10 Digital Marketing Trends to Rule 2020
The year of 2019 witnessed a monumental swing in digital marketing techniques. 2020 promises to bring about new disruptions to the already exploding digital marketing space. Digital marketing will continue to become increasingly more complex in 2020. Technology and applications are booming, with new and expanding social media platforms, increasingly sophisticated marketing automation systems, the incorporation of artificial intelligence, the need for chatbots, and lots more.
While the trends of this year will continue thriving, the New Year will pave the way for other fresh approaches of reaching, retaining and converting prospects and customers.
So here’s a take on the top 10 digital marketing trends to rule 2020:
1. VISUAL COMMUNICATION
With the average human attention span calculated at 8 seconds, marketers are finding it increasingly hard to grab the attention of their audiences. This short attention span combined with the plethora of content created makes a marketer’s job a nightmare. So it’s not surprising that more and more marketers are turning towards visual communication in their marketing efforts.
Visual communication has many benefits and arguably the most vital one is the ability to process information faster. If you look back at your own Facebook experience you’ll notice how things evolved from text updates to pictures and how rapidly video took over the News Feed ever since. Nowadays, everything needs to be visually appealing to stand out in the flood of content that’s being published.
2. SEO AND VOICE SEARCH IN SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is perhaps THE most cost-effective digital marketing technique. New voice-enabled devices such as the Amazon Echo and the Google Home have been blockbuster hits with consumers in 2017. It’s clearly set to grow and expand even more to become one of the biggest digital marketing trends of 2020.
Voice search affects SEO and incorporating voice command into our websites as well as expanding the amount of quality, conversational style content is imperative. Voice search queries will push SEOs to focus on even longer long-tail keywords and generate content specific to the nuanced needs of spoken searches.
3. CHATBOTS
Developments in online technology have made marketing increasingly consumer-focused. To adapt to this customer-centric approach, brands need to be more available and connected with their audience. Many brands will be opting for Chatbots because they make it possible to offer 24/7 customer service with an immediate response. After Facebook Messenger opened its API, installing chatbots in a CMS has become an easy victory for even novices. Companies can adopt chatbots in an effort to cut the cost of engaging regular customer service or technical support staff.
The chatbot which functions solely with an artificial brain (AKA artificial intelligence) is proving to have an increasingly larger role when it comes to dealing with customers via chat interfaces.
Clothing brands like H&M and makeup retailer Sephora have both used chatbot technology to their benefit. Sephora has used it to offer their customers bespoke and tailored customer interaction, tips, treatment, and advice, whereas H&M have offered their users a personal stylist Chatbot. This attempt to shorten and personify the communication pathway between brand and customers will be the underlying theme in many of this year’s emerging digital trends.
4. LIVE VIDEOS
Live streaming video is a powerful new tool in the marketing toolbox. What streaming video does best is to allow brands to drop the corporate veil, connect human-to-human, and allow users to participate in brand storytelling in ways that enrich the customer experience. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube have all released live streaming on their platforms. And, while video content of all types has experienced serious growth in recent years, live video is growing the most.
Live streaming brings a new element to digital marketing by giving consumers an authentic look into the behind-the-scenes magic that creates immediate interest in a brand. Making a connection is where the success of marketing lies, so understanding how to use live streaming to broadcast your company’s best self is important. For B2B marketing, consider using live video for interviews, product demos, and event coverage.
5. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Artificial Intelligence can be called the latest invention by human beings and suffice to say it has taken the world by storm. AI is playing an increasingly important role in the marketing process. By analyzing customer search patterns and behavior, using data from social media sites, blog posts, interactions with your own website, and other inputs, AI can tell you exactly how customers and prospects are reacting to your product and brand. AI can even use this information to jump into a conversation, offering persuasive information or tips. Savvy marketers will ensure they understand AI and the implications and opportunities for B2B marketing.
In 2020, we can expect to see AI take a leading role in e-commerce. Online stores are focusing on how to turn their predictive analytics into actionable solutions. By incorporating AI into their platforms, e-commerce stores can customize content and product recommendations based on each user’s unique tastes and behaviors. Like other marketing activities, the goal is to make a more customized and intimate shopping experience.
6. BIG DATA AND PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS
The job of marketers today has changed slightly. It now involves collecting data, crunching numbers and statistics, deriving trends, targeting individuals rather than masses and discovering the appropriate channel to reach target clients.
The digital age has brought with it huge volumes of data. Big data offers a clear insight that marketers can use to leverage their marketing strategies over their competitors. A direct benefit of this is that the companies can develop better content with the help of these insights and thus target the core need of the customer.
As marketers are focused on making the customer journey more personalized, predictive analytics is going to be much talked about to explore this potential. It’s no longer to keep up with customer behavior- brands need to be anticipating their buyer’s next move. This upcoming year, we can expect to see brands in investing time and money in predictive analytics so they can foresee customer behavior and increase ROI.
7. GEO-TARGETING
It’s actually just tailored location-based marketing. So, if a business aims to be competitive in 2020, it must find a way to connect with local consumers. Local search ads display only to users in the relevant geographic area. A user inputs a search term with a specific location, such as “restaurants in Paris” and a list of businesses in that vicinity will show up.
You can tailor messages to locals searching for your product or service and increase your visibility and help potential customers find you more easily by setting up a search ad on Google (as well as on other major search engines).
8. CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing means attracting and transforming prospects into customers by creating and sharing valuable free content. The purpose of content marketing is to help companies create sustainable brand loyalty and provide valuable information to consumers, as well as create a willingness to purchase products from the company in the future.
This relatively new form of marketing does not involve direct sales. Instead, it builds trust and rapport with the audience. However, just creating unique compelling content won’t be enough; marketing and targeting it at the right time to the right audiences will matter most.
9. APP STORE OPTIMIZATION
Mobile apps are turning as an advantageous way for business growth. Many startups, well-established companies, small & large scale industries are flourishing their businesses through innovative and high performing mobile applications.
App store optimization (ASO) is the process of improving the visibility of a mobile app in an app store. Just like search engine optimization (SEO) is for websites, app store optimization is for mobile apps. The higher your app ranks in an app store’s search results, the more visible it is to potential customers. That increased visibility tends to translate into more traffic to your app’s page in the app store. The goal of ASO is to drive more traffic to your app’s page in the app store, so searchers can take a specific action: downloading your app.
10. REMARKETING
Remarketing shows ads to people who’ve visited your website or used your mobile app. When people leave your website without buying anything, for example, remarketing helps you reconnect with them by showing relevant ads across their different devices. It allows you to position targeted ads in front of a defined audience that had previously visited your website — as they browse elsewhere around the internet.
Remarketing in Google AdWords consists of static images, animated images, video, responsive ads, and text ads that are placed on the Google Display and Google Search Network. Remarketing entails using special tracking code to place cookies on the browsers of people visiting your website, and then serving ads to those with that cookie, specifically, on the Display and Search network. Executed in the right way it can be a powerful component of a PPC campaign and assist in raising your conversion rate and brand profile.
Final Thoughts
To conclude, digital marketing is evolving at the speed of light. Keeping yourself abreast of emerging trends can give you a first-mover advantage over competitors. These are the top 10 digital marketing trends that we think will rule 2020. It is not imperative to use every single one of them in your marketing strategy. In fact, it is all about analyzing what works for your business and your customers.
