Marketing Trends to Watch in 2020

Innovations in digital media, online platforms and technology will revolutionise marketing trends in 2020. Businesses are leveraging opportunities to adopt the latest marketing techniques and tools in order to increase brand awareness and attract more consumers. 

Digital marketers must be aware of these emerging trends in order to stay on top of the game.

Here are some exciting 2020 marketing trends that you should look out for!  

Life Cycle Marketing 

Consumers usually go through a marketing funnel, where businesses use various marketing strategies to raise awareness of their brand/products and generate new leads. Digital marketing is essential in forging a unified customer experience yet many businesses often are often weak on the middle-bottom end of the marketing funnel, especially with customer retention and nurturing activities. 

A practical way of achieving online marketing integration is to consider the customer’s point of view or their purchasing decisions / buying behaviour throughout the holistic customer journey. This is known as the always-on-cycle marketing, which involves a comprehensive overview of both your online and offline media across the customer lifecycle. To do this, many businesses are using marketing automation and account-based marketing technology. 

Virtual and Augmented Reality 

One of the most popular rising marketing trends of 2020 is virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) which enables the user to create simulated experiences. Digital marketers can harness this powerful tool to create seamless user experiences that gives them a semblance of trialling the product in real-life. 

For example, the Swedish furniture corporation Ikea has a mobile app which allows customers to visualise what a piece of furniture may look like placed in their home. 

Interactive Content 

Everyday, customers are seeking more interactive content as we live in a world inundated with unnecessary excess information. In fact, 91% of consumers are actively seeking visual and interactive content, which presents a major opportunity for digital marketing specialists. 

Interactivity ensures that buyers are effectively engaged with a business’s marketing campaigns and digital content. Interactive content is fresh and captivates the viewer more easily, ensuring that they remain longer on the page/site. They are also extremely shareable which means that businesses can grow brand awareness and exposure quickly. 

Personalisation 

With the growth of digital marketing comes greater personalisation, marketing campaigns and tailored content. Consumers have become accustomed to tuning out generic ads amid information overload. Businesses must inject some level of personalisation so that buyers can feel a more intimate connection with the brand or product. 

According to a Forbes survey, 90% of 1000 people believed that personalisation was more appealing. Interestingly, 80% admitted that they would be more inclined to undertake business with a company that offered them more personalised experiences.

This is also notably demonstrated through the effectiveness of segmented lists with personal email blasts, which outperform generic emails sent to an entire subscriber list. This is just one example of optimising personalisation to connect with audiences in more targeted ways. Digital marketers should be looking for different avenues to customise their content and marketing strategies.

Google Ads Smart Bidding 

Google has announced updates to Google Ads, which will likely lead to automation and smart bidding. Google Ads uses machine learning to optimise bids and subsequently maximise your conversion. 

Under the new smart bidding system, you can select your ideal conversion action for campaigns and you also have the ability to change your bids automatically when sales start or end. Google Ads enables you to further optimise bids over multiple campaigns with a chosen set of conversion actions.

Conversational Marketing

The growing emergence of conversational marketing is a promising field that businesses should seek to capitalise. It involves the rapid consumer adoption of smart speakers and innovation in areas of search query processing, conversational interfaces and messaging. A key example of this is the use of Facebook or website chatbots. 

In a nutshell, conversational marketing is able to imitate human dialogue and applies this across broader customer-business (B2C) interactions. According to AI and data agency Artefact UK, 60% of 2000 British adults have used smart speakers to make a purchase in the past year. 

This has enormous implications for web, email and mobile-based conversations which can enhance personalised customer service. 

Data Analytics and Insights-driven Marketing

Businesses often use analytics and insights to improve business performance and optimise results. According to the Altimeter Digital Marketing Report 2019-2020, improving their data-driven marketing is the primary aim of businesses as it is the most desired skill among digital marketers.

McKinsey Research also discovered that intensive users of customer analytic are 23 times more likely to outperform their competitors in terms of new customer acquisition than non-intensive users, and are 9 times more likely to surpass them in customer loyalty. 

Gathering valuable data on market trends and customer bases can provide insight into the competitive landscape, providing more opportunities for business growth. 

SERP Position Zero 

Do you want to rank Number #1 on the search engine results page? 

Think again. The top position in SERP is now Position Zero (used to be known as Quick Answers) – a featured block of text that appears above the list of search results. This position usually provides information related to the search query, while also providing the link to the information’s original webpage source.

Position Zero is often the only result that some users will view. Businesses should be optimising their SEO marketing strategies to achieve this highly lucrative position.