12 Social Media Marketing Predictions from a Professional

How will social media marketing change for local businesses in 2021?

Well, we know the pandemic forced many businesses to change how they operate. Local businesses also change how and what they communicate on social media moving forward. 

When I started helping local businesses with marketing in 2003, the BIG thing was landing pages, not social media.

• Landing pages to capture leads.
• Landing pages to present a specific offer.

But somehow, landing pages and collecting email addresses became a “thing of the past” when social media because “the new shiny object.”

In 2021, you want to refocus your email list building efforts on building two email lists minimum.

1. One email list for leads.
2. One email list for clients.

Because you want to separate the emails you sent your clients vs the email you send your leads.

Pro Marketing Tip: Move people from the “leads list” to the customer list automatically to restart the post-purchase process.

Ok, so what are the 12 social media marketing predictions?

In 2021, on social media, successful businesses will:

1. Communicate cleanliness on social media.
2. Provide contactless service and payment options.
3. Support the community
4. Sprinkle a little bit of controversy online
5. Have a regular video show.
6. Launch a paid email newsletter.
7. Automate more.
8. Host a paid virtual event
9. Implement new social listening strategies.
10. Reduce paid advertising.
11. Hire a virtual marketing manager.
12. Refocus marketing on search intent.

Communicate cleanliness

Local businesses MUST communicate on social media what they are doing to avoid employees and customers to get sick.

• How are you doing it? 
• Why are you doing it?
• What are the cleaning protocols?
• Are masks require? Why?

Provide contactless service

Contactless service and payments are not new but saw an increase in usage during the pandemic and will continue to rise this year.

• Contactless payments.
• Virtual meetings via Zoom.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. You can always

1. Get paid to provide one to one training.
2. Sell pre-recorded training.
3. Provide group training via Zoom, YouTube, or Facebook live.
4. Bring speakers to your own Paid Online Seminar.
5. Provide consulting via Zoom.
6. Earn YouTube revenue.
7. Earn Facebook In-Stream Ads revenue.
8. Earn referral income.
9. Self-publish a book on Amazon

Are you publishing a book this year?

Support the community

Community involvement, charity support, what you stand for, and what you stand against are things that MUST be included in your 2021 marketing message.

Think of your marketing in parts of

• How people find out about you, your product, or service?
• When people know about you but haven’t bought anything, communicate quality, value, service, cleanliness, consistency.
• After they purchased from you.
• Society. Community involvement, charity support.
• The environment. Recyclable packing, products from sustainable sources.

Pro Marketing Tip: Revisit your mission statement, purpose, and offers and highlight what’s most helpful for your customers so it can be shared on social media.

• Sprinkle a little bit of controversy online – Controversial marketing will continue to drive sales.
• Have a regular video show – Video podcast shows will continue to dominate.
• Automate more – Automate what you can, not what you want.
• Host a Paid Virtual Event – Virtual events will become more accepted by the general public. But won’t replace the need for traditional conferences and in-person experiences that we are used to.

Implement social listening strategies

Knowing what people say about your business is always good. Whether the information is good or bad, I bet you want to know.

In 2021, will see successful business guarding their reputation more than before. The use of old tools like Google trends and warble.co will be added to the everyday business marketing tool kit.

Social listening will be at the forefront of marketing strategies.

• Launch a paid email newsletter – Paid email newsletters will become the norm.
• Reduce paid advertising – Paid advertising will see a decrease. Companies’ marketing budget used to 80% towards paid ads. In 2021, companies will spend 60% on content creation and 40% on ads.

Hire a virtual marketing manager

This year, many business owners will hire their first virtual marketing manager. They no longer have time to learn about marketing or have the time to do it properly. 

1. Using only financial motivation when hiring will lead you to hire the wrong marketing person. Hiring a minimum wage person to help you with your marketing ONLY works when you know what they need to do step by step. If you are not a marketing person, you need someone to tell you what needs to be done.
2. Share your long-term vision. One thing you can do as a leader is to ensure your team knows how their work contributes to the company’s success and mission. 
3. Be available. If you need to delegate, delegate, but don’t be unreachable. Meeting with people in your team one-on-one once a month is great, but you also need to be available for urgent situations or impromptu questions.

Your first marketing hire should be someone that can be responsible for.

• Translating business goals into marketing actions.
• Creating and updating the marketing plan looking at your business as a whole, not just social media.
• Developing a social media marketing strategy.
• Posting on social media.
• Sending email blasts and manage email marketing automated email follow-up sequences.
• Creating paid ads.
• Performing frequent marketing experiments to see what helps your business grow.

A refocus of search intent

It’s important to refocus every year because searcher intent and behavior are changing all the time, especially after the year that was 2020 when so much rapidly changed.

What is search intent?

Search Intent (also known as “User Intent”) is the user’s main goal when typing a query into a search engine like Google.

Why search intent important?

Simply put: satisfying Search Intent is ultimately Google’s #1 goal.

So if you want to succeed with SEO and content marketing today, Search Intent needs to be a big part of your approach. If your blog post doesn’t satisfy search intent, it’s not going to rank.

In 2021, are you publishing a blog post weekly? Monthly? Whenever you have time? Not blogging? Why?

All search terms fall under 4 different intent categories: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. Think of these 4 different search intent categories when planning your content marketing.

Informational searches include:

• How may
• Strategies to
• Best

Navigational searches include:

• Angel Anderson contact info
• WordPress login

Commercial searches include:

• Motivational posters
• Best livestream camera under $500

Transactional searches include:

• Car insurance quote
• Buy groceries online
• MCO to BQN flights

Google recently published a report called: “How Search Intent Is Redefining the Marketing Funnel.”

Which of these predictions you already use successfully, and which will you implement in 2021?