share is even smaller for some of the more niche platforms.
For example, more than 94 percent of YouTube users say that they use at least one other platform, but that figure rises to more than 99 percent for the users of TikTok, Snapchat, and Twitter.
And that offers us a clear but very important finding, which is that marketers can reach almost all of the users of almost any social media platform on other social platforms.
So what does this mean for you and for your marketing plans?
Well, crucially, it means that each additional platform in your social mix will only deliver very small, and ever-diminishing returns when it comes to expanding your audience reach.
And because of this, you need to be quite clear about the potential benefits of adding a new channel to your plan.
Because there’s so much audience overlap between these platforms, the portfolio opportunity is much more about the potential to reach an existing audience in new contexts, than it is about the potential to reach totally new audiences.
And because of this, we need to balance the mix of channels that we use for both our organic and our paid social media activities.
When it comes to organic activities, these overlaps mean that it’s generally okay for you to focus your marketing activities on just one or two platforms.
And that’s because you’ll already have the potential to reach almost all social media users by using just one or two of the larger platforms.
As a result, I’d recommend focusing your organic social media efforts on fewer, bigger, better platforms.
But with so many platforms now reaching hundreds of millions of users, there are still important choices to make.
So how do you decide which platforms are right for your brand and your needs?
Well, the answer to that question is actually relatively simple.
Firstly, you’ll want to identify which platforms are most popular amongst your specific target audience.
Note that platform preferences do vary by geography, by age, and by gender, but the good news is that you can find loads of these insights in our free reports, as well as on Statista.com.
You’ll also want to consider the contextual relevance of each platform, and how it relates to the kinds of marketing content that you publish.
For example, if you’re a tech brand targeting gaming audiences, you’ll probably be able to find these people on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, but you may be able to achieve richer engagement on platforms like Reddit and Twitch.
But in spite of that ‘fewer, bigger, better’ mantra, you don’t necessarily need to drop any platforms from your mix, because this advice relates solely to how you can prioritise your organic efforts.
And if you have the luxury of a bit of media budget, you can happily make use of as many different platforms as you like, by using paid media and promoted placements.
And that’s because you don’t need to maintain an organic presence on a platform in order to benefit from its paid opportunities.
As a result, you’re free to swap between paid platforms as often as you need to.
And it’s actually well worth experimenting with a few different platforms to see which ones work best for your specific needs.
And because of this, I’d strongly encourage you to consider some of the smaller, more niche platforms for some targeted paid media activities.
For example, Reddit now reaches more than 430 million people each month, and can be a great place to connect with young, engaged audiences.
Similarly, Pinterest’s user base has been growing quickly in recent months, and the platform also offers some amazing image search tools that make it a very interesting opportunity for ecommerce brands in highly aesthetic categories like fashion and furnishings.
And we’ll take a closer look at image search opportunities in the next section of my presentation.
Quora is another interesting opportunity, especially in more complex categories where people are likely to seek out other people’s advice and guidance.
Note that each of these platforms engages a different demographic though, so be sure to identify which platforms are most relevant to your brand’s specific target audience before making any investments.
And if you’re planning to run paid activities across multiple platforms, do note that you may end up with some significant audience duplication, so keep that in mind when you’re planning and sequencing your content.
Remember that there’s a fine line between message reinforcement and ‘repetition pollution’, so be sure to cap your audience frequency levels, in order to ensure that you don’t end up doing your brand more harm than good.
But it’s not just our social media habits that have been evolving.
People are also embracing new approaches to search, so let’s take a look at the latest trends to understand what these changes mean for marketers.
3. Evolving search behaviours
Now, for context, Statista reports that global spend on digital search advertising will exceed 150 billion US dollars in 2020, which is up by nearly 10 percent compared to 2019 spend levels.
However, the ways in which people search for things online are evolving.
And these changes have particular relevance for brands, because search engines play a central role in brand and product discovery.
As we reported in our July Statshot report, more of the world’s internet users learn about new brands through search engines than they do through any other channel, including TV ads or word-of-mouth recommendations.
Search plays an important role in B2B marketing too, so evolving search behaviours will be critically important to you as a marketer, whichever category your brand operates in.
But how exactly have people’s search behaviours changed?
Well one of the most obvious trends is the rise of voice search, which has been a hot topic in marketing for some time now.
However, the rate of voice adoption may surprise you.
The latest data show that almost half of all the world’s internet users already use voice search and voice commands each month, and that figure is still rising steadily.
The picture varies by geography though, with adoption growing more quickly in developing economies.
Indeed, voice adoption is highest in India, China, and Indonesia – three of the world’s largest internet populations – with uptake also well above the global average across much of Southeast Asia.
Younger people are particularly likely to use voice interfaces, with the majority of these users already taking advantage of voice assistants like Siri and the Google Assistant on their smartphones.
And in fact, the latest data show that more than half of all internet users below the age of 35 used voice search and voice commands in the past 30 days.
We’re still seeing meaningful adoption amongst older groups though, with more than a quarter of users in the 55 to 64-year-old bracket saying they used voice in the past month.
But what does this mean for you?
Well, one of the most important implications is that we may need to rethink our approach to activities like SEO and SEM.
Google reports that 70 percent of Google Assistant queries are expressed in natural language, as opposed to the staccato keywords that people might use in more text-based environments.
And this means that web content written in more natural language structures may achieve a higher SEO ranking, compared to keyword-centric content that has been optimised for a more text-based search paradigm.
Perhaps more importantly though, if a voice interface reads out its results – rather than simply showing them on a screen – there’s a good chance that people will only be exposed to one search result, turning SEO into a winner-takes-all race.
And voice interfaces aren’t the only tools reshaping our search behaviours, either.
Data shows that image search is also on the rise, with image recognition tools like Google Lens and Pinterest Lens offering people the option to use an image as their search query.
These tools have seen particularly strong growth in Latin America and Southeast Asia, but with adoption rates still relatively low in some key Western markets, there seems to be a significant lag in the reporting of this trend in the global marketing press.
Indeed, more than a third of the world’s internet users already use image recognition tools on their mobile phones each month, and adoption has already passed the halfway mark in 6 countries.
Interestingly, young women represent the largest user base for image search tools, with nearly 4 in 10 women between the ages of 16 and 34 saying that they’ve used image recognition tools in the past 30 days.
Adoption trails off somewhat amongst older users, but usage rates are still high enough in these age groups to merit more serious investigation from marketers.
And that’s especially true if you’re trying to market a highly aesthetic brand via ecommerce, with fashion being one of the obvious areas of opportunity when it comes to image search.
It’s worth noting that these tools can also power augmented reality services, and facilitate offline-to-online conversions, so it’s important to explore the broader potential of these technologies, and understand what they might mean for your brand.
People’s existing behaviours already have some clear implications for brands though, such as ensuring that you feature images of products taken from multiple different angles, to ensure the greatest chances of your content matching a user’s image query.
Similarly, for brands in those highly aesthetic categories, you’ll want to pay greater attention to visual platforms like Pinterest, where dedicated image search functionality offers a wealth of new opportunities.
And finally, it’s also worth investing time to understand how image search behaviours might impact your marketing activities in the physical world, with areas such as product design and in-store merchandising being clear opportunities.
However, perhaps the most surprising change in people’s search behaviours relates to the rise of search on social media.
GlobalWebIndex reports that social networks are now the second top source for brand research amongst the world’s internet users, just behind search engines.
And once again, people in developing economies have been quickest to adopt these new behaviours.
More than 4 in 10 internet users say that they turned to social media in the past month to research a brand or product that they were thinking of buying, but – as you can see on the chart here – there are many parts of the world where that figure is well above the 50 percent mark.
And as we saw in another trend earlier in today’s presentation, age plays an important role here.
Younger users are the driving force behind the rise of social search, with social networks now the primary destination for online brand research amongst audiences aged 16 to 24.
And it’s particularly interesting to note that – once again – young women are the biggest users of social search, with more than half of all female internet users aged 16 to 24 saying that they favour social networks when researching brands and products to buy.
Figures are again slightly lower for older age groups, but with more than one-third of internet users aged 45 to 54 now researching brands on social media, it’s clear that social search represents an important opportunity across all audiences.
However, very few marketers seem to have grasped the importance of social search behaviours, and as a result, very few brands are optimising their social media activities for social search.
So, how can you use social search to gain an advantage over your competitors?
Well, the obvious place to start is to ensure that your content strategy is optimised for your audience’s social search behaviours.
In essence, this means thinking beyond the sequenced ‘narrative’ of your content calendar, to include additional elements that address more ad-hoc audiences who may find your content via social search.
And one of the most important considerations here is hashtags, which work in similar ways to how keywords work in more traditional SEO.
Hashtags are a key input into the algorithms that platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn use to index content published to their feeds, so they’re essential for social search success.
And this is where most marketers are tripping up, because conventional industry practice seems to focus on brand and campaign-specific hashtags.
These tags have an important role to play of course, but if we take a moment to think about how people search, it quickly becomes clear that generic hashtags are potentially much more important than campaign-specific ones.
So, my advice here is to take a more varied approach to tagging.
You don’t want to go crazy of course, but most platforms will allow you to add at least a handful of tags to each post, so I’d recommend using a mix of different tags on every post to improve indexing and search visibility.
For example, you’ll probably want to include at least one brand-specific tag; a couple of tags related to your product or campaign; and a few category-generic tags to increase reach and visibility.
If your brand has a physical world presence, you may also want to explore using location tags, which are particularly useful if you hope to promote individual retail outlets, restaurants and cafés, or tourist attractions.
It’s also worth noting that you’ll want to include hashtags in the status text of image and video posts to ensure that they’re more visible to search indexing algorithms.
And do remember that ‘ephemeral’ formats like Stories will be less useful when it comes to social search, because the content will disappear quite soon after it’s been published.
Now, we’ll change gears a bit for the next section, which looks at some important changes to ecommerce activity around the world in recent months.
4. Ecommerce growth
One of the most interesting shifts we’ve seen as a result of COVID-19 is the surge in adoption and use of ecommerce.
As the wave of pandemic lockdowns spread across the world, we saw people of all ages turn to online shopping in greater numbers, with men particularly likely to increase the amount of time they spent using ecommerce platforms.
The kinds of things people bought online also saw some meaningful changes, with food, groceries and household essentials seeing the biggest increase in interest.
But beyond the obvious contribution to short-term performance, these new behaviours may have longer-term implications too.
For example, people tend to shop for groceries and household items on a relatively regular basis, and because most lockdowns lasted for a number of weeks, people had the chance to develop new shopping habits.
Provided these experiences were generally positive, this increased frequency will likely increase people’s overall familiarity with ecommerce, and potentially increase their confidence in it too.
Moreover, almost half of us say that we expect to continue with our new online shopping habits too.
As you might expect, the picture does vary by country, but the encouraging finding in this data is that countries that have previously experienced slower growth are seeing a sudden uptick in adoption, with growth rates in India offering some particularly interesting opportunities.
It’s also interesting to note that plans to continue with online shopping remain relatively high amongst older consumers too.
More than a third of internet users around the world aged 55 to 64 say that they expect to continue shopping online more frequently even after the pandemic has passed, which is only slightly lower than the trends we see for younger age groups.
And what’s more, the impact of these enduring changes is already evident in ecommerce transaction data.
Insights from Contentsquare show that ecommerce transactions have declined since their lockdown highs, but ecommerce sites are still seeing 20 to 25 percent more transactions than they were back in January before the COVID pandemic started to spread.
Some categories have seen even more impressive growth, however, with sports equipment and groceries seeing increases in excess of 50 percent compared to pre-pandemic levels.
Sadly the travel and tourism sector continues to be badly hit, but recent transaction data do show that the situation is starting to improve, albeit at lower levels than we might have expected without COVID.
But overall, we can expect to see these trends translate into a significant uplift in overall online spend.
The latest findings from Statista’s Digital Market Outlook research indicate that consumer ecommerce spend will increase by 26 percent in 2020 compared to 2019 levels, with total spend on consumer goods alone jumping to almost 2½ trillion US dollars.
However, ecommerce still has a long way to go before it matches ‘offline’ retail spend.
The latest edition of PPRO’s Payments & Ecommerce Reports shows that ecommerce accounted for just 1 in 6 retail dollars spent in 2019, with online’s share still below 10 percent of total spend in many of the world’s key economies.
So what does all of this data tell us?
Well, the most important takeaway is that a balanced, ‘omni-channel’ approach to retail and to marketing still offers the best opportunities.
This means that we need to accelerate our digital activities in line with consumer behaviour, but that we also need to be wary of putting all of our eggs in one basket.
But ecommerce data also point to a shift in the internet’s centre of gravity, so let’s conclude today’s presentation by digging deeper into this critically important trend.
5. The rise of the East
And the key driver here is the rise of Asia’s internet brands, which are gaining increasing global interest and momentum.
For example, Alexa reports that Chinese platforms now account for more than half of the world’s top 20 websites by traffic volume.
Even more tellingly, this top 20 ranking includes 5 Chinese ecommerce sites, but only features one Western ecommerce brand.
Now it is worth noting that this list doesn’t include activity in mobile apps, so it perhaps doesn’t tell the full story.
However, that doesn’t detract from the key underlying trend, which is that Asia’s internet brands are increasingly popular amongst international audiences.
And a similar story is evident in the global social media platform ranking that we saw earlier too, with platforms developed by companies in China now accounting for 7 of the 13 most-used social media platforms in the world.
Diplomatic tensions may restrict the growth of some of these platforms, but the implications of the rising popularity of Eastern digital brands go well beyond individual platform choices.
For example, increased exposure to different kinds of site design and user experience may influence people’s general expectations, resulting in more Asian influences in the UX and UI of Western platforms.
Similarly, we’re seeing the livestream commerce format start to gain meaningful traction outside of China, with increasing interest across countries in Southeast Asia.
Moreover, the huge global popularity of TikTok is already inspiring a change in the way social media feed algorithms work, with a move away from a focus on a social graph, towards more content-oriented drivers.
So it’s clear that Asia’s internet brands are already influencing Western internet trends.
But that’s not by accident.
Asia’s internet audiences represent an increasingly attractive opportunity for those Western brands too, and even established internet giants recognise that Asia offers some of the most fertile ground for growth in the short and medium term .
And this is especially true when it comes to ecommerce.
For context, Southern, Eastern, and Southeastern Asia already account for more than half of the world’s total internet user base, even though internet penetration in these regions still falls considerably below the global average.
However, Western ecommerce brands have historically underplayed the Asian opportunity, perhaps because average revenue per shopper (ARPU) tends to be much lower in much of Asia than it is elsewhere in the world.
For example, online shopping ARPU in Southeast Asia is 4 to 5 times lower than the global average, while average spend in India is more than 10 times less.
But despite these low averages, the latest data from Statista’s Digital Market Outlook shows that Asia already accounts for roughly 60 percent of total global ecommerce spend.
The company forecasts total consumer ecommerce spend of just over 1.4 trillion US dollars across Asia in 2020, compared to a global total of just over 2.4 trillion.
And what’s more, with those regional averages starting from a relatively low base, it wouldn’t take much to double ARPU across many of these countries.
That would already be compelling enough in itself, but if we also factor the current rapid growth in new users across Asia, it quickly becomes clear that there may be exciting opportunities for compound growth across the region over the coming months.
So the key take-away here is that Asia’s digital opportunities are already too big to ignore, but they’re set to get even bigger.
So if you’re not already taking advantage of the rise of the East, now would be a great time to get started.
Conclusions
Now that concludes my presented content for today, but just before we kick off our Q&A, here’s a recap of the key findings and implications we’ve covered over the past half hour.
We started with a look at how digital adoption has been accelerating over recent months, while people have been integrating connected tech into more and more aspects of their lives.
As a result, the most exciting digital opportunities go beyond looking for ad efficiencies, to identify more compelling ‘value-adds’ that actively make people’s lives better.
In the second section, we looked at the importance of building a balanced portfolio of social media platforms.
That likely involves focusing on one or two of the bigger social platforms for your organic activities, but you can experiment with a wider variety of channels for more tactical opportunities using paid media.
We then looked at the rise of new search behaviours, and what these mean for content.
Specifically, we need to explore natural language structures in written content to ensure better voice search results; we need to feature images of products from multiple angles in order to boost image recognition performance; and we need to ensure social posts are carefully tagged to ensure they’ll be properly indexed by social search algorithms.
Next, we saw how ecommerce is becoming an increasingly important opportunity, especially across developing economies.
However, we also learned that offline retail still accounts for the majority of consumer spend, so the best strategy is to adopt an omni-channel approach to both retail and marketing.
And we wrapped up with a look at the rising influence of Asia.
On the one hand, we saw that Asia’s increasingly popular internet brands may reshape global user expectations when it comes to UX and UI.
But we also looked at why Asia’s consumers represent an increasingly compelling opportunity for Western brands, especially when it comes to ecommerce.
Now if you’d like to dig deeper into any of the trends that I’ve covered today, you’ll find all of our reports available completely for free over on DataReportal.com, and you’ll also find loads more valuable insights and trends over at Statista.com.
We’re not finished for today though – we’ve still got around 20 minutes left for your questions and challenges – so do please share those with us now using the question feature in your webinar interface.
Just in case you’d like to contact me directly though, here are a few of the ways you can find me [LinkedIn, Twitter].
I’d like to extend a very big thank you to Statista for organising today’s session, and thanks to all of you for joining us too.
But with that, I’ll hand back to the Statista team to kick off our Q&A.
Presentation slides
You’ll find the complete set of slides used in this presentation in the SlideShare embed below (click here if that’s not working for you).