 Welcome back my friends. Today we're going to be talking about one of my favorite topics in the world, and this is all about trends. So in today's video, we're going to talk about nine of the hottest digital marketing trends to watch out for in 2021. And I'll be talking about these so you can get ahead of the curve. If you are a marketer or a salesperson or you saw anything online, give me a like. And you're going to enjoy this video because you're going to learn exactly where you should be putting your focus in 2021 in the digital marketing space. So let's jump right into it. Let's not waste any time. So number one is audio content. Over 100 million people listen to podcasts every month, but that's not the only platform there is for audio content. So there is Clubhouse, the new app that came out, I think earlier in 2020 where it's audio only and you can join these rooms with big time entrepreneurs who are sharing value and listen in on the lessons they're sharing in these Clubhouse rooms. Twitter is coming out with their own competitor to Clubhouse called Twitter Spaces and Facebook is coming out with their own competitor as well. So the audio content industry is huge and the reason people love it so much is because you can listen to audio content with whatever you're doing. So if you're driving, if you are doing chores around the house, you're doing something with your kids, or if you're just busy doing some other work on your computer, you can listen to audio content while you're doing all those things and you don't have to be in front of a screen to do that. So audio content, if you create audio content or you are looking to get into the industry, huge trend for 2021 and it's only going to be going up. Number two on this list is live streams. In 2020, the live stream industry grew by 99%. And everyone knows video is the future. It's been on the rise for a while now. But in 2020, the live stream industry specifically grew by leaps and bounds and it's because more people were at home in front of their computer than ever before. I don't have to share why. We all know why after the year that we just had but more people are using platforms like Zoom to do virtual meetings. They're doing live streams on social media platforms like Twitch, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok even. I don't know if TikTok has a live stream feature but I know that more people are going to video than ever before. So the live stream industry is massive and it's going to be growing and it's going to be used in creative ways in 2021. So just imagine right now we have late night commercials where people are selling physical products to grandmas. But soon we're going to have people on platforms like Twitch who are using the platform to sell their own merchandise, their own gear, their own branded products. And we're going to see more and more creators and influencers and marketers start to do this. We're already starting to see that first wave come through where they're selling things on live streams. So that's number two. So number three on this list is short form content. And this could be in the form of text, audio or video. And the recent short form content is going to be a big trend this year is because attention is fleeting. We have very short attention spans and short form content takes advantage of that and it grabs your consumer or your reader quickly. So this could be again in any form, video, audio or text base. If we're talking about text, you want to think of platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn. They have character limits on those platforms and I just started getting into Twitter and their reach and engagement on that platform is crazy. It's insane. Very underrated platform, even though it's a pretty old platform. If we're talking about audio content, I just talked about Clubhouse and I just talked about podcast. So you can create short form clubhouse recordings or short form clubhouse rooms or podcast episodes. If we're talking about video, you can think of platforms like TikTok or Instagram stories. Those are forms of short form content. And if you can get good at creating short form content and grabbing people's attention quickly, that is a very useful powerful skill to have and you're capitalizing on a trend that we're going to see in 2021 and even going into 2022. Now, number four on this list is email newsletters and you guys know how much I love email. You know how much I love writing and publishing online. In my opinion, it is the highest leverage skill and habit that you can develop this year and beyond is writing and publishing online. But why am I bringing up email newsletters as a trend? It's been around for a while. Well, recently a company called Substack popularized the paid email newsletter model. And so basically what Substack is, you can be a creator, someone who creates content or has an email list. And you can go on Substack and charge your subscribers a monthly or annual recurring fee to see your premium emails and you see your premium content. So it was popularized by Substack recently and now companies like Twitter, I think they just released their own newsletter platform and Facebook. They're creating their own newsletter platforms that are native within their platform. So Twitter, they just bought this company called Review, I think it's called. And now you can create newsletters directly in the Twitter platform. You don't have to take somebody off to a separate site. You can go to Twitter, you can create a newsletter within that platform. And whenever someone reads your tweets, they can sign up for your newsletter directly there. So I think email newsletters are going to be a huge trend this year. It's coming back. Email is not dead. It's still king. And I think it's going to be a massive trend for people who take advantage of this. Number five is personal branding. So people connect with other people. And if you're a founder or your business owner or you just you want to create content, the best way to do that is creating your own personal brand and creating content consistently under that personal brand. So examples of people who have done this, you don't have to be an influencer to do this. So Russell Brunson, who runs a software company called ClickFunnels, you guys probably know this. He was a personal brand. He used his personal brand to grow ClickFunnels, right? So he created his own books. He wrote his own books and he used those books to grow ClickFunnels to, I think they do over $120 million per year now. So instead of just selling software and hiding behind the company, he used his personal brand to grow ClickFunnels to $100 million plus company whose value now at over a billion dollars. The company ClickFunnels is valued at over a billion dollars now. A lot of it is thanks to Russell Brunson and his personal brand. So people connect with other people and it doesn't matter what type of business that you run, right? A software company, a coaching company, a services company, or if you're just a content creator, right? A personal brand is a great way to grow your company and grow your customer base. So number six is user-generated content. Now what is user-generated content? It's exactly what it sounds like. It's content that's generated from your customers or your users, your customers, or your clients. So this could be in the form of case studies, testimonials, results, stories, feedback, anything that comes from your customer base. You can take that and turn that into a piece of content, whether you're writing up something about it, whether you're creating a compilation video of all your different customers who are shooting videos of the results using your product or your service, or even if you run an agency or you're doing services, you can go to companies who are sitting on all this user-generated content and not using it and offer to help them leverage it in their content marketing strategy to get even more customers by creating content around this user-generated content. So this is going to be a massive trend this year, both for companies and individuals who can help these companies leverage that content even more. There's more people on social media than ever before who are taking pictures and sharing their results and sharing their stories. And if you can help companies use this in their overall marketing strategy or use it for your own company, this is going to be a huge trend. It's going to be a huge way to increase your customer base and your brand equity using this user-generated content. Now number seven on this list is something you probably haven't heard of before and that is building in public. What is building in public? Well, it's exactly what it sounds like you are building your company or you're showing your journey and you're doing it in public. And this is a huge trend on Twitter, especially in the software founders space. A lot of these companies, new software founders, they're starting their company from $0 and they're showing their journey as they're growing it to 10K per month to 20K per month to 30K per month. They're showing how they're getting customers and how they're improving their product and what they're doing on a day-to-day basis to grow their team and all the things that they're doing, they're documenting it and they're building their company in public. So I love this trend. I don't know why it's on other platforms yet. I've only seen it on Twitter so far but I think we're going to see more and more of this spread to other platforms because it's transparency. People love to see how you are building behind the scenes and how you're growing and documenting your journey. People love to see that. So a few reasons why this is so powerful. It builds trust. It builds social proof. It builds your audience and people who are cheering you on and want to see you do well with your company if you have something of value to provide and they are seeing you build this and grow publicly and it has all that built in trust, social proof and you get that audience as well and of course you're going to get customers out of this too. As they're watching you, people are going to be interested in your product as well as you're documenting things and they're going to start signing up for customers of your product if you have a good product of course. So building in public, huge trend this year. I've only seen it on Twitter but I think it's going to spread to other platforms like Facebook and Instagram and TikTok of other people who are building in public and documenting their journey. Number eight is community building and I strongly believe that the companies who build communities not just sell products and services, they build communities around their company. These are the companies that will win in the long run. So we just talked about ClickFunnels and Russell Brunson, a big reason why he was able to build his company to a hundred million plus is because he built a loyal community around sales funnels and online marketing, right? The ClickFunnels community and the Facebook group, they have over 260,000 members in that group at the time of this recording. So other people, influencers on YouTube, right? Vanessa Lau, she has a community as well in her Facebook group. I can't remember what it's called but she has a Facebook group around her mission which is helping people turn their followers on social media into clients in a coaching business. So the people who can build communities around their company and not just sell products and services, these are the people who are going to create loyal fans because people love being parts of communities who have a common mission, a common goal, a common purpose. And number nine on this list, the final trend in this top nine digital marketing trends for 2021 list is cohort based courses. Now what is a cohort based course? You can think of it like a college course but it's not a college course. It's in the form of an online course. Now what a cohort based course is, it has a specific start date, a specific end date and everyone in this cohort together is working towards a specific result, a specific end goal together. So it's different than online course because with a regular online course you can join at any time and you can go at your own pace, right? It's just whatever, however fast you go through the modules. With a cohort based course, the reason I like it is it has a built in deadline and everybody is working to that deadline, working through the modules, through the course material together on the same timeline together towards that goal all as a group. And the pros about that, the upside with a cohort based course is it forces people to take action and it motivates people to take action because you're seeing all these other people, these other students in the cohort based course who are taking action, who are moving along, who are crushing through the material and who are getting results and it makes you want to do the same thing, right? Because you're going at the same pace together as a group and you're staying accountable. So I'm a part of a couple of cohort based courses right now. I'm getting incredible results. I'm loving the experience. There's people like David Perrell, who has write of passage. It's a writing program teaching you how to write online. There's people like Tiago Forte, who has building a second brain and the founder of Udemy, which is a multi-billion dollar company in the online education space. He is building another company all around cohort based courses and a platform for helping you create and sell those. So I think this is going to be the biggest trend on this list this year. It's going to have a huge blow up if I were to predict it sometime around the middle of the year. But cohort based courses, I think they're going to be a lot better than regular online courses. I think it's going to revolutionize the industry because it's going to help people get better results, right? And that's the main thing with courses is not a lot of people go through the courses right now. So the cohort based course will help people go through the course, implement and get a result with it. And of course, that is what matters, right? It was when people get results with the course. So I'm creating my own cohort based course sometime in the next month. And I think this is going to be a huge industry on its own in the next year, two years, three years down the road. If you guys enjoyed this, you got value out of this, give me a like and do me a favor down below in the comments. Let me know out of these nine trends, which one you are going to be diving into and focusing on this year. Let me know in the comments below. I'd love to hear from you in the next video and next week's video. I'll be talking more about side hustles and seven lucrative side hustles that you can do and start in 2021. So stick around for that. I will see you in the next video.