The digital marketing landscape is one that is ever changing and constantly evolving. As the new decade starts, digital marketers must learn how to adapt and stay ahead of the curve in order to thrive in the competitive digital marketing landscape. We enter this new decade a smartphone obsessed society, with people spending an average of over 3 hours a day on their smartphones. This reliance on smartphone brings about opportunities and new ways digital marketers can explore to better reach their customers. In this article, we will discuss the quintessential trends for digital marketers to understand to succeed in the upcoming year.
1. Voice Search
“Alexa, where can I find the nearest Thai restaurant?”. Questions like these will become more common with people demanding more convenience from their smart devices. These voice enabled devices act as an assistant to help people in searching for products online.
Voice technology has already been a significant force in the search engine domain. Google announced in 2016 that 20% of the searches it has received have voice intent. This figure has grown to a predicted staggering 50% of searches in 2020. Furthermore, it is predicted that by 2022, 40% of a surveyed population by Capgemini would prefer using a voice assistant as opposed to manual search.
There are actionable steps that us digital marketers can take to capitalize on the trend of voice assistants. Digital marketers can shift their focus of targeting shorter keywords to targeting long-tail keywords instead. This is important for targeting users of voice search because of the way they are likely to search for the things. For instance, users will search with full sentences when speaking. Like: “Can I find out what’s the best digital marketing agency in my area?” instead of typing “Best Digital Marketing Agency near me”. This would change up the game for digital marketers as they have to now look at more long tail keywords to target.
Additionally, there are companies like Jetson.ai that help businesses craft and transform their online marketplace into a fully voice search integrated one. Allowing consumers to buy from your site using only their voice. Below is a video of Jetson in action.
With these statistics showing the move of consumers to voice search and purchasing, capitalizing on voice technology with these tools and tips is paramount to a digital marketer’s success in 2020.
2. Diversifying Marketing on Social Platforms
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter. These are the most renowned social media platforms that come to mind when people talk about social media marketing. However, what they fail to notice is the trend of companies seeking to do their marketing on other platforms and increasing their engagement by doing so.
Take for example: TikTok. TikTok is a social short-form mobile video platform where users can share their self-produced entertainment content. TikTok is a rising star in social media marketing, with an impressive download volume of 614 million in a single year, outmuscling established competitors like Instagram. TikTok’s growth can also be seen in its sudden growth in ad spending, growing 75 times from May 2019 to November 2019 in the span of only half a year.
Pinterest is also another emerging platform for companies to marketing their products, especially for companies that have females as their target demographic. Presently, Pinterest have a monthly active user base of over 300 million users, with 70% of these users being female. Pinterest is great for digital marketers to share their visual content, ideas and style inspiration.
In 2020, with these emerging alternative social media platforms, it is important for you as a digital marketer to keep up with the trends and appropriately use the different varieties of social media platform to effectively capture your target audience’s attention. Choose wisely and market smartly!
3. Personalized Marketing
Let’s face it, if you’re an online retailing site, you would be more than glad to have 15% of your visitors converting into customers. But the fact of the matter is that it is highly likely that you’re only going to see about 1 – 5% of your site’s traffic convert into customers. This most likely has got nothing to do with your marketing efforts being low quality or that your products are uninteresting.
The likely reason for why your visitors leave your site is probably because the messages they see on your website don’t resonate with them. To curb this issue and possibly boost conversions, you would have to make use of personalized marketing tools to ensure that your visitors needs are satisfied.
One very good example of a company that does personalization well are companies like Asos, End Clothing and Amazon. These companies make it a point to track your buying patterns and show things that you are likely to buy based on your cached buying and product viewing history. Additionally, they notify customers through e-mail on deals that they think are of interest to them.
To make the best of this trend as a digital marketer, tools such as OptinMonster and Barilliance could help your company to create personalized exit intent pop-ups and even personalized floating headers to promote relevant deals and sales to customers that are deemed interested. By tapping on this trend of personalized marketing, you could bring your digital marketing game to the next level as well as see your conversion rates soar. With companies seeing a sales increase of over 50% after utilizing such personalized marketing tools.
Personalized marketing is the future and will become commonplace in the future of e-commerce and digital marketing. Mark our words.
4. Augmented Reality Content
The future of ecommerce is in augmented reality. Shoppers want to be able to experience and feel what an object looks like in their space or on them without even having to leave the house. The amount of convenience this could bring to them as well as enhance their shopping experience is insurmountable.
AR being an upcoming trend is also backed by consumers’ sentiments as surveys have shown that 70% of consumers believing that AR could bring them benefits and 67% of media planners wanting AR in their digital marketing campaigns.
Presently, we are seeing furniture companies like IKEA implementing AR successfully into their online stores. Customers can use the AR function to see how a piece of furniture would look like in their living space! This helps to bring more trust and satisfaction in the consumer shopping experience. The level of immersion brought by AR can help to create a shopping experience that is hard for competitors not using it to replicate, helping your business appeal better to potential customers.
5. Automated Advertising Campaigns Optimization
AI and machine-learning are powerful tools that we as digital marketers should make full use of. There are algorithms designed to help ease our digital marketing journey by optimizing our online advertising campaign.
There are software out there like SmartyAds and SalesForce Marketing Cloud, that are able to help you with your online advertising. Automating tasks and processes such as the keyword bidding process to even helping with personalizing your emails to each client.
By acquiring the service of such software, you’ll free up valuable time as a digital marketer to do tasks that robots and algorithms can’t perform. Automation is the way to go in terms of making your digital marketing campaigns more effective in the future.
Still Can’t Figure Out How To Strategize in 2020?
Fret not! Our gurus at MarketingGuru are here to help your company with campaigns and digital marketing strategies. We have a team of creative and trendy gurus who are consistently in the know with regards to marketing trends. To find out more about our services you can head over to our site! As a full service digital marketing agency we are experts in not just SEO, but also in Social Media and Pay Per Click marketing as well.
You can get a FREE SEO AUDIT from our expert gurus by dropping in an email to us. We wish you all the very best in your 2020 marketing endeavours!
