Marketing Trends You Need to Know in 2020
As a digital marketing agency working with successful businesses and individuals, we have seen firsthand how being ahead of the curve can help you gain better leads with less investment.
For example, the first adopters of Facebook and Instagram had an advantage in building an organic following compared to today.
As the world becomes more cluttered in the digital space, businesses need to cut through the noise. By staying on top of the trends, you can reach more customers, more efficiently and effectively.
Here is our summary of the top 6 marketing trends you need to know about in 2020.
1. The importance of digital marketing
Almost everyone is online. There are over 3 billion people (and growing) on social media around the globe (1), and online search is often the first place customers go to when thinking about buying a new product or service.
Therefore, it’s essential to optimise your customer’s online journey. If one area of your digital marketing is brilliant (perhaps you have a highly engaged social media community) but another area is lacking (your website looks like a nightmare from the ’90s) you won’t be able to convert potential leads.
Make sure you haven’t put all your eggs in one basket and take a moment to audit your entire digital marketing suite – use this infographic to guide you!
2. Put customer experience at the centre of your strategy
A recent report by Econsultancy and Adobe (2) asked companies to indicate the single most exciting opportunity for their organisation in 2020. Can you guess the opportunity?
If you guessed ‘customer experience’ (or CX), you’d be right.
Whether improving the user experience (UX) of your website, investing in customer service or improving the breadth of channels to reach your target customers, improving the customer experience at every touchpoint is critical to business success.
Try to reach out to and listen to your customers. What are their frustrations, and what areas of the business are they happy with?
Use this feedback to improve loyalty by scaling what you do well and increasing positive touchpoints and removing areas of friction.
3. Visual content – image and video
Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.
Allen Ginsberg
65% of people are visual learners. Hence when people look at an advertisement, the first thing they notice is the image (or video!).
Did you know that our modern image of Santa didn’t even exist before Coca Cola advertising? Or that people are 64% more likely to buy your product after watching a video about it. (3)
You can use visual content in almost every marketing channel. Need more ideas on incorporating more visual assets?
(Source: Hotjar)
Post product and lifestyle photos across your social media accounts.
Use infographics to communicate chunks of information.
Create a YouTube account and start posting how-to videos or product demos.
Repost consumer-generated content or show your customers behind-the-scenes look of your brand.
4. Personalisation
80% of consumers said that they’d be more likely to do business with a brand that provides a personalised experience (4).
In the 2002 movie Minority Report, a series of personalised ads bombard the protagonist as he walks into shops. Almost two decades later, this is nearly a reality.
On the one hand, overly personalised services can be, well, creepy. However, when personalisation allows businesses to meet their customers’ needs better, the outcome is that customers are delighted and more likely to purchase. For example, Nutella became Myers top-selling Christmas gift when customers were able to buy a personalised Nutella Jar with their name inscribed.
The opportunities for personalisation are endless. Businesses can create targeted ads on Facebook based on products customers have looked at online. We can target specific segments via email campaigns, for example, female customers may receive a different campaign compared to male customers.
5. Chatbots
Chatbots are programs built to engage with received messages automatically. Artificial intelligence powers the most advanced chatbots, making them able to respond to sophisticated requests. More commonly used by businesses are chatbots built using ‘if-then’ statements. This means you don’t even need to know how to code to use them!
You can use chatbots in social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and on websites and SMS text.
Customer-facing businesses should consider leveraging chatbots to streamline customer communications, success and sales. Some pros of using chatbots include:
Save time and money
24/7 support
Can serve many purposes, including resolving common customer service issues and FAQ’s, promote a new product, or generate leads.
Can reflect your brand voice, whether humorous and energised or friendly and professional (see the examples below!)
6. Voice search
If you have ever asked a question to Siri on your iPhone or asked a smart speaker to play a song, you have used voice search. We are continuing to see an upward trend in this kind of technology and its capabilities. Smart speaker shipments grew nearly 200% year on year in 2018, globally(5) and 65% of 25-49 year-olds speak to their voice-enabled devices at least once a day(6).
Voice searchers use search platforms (i.e. Google) differently. They use longer, more conversational queries. For example, “what will the temperature be this weekend” instead of, “Saturday weather”. As current trends suggest Voice will be a $40 billion channel by 2022, (7) you may want to consider how you will address it in your marketing strategy.
Consider optimising both your website and SEO for these longer and more conversational search queries. Use natural-sounding language, turn form queries into question phrases and target long-tail keywords (long-tail keywords are just a fancy name for long or sentence like searches). If you have a physical location, you can adapt your SEO strategy to include local keywords.
If you have an app, consider voice integration. For example, you can ask Google or Alexa to, “play Roar by Katy Perry,” and Spotify or Apple Music will understand this voice query and start playing that particular song.
In conclusion, keeping on top of marketing trends can both improve a business’s relationship with its customers and therefore, enhance its bottom line. Whether it is spending a little bit of time updating your website or personalising a service you offer; consider how you can use these voice search, chatbots, personalisation, visual content, customer experience and digital marketing to improve how you market your product or service.
References:
(1) BrizFeel, 2018 https://brizfeel.com/digital-marketing-statistics/),
(2) https://www.adobe.com/uk/modal-offers/econsultancy_digital_trends_2019_report.html
(5) Strategy Analytics, 2018, https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics
(6) PWC, 2019 https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics
(7) OC&C Strategy Consultants, 2019 https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics
