Over a short period of time, Digital Marketing has become the top priority amongst businesses. From Artificial Intelligence, Voice Search Engine optimization (VSEO), to Influencer Marketing, there are many options, and plenty of opportunity, to hone in on your target audience. With all that is available, we can agree that Marketers and business owners alike, can no longer use the same methods over and over again. We have to be more strategic than ever when choosing the appropriate Digital platform, especially when it comes to promoting your brand or product to a specific audience.
Check out the top 5 digital trends of 2020 that will help your business thrive in the “Age of Innovation:”
1. Personalization
For 2020, marketers are continuing to focus on personalization of content, products, and emails. Consumers are easily annoyed with generic advertising blasts and sites that are unclear or lengthy. Some customers indicated that they would more likely do business with a company if it offered personalized experiences. Netflix and Amazon are great examples of this. They tailor their products, or recommend movie titles, to the consumer’s liking based on their history or search. Additionally, Starbucks uses a gamified mobile app that collects data from the consumer to customize their drinks and encourages further use with its rewards program. Moving forward in 2020, it’s important to keep your content direct and concise, to painlessly move the user down the funnel.
2. Voice Technology will move beyond smart speakers, and close in on visual search capabilities – voice search and smart speakers.
The use of voice search is increasing and has companies rethinking their digital marketing strategies for 2020. AI, or Artificial Intelligence, is getting ‘smarter’, meaning the amount of errors have reduced greatly amongst voice assistants like Alexa, Google, and Siri.
Multiple brands, such as: Campbell’s, Nestle, PayPal, and Domino’s, are already including voice search in their digital marketing strategies to deliver value-based content effectively to their customers.
Voice search is changing the way people search for, and find, brands to interact with. Businesses who want to remain visible to consumers in the coming years, will have to find a way to incorporate this into their marketing plan.
3. Shoppable posts (Social Commerce)
Social commerce refers to buying products directly through social media posts or ads, without leaving the site or app. Since Instagram Checkout launched in 2019, it has rapidly been increasing in popularity. The goal is to minimize the number of steps to take for your shoppers, by selling directly on social media. This then decreases the chance of “cart abandonment.” This feature is available to anyone selling products, even if it’s just a few pieces of branding merchandise. By allowing transactions through social media, you can typically see greater return on investment (ROI).
If you have a Shopify store, you can easily link your accounts (for Instagram), or install a plugin (for Snapchat). Otherwise, you may have to create stores in the right places, such as Facebook, to qualify.
4. Video Marketing
One of the most important marketing trends of today, is video content (and it is likely to be for the next 5-10 years). Video Marketing is a popular way to learn about new products, and it is not just found on YouTube. Video content can also be found on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. If your site includes video content, it is 50x more likely to drive organic search results, in comparison to text. Video content is compelling and more likely to draw the consumer’s interest; for this reason, Google ranks pages with video content higher.
In addition, video content is easy to format for multiple uses. Videos can be transcribed, published on a blog, or embedded, for better rankings.
5. Influencer Marketing
Have you ever searched for a video to learn more about a specific product? Have you ever wanted to know how a product works, or how it compares to similar products? Look no further than Influencer Marketing. Often described as word-of-mouth marketing, utilizing key leaders or speakers, who boost your message to a larger market. Influencers can be YouTube, or Instagram, personalities and celebrities – any person who has a large following, and is well-known in the market, that can assist in spreading the word about your product or services through their social outlet.
Influencer Marketing is not just a trend; a recent Mediakix study, concluded that ad spend for Influencer Marketing could reach $10 billion by next year.
