In this webinar, Milestone experts Erik Newton and Benu Aggarwal discussed key 2021 digital trends. The audience can use these trends to shape their comprehensive marketing for when business returns to normal.
3. Agenda
1. Macroeconomic trends
2. Digital transformation
3. Digital experience
4. Speed
5. Mobile
6. Security and availability
7. Entity
8. Local
9. Culture
10. Video
11. Corporate character
4. Confidential
4
About Milestone
CMS
Schemas
AMP
FAQ Manager & Voice Search
Local &
Reviews
Insights
Analytics
Milestone Presence Cloud
Design & UI
Content
Marketing
SEO
Paid Media
Local
Analytics & BI
Omnichannel Services
We help you organize and amplify your digital information to reach the right audience
Hospitality • Restaurants • Retail • Finance • Automotive • Healthcare • Technology
5. Confidential
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1. The World Economy Will Grow Again
• From stimulus
• From recovery
• Pent-up demand to travel and shop and
be entertained and have weddings
• US GDP
• Q2 down 33%
• Q3 up 31%
• Q4 up 4%
• Overall expected down 3.5% for 2020
• 2021 predicted to be up 4.4%
6.
7. Confidential
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Paid Search Conversions Rebound with Holiday Promotions
• We saw paid search conversion return to 90% of pre-COVID levels
• Packages and holiday promotions help drive conversions
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What Does Digital Transformation Look Like?
• CDs to MP3s
• Paper documents to images
• Open houses to online house shopping
• Car test driving to car delivery
• Menus to QR codes
• Photographs to jpegs
. . . in-person conferences to virtual
conferences
• Scrapbooks to social feeds
• Tellers to ATMs to online banking
• Classrooms to distance learning
• Offices to remote working
• Metal carts to digital carts
• Your signature to e-signature
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3. Digital Customer Experience Is King
• 61% of marketing departments have pivoted resources
toward improving customer-facing digital interfaces and
• 56% are changing their business models to focus on digital
opportunities, according to the The Creative Group, a
Robert Half Company
• 35% of prepared CMOs said they were completely
changing the customer experience in reaction to the
pandemic
• Customer journey
• Touchpoints, UX/UI
• Engagement
• Consistent messaging
12. Local Searches Have the Most Purchase Intent by Far
• Rise of local intent
• Local search intent in 53% of 2 trillion searches
• 80% of people feel more committed to help community and local businesses
• 81% of small business searches are unbranded queries
• Crucial to engaging with consumer at the local level – Post, FAQ, Social Media
• Reviews are becoming a strong trust factor
• Voice search does surface information from GMB, Bing, Yelp
https://player.vimeo.com/video/481497881
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Increase Awareness:
Identify and enhance under-
performing content around
relevant keywords
MORE
CONVERSIONS
Increase Engagement:
Optimize under-performing
content around the right search
intent to bring more visitors
Increase Conversions:
Refine experience and content of
traffic driving pages to maximize
conversions
Full
funnel
analytics
– measure
effectivel
y
Reach
Act
Convert
Engage
• Journey touchpoints will
get harder to connect
without 3rd party cookies
• Attribution will get more
challenging
• Omnichannel thinking and
tracking more important
• Connecting online and
offline
• Better dashboards and full
funnel data analysis are
needed to make right
decision
Omnichannel Perspective Needed to Make Good Marketing Decisions
14. Confidential
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Online – Offline Attribution Analysis
Organic Paid Local Direct Social
1200 700 800 716 844
Online
Offline
Journey
Users
Leads
Sales
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4. Speed Is Critical
• Google’s best practice is to have a speed index
under 3 seconds. Where does your site fall?
• https://www.machmetrics.com/speed-blog/average-page-load-
times-for-2020/
• https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-need-for-speed/
• CPUs are 40X faster than 7
years ago
• Bandwidth is 4X faster than
7 years ago
• Mobile web pages were 2X
SLOWER in 2019
• A 10% decrease in bounce and conversion
is the same as 10% more new visitors
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5. Mobile-First Becomes Mobile-Only
• If mobile exists, desktop content is now ignored for indexing
• Mobile experience is often overlooked by managers working on computers or laptops
• Make sure your team uses your mobile site on lesser phones and weaker coverage regularly
• Optimize your mobile experience
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6. Security, Connectivity, Reliability & Availability Required to
Maintain Customer Relationships
Connecting with
your customers
through various
online channels
Cloud
Infrastructure
HTTPs,
SSO, ISO
Real-time
dashboards
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7. Entity Is the Way to Ensure Consistent Presence Across All Your Channels
BERT
Conversational
Schemas
FAQs
Newer Entities
• Special announcement
• Online events
• Temporary hours
• Cleaning protocols
• FAQs
• HowTos
https://player.vimeo.com/video/481492550
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8. Organic Will Be More Local-Savvy and Local-Weighted
New Local Features and Content in 2020
1. Temporary closure
2. Special messaging
3. Secondary hours of operation
4. Prominent attributes
5. Virtual services
6. Google Shopping free for all merchants
7. Health and safety attributes
8. Support and fundraising for SMBs
9. Updates to make travel safer
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GMB Drives Local – Only 4% of Businesses Have Perfect Local Citations
• UNAP vs profile completeness
• 30+ fields to optimize
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5
1
4
12
6
2
7
8
3
13
9
14
10
15
Enhanced information across all local channels
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10. Video Consumption Will Strengthen Further
Mobile share will exceed 60% in most B2C
industries by Fall 2021, so mobile+video
Netflix will surpass cable subscriptions in 2021
Video, Visual, Voice: V3
Saturate the SERP, Potential 85/15
Invest in your YouTube channel
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11. Corporate Character and Authenticity
Will Matter More
• What 72M Millennials think will matter more
• Companies that do the right thing will
acquire and retain customers better
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25
Special Offer, Brand New Customer Experience Benchmark
• Download our new Core Vitals Benchmark research report
https://go.milestoneinternet.com/core-vitals-benchmark
If you want to discuss any of these trends, contact your CSM
or sales@milestoneineternet.com
26. Sign Up for a 2021 Readiness Audit
First 30 attendees* to register will get a
complimentary review and recovery
recommendations
• Technical SEO
• Schema
• Speed
• Local
• Core Vitals
* Available to first 30 to respond, not available
to agencies, consultants, or individuals
https://www.milestoneinternet.com/resources/request-audit
27. Key Takeaways
1. Be hopeful and prepared, growth is on the way
2. Actively accelerate your digital transformation
3. Understand and track customer journey and touchpoints
4. Optimize the digital experience, speed, UX, UI
5. Place compelling CTAs at all touchpoints
6. Build a better dashboard to capture omnichannel results
7. Plan to improve mobile and increase video
8. Upskill your people
9. Partner with vendors that innovate and keep you ahead
Erik
We are going to cover a number of topics today that will shape the landscape for marketers in 2021
Erik
Milestone brings the best of software and services to
Help you organize and amplify your digital information to reach the right audience
And we serve a wide range of industries
Erik
What a year 2020 has been. Like none we have ever seen before.
It’s almost over and the vaccine started rolling out in the UK this week, so we can look forward to a better economy in 2021
After whipsawing up and down in 2020, predictions are for 4% growth or better in 2021.
So the takeaway is that it is time to get ready to capture some of that growth
To help the community deal with 2020, we developed the crisis-recovery-growth framework
It provided guidance through the first 2 stages and happily we are about to enter the growth stage
Hopefully you have taken some of the slower weeks to get the digital house in order and are in a good position to expand with the economy in 2021
Erik
The CRF framework advises to ramp up paid in the late recovery phase and some of our customers who did that saw channel results return to pre-pandemic levels
Erik
Digital transformation always offered these opportunities in
Erik
Erik
Erik
Benu
- Driving direction is down but phone call up / Hours of operation up
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/search/consumer-needs-research/
Core
1. URL with UTM
2. Address, Service Area, Departments
3. Phone (with call tracking)
4. Category
5. Map Marker
Business
6. Amenities
7. Regular & Special Hours of Operation
8. Menu and Links to Online Ordering
9. Popular Hours
10. Description
Media
11. Photos and Videos
Engagement
12. Verified Listing
13. Q&A (FAQs)
14. Reviews
15. Google Posts
Build talent density
Upskill
Hire more people and vendors who really know how to optimize the customer experience
Benu
Employers will continue to shift focus from candidate experience to capability after realizing how much speed and agility was needed in 2020. Employers who assume more of the responsibility for training and retraining their teams will benefit. 56% of employers report a skills gap. Amazon reports a plan to upskill 1/3 of its labor force at a cost of $700 million over the next 6 years.
Erik
Video ad spending eclipsed display in 2020 and will exceed it in 2021. Online streaming providers, also called over the top (OTP), will grow and cable and landline subscriptions will shrink.
Mobile share in most B2B industries will be about half as much as B2C levels.