Growth Areas For You To Explore – 2021

2020 has had a number of interesting trends that have leaped out.

Here is a list of interesting trends that you, your growth and innovation teams can consider or Marketing teams should get involved with

• Fitness: Health and fitness app installs increase 37% in H1 of 2020 – will you be looking at physical or mental health in 2021. 
  Mental health apps have rightly become mainstream, will Calm, Headspace and co make it into your org or into your integration plans?
• Dedicated Chat Community: Discord has exploded in popularity – do you need to be on discord and offer another way to support your customers or community? 
  Important Note: Be wary of the push to WhatsApp business, although it can appear useful for businesses, you are going into Facebook controlled platform and likely to charge more and more for chat commerce. Will iMessage support be something you will revisit?
• Toys 2020: There was a huge growth in toys and board games in the middle quarters of 2020 – is there an opportunity there for you and your business?
• Virtual Life 3.0: Zoom released OnZoom (marketplace) – do you have something you can offer? Or charge for? Subscription services on Zoom vs having to have an app or dedicated website? 
• Gated Content: subscription sites like Substack (newsletters + podcasts) had a breakout year, especially those who are charging for their newsletters, will you and your brand look to leverage the trend?
  Is there something you can charge for? Is there a platform like Onlyfans, Patreon or substack that would be applicable for your business?
• Virtual Events: LinkedIn is going big into virtual events – will you be following suit or using LinkedIn / Hopin.to or similar for internal or external events?
• B2B Marketing – LinkedIn has just hit 722 million users with record levels of engagement, will b2b marketing have another moment like it is at the moment? Will LinkedIn to the new home for brands? Maybe LinkedIn stories are your new platform…😥
• Mixed Reality: AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual) and MR (mixed) all had good years, particularly AR which is now being used in many apps, Apple, Facebook and Snap all are going deep into AR. Is there a move into MR for you? Would AR help your customers or staff have better product or employment experiences?

Will you be joining any of these stand out trends?