Marketing challenges can drive even the most confident entrepreneur up the wall. Choosing appropriate platforms for your product, branding, speaking your audience’s language, and figuring out which marketing strategies are most effective for your target market can be a real challenge.
The digital marketing landscape is continuously changing. If you’re out-of-date with your digital marketing trends, you’re limiting your brand in both reach and repetition. As we enter into a new decade, businesses are looking for new avenues to help stay ahead of the curve. In 2020, we’ll see new marketing trends alongside some older, ongoing trends that are still effective.
That’s why we have outlined the best digital marketing trends for 2020.
Chatbots
Personal assistance without personnel – Chatbots will continue to be an essential part of digital marketing in 2020. The digital innovations will breathe new ‘life’ into chatbots, making them smarter, convincing, and accessible. This AI-based technology uses instant messaging to chat in real-time, day, or night, with your customers or site visitors to offer instant responses to queries and answers to simple questions.
Shoppable Posts (Social Commerce)
With e-commerce and social media, both growing at alarming rates, it’s no wonder brands are using the two together to maximize opportunities for sales. For the longest time, businesses were wondering how to get their social media followers to visit their online stores and make purchases. Up until recently, adding a link to an Instagram bio was the only organic way for e-commerce stores to drive traffic from Instagram to their landing pages. Shoppable posts are the answer now.
Shoppable posts allow visitors to buy the products through social media posts or ads directly. As this will create fewer steps for shoppers because they do not need to leave the site app – selling directly on social media will decrease the chances of sales abandonment.
Video Marketing
Video marketing is using videos to promote and market your product or service, increase engagement on your digital and social channels, and reach your audience with a new medium. Video marketing is one of, if not the, most crucial marketing trend today. Today, consumers say that watching product or service view makes them more confident in online purchase decisions.
With video marketing, there are plenty of options to drive engagement, as you can make video posts on YouTube, start a live broadcast on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Live video is particularly popular with a large number of companies who use it for product demos, interviews, and behind-the-scenes glimpses of the brand. The latest video trends include personalized videos, which are any video content that’s customized and relevant to each one of your audience groups, be it prospects, customers, or influencers. Long-form videos that enable you to tell a story that can make you memorable, as well as help educate your audience – whether about your products or your brand values. 360-degree videos, also known as immersive videos, or spherical videos are video recordings where a view in every direction is recorded at the same time, shot using an omnidirectional camera or a collection of cameras. During playback, the viewer has control of the viewing direction like a panorama.
Direct Messaging
In a bid to get more personal with customers, brands find DMing customers as an effective medium for forging relationships – whether taking sales orders, addressing complaints, or just interacting with them. Through messaging apps like Viber, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or through the private message on Instagram or Twitter, brands are building stronger connections with their customers. DMs help to make instant contact with your customers – all within an environment that the customers are already familiar with and is becoming one of the hottest digital marketing trends of 2020.
Sentiment Analysis
Most of the marketing experts are trying to figure out what their customers are thinking. Sentiment analysis, or social listening, helps to analyze the reactions of customers to a product or service, typically on social media. It involves data-collecting tools and algorithms to scour online responses to your product or service and evaluate them. The advancement in technology is making this digital trend more accessible than ever before. It helps marketers to understand their users, and use their opinions to fine-tune not just their products, but also build strategies for sales, marketing, customer service, and social media. Sentiment analysis tools like Critical Mention, Repustate, or Lexalytics reveal what people think about your brand. You can then use that data to fine-tune not just your products, but also your strategies for sales, marketing, social media, and content.
Alternative & Niche Social Media Channels
Despite optimism over Facebook’s most recent earnings, the continual declines of both user growth and public opinion have shaken confidence in the platform’s dominance. To be clear, both Twitter and Facebook will remain useful marketing tools throughout 2020 and beyond. But the departure has already started. In particular, Snapchat, Pinterest, Medium, and Reddit are becoming new favorites for marketers lately. Facebook has been bleeding young users for years, and brands were targeting the under-30 market are flocking to youth-centric outlets.
Programmatic Advertising
Ad placement, media buying, performance tracking, and customer targeting can all be handled by software. Real-time bidding can be stressful and time-consuming, just like finding the right avenues to advertise on. Handing off these tasks to an automated system can be best for both you and your business. Softwares like the Adobe Marketing Cloud or SmartyAds navigate the landscape of online advertising for you.
Audio
In 2020, the audio will have its moments. Podcasts are the medium for the future because when the audience has an attention issue, don’t just give them a short video. Please give them the passive listening experience that audio enables. Not to forget, Alexa is everywhere now. So marketing through voice just got very interesting.
Interaction with Gen Z
Among other things, marketing to Gen Z means a quick turn in how you stylize your content. The youngest market is also the quirkiest, with tastes that may seem weird if you’re used to marketing to Boomers or Generation X. Some sources even claim Generation Z will make up 40% of all consumers in 2020. Marketers note the similarities between Gen Z and Millennials, but as the Gen Z market matures over the next few years (in more ways than one), expect more divisive differences to emerge.
Optimizing Content
As search engines evolve and become smarter, marketers need to adjust accordingly. Google updates its search algorithm thousands of times a year; that’s why it’s crucial to keep to remain updated when creating digital marketing content. In 2020, it’s more important than ever before to produce extremely high-quality content that covers topics thoroughly yet clearly, and that is well-structured and easy to understand. In 2020, the marketer will focus on the need to write for humans and search engines alike, and make sure that they don’t neglect one or the other.
Influencer Marketing
This study reveals that influencer marketing is not just a trend, but it is going to get bigger and stronger in 2020. Influencers have already built a loyal following of people who trust them. So when they tell their fans and followers about how great your product is, there is a much higher chance that their audience will convert, simply because they need the product and trust the influencer.
So, there you have it – our definitive guide to the most important digital marketing trends you can’t ignore in 2020.
As Charles Darwin once said: It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.For anyone in digital marketing, change is inevitable. It would be best if you strived to embrace new technologies, tools, and strategies to gain an edge over your competitors.
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