Digital Marketing Landscape is constantly changing. To keep you on track, below is the outline best digital marketing trends 2020.
If you are out-of-date with your digital marketing trends, you are keeping business from reach and repetition. You may be unaware about the recent marketing trends, but your target customers and your competitors are not.
Shoppable posts (social commerce)
For a long time, businesses were desiring to get their social media followers pay a visit on their online stores. Now, they no longer need to.
Social commerce refers to purchasing products straightly from social media posts or advertisements which makes it more convenient because you no longer need to leave the site or app. These shoppable social media posts are rapidly getting more attention.
Bottom of Form
You do not need to be an e-commerce brand provided that you market goods, even just a few pieces of merchandise, you can see an increased earnings by allowing dealings through social media.
Talking to Gen Z on their own terms
Last but not least, marketers in 2020 are welcoming the latest consumer group, Generation Z. Those born just after the turn of the century are now turning 18 and entering the workforce now. Some sources even claim Generation Z will make up 40% of all consumers in 2020.
Among other things, marketing to Gen Z means a sharp turn in how you present awe 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.
If Gen Z is one of your top markets, here’s a quick list of their general values to keep in mind:
- Authenticity—having grown up online in the era of misinformation, Gen Z are very sensitive to authenticity and can smell phonies a miles away—avoid overly promotional approaches and opt for transparency instead.
- Privacy—concerns about privacy rank highly among Gen Z, so respecting their data will earn you more than using it against them.
- Diversity—the most diverse generation yet appreciates that diversity reflected in the videos and images they see online.
- Sense of humor—Gen Z humor has been described as “absurdist” and other less-polite euphemisms, so if you personally don’t get it, hire someone who does.
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.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis or social listening is the practice of analyzing the reactions of users and customers to a certain product or service, typically on social media or other places online. Online reviews and posts are not always a black-and-white “I like/dislike this.” There is a big gray area with varying degrees in between. Maybe a user likes the product as a whole but one particular feature may dismay them in a way. Some customers may not get what they have expected in the particular service or product they bought. Some customers may wish to present comments or feedback or ask even plain clarifications or inquiries as well.
Sentiment analysis usually involves data-collecting tools and algorithms to scour online responses to your brand and evaluate them. Again, this isn’t a new digital marketing trend, but new technology is making it more popular than ever before. Advances in natural language processing let computers understand the meanings behind what humans say online, including slang and emoji.
Sentiment analysis tools like Critical Mention, Repustate or Lexalytics reveal what people really 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.
Micro-influencers
Micro-influencer is a term that has been more familiar to us lately. It refers to the medium-sized influencers with narrower niches—popular enough to be influential in touch with their followers and not overloaded with sponsors.
Micro-influencer have less followers which makes it easier for them to have more personal time for each one.
Alternative and niche social media channel
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. Likewise, Twitter is seeing a similar plateau in growth, leading to a shift in power.
To be clear, both Twitter and Facebook will remain useful marketing tools throughout 2020 and beyond. But the exodus has already started.
Alternative social media channels are already seeing new interest and promising growth levels. If you can start developing your presence on these “secondary” sites now, it’s likely to pay off in a few years after they continue to rise.
In particular, Snapchat, Pinterest, Medium and Reddit are becoming new favorites for marketers lately. Facebook has been bleeding young users for years, and brands targeting the under-30 market are flocking to youth-centric outlets.
New and smaller social media platforms may not have the reach of the giants, but that’s not a bad thing. If you’re a niche brand, more specialized platforms are better at reaching your target users. Check out these Facebook alternatives, broken up by industry or interest, so you can find the social media platform that’s perfect for your niche.
Programmatic advertising
Just like with sentiment analysis, don’t send a human to do a robot’s job. Artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms are designed to make your work easier, and that includes optimizing your online advertising campaigns.
Ad placement, media buying, performance tracking and customer targeting can all be handled by software. Not only do the results tend to be better, but “outsourcing” these tasks to a bot also frees up time in your schedule to handle more important tasks. It’s automation at its best.
Software like the Adobe Marketing Cloud or SmartyAds navigate the landscape of online advertising for you. 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.
Interactive emails.
Lately, we are seeing a swift decline in plain-text emails and newsletters. It was replaced with more attractive, pixel-perfect emails that look similar to a web designer’s portfolio. Today, Email marketing appear to be more functional and interactive. Gone are days of plain information and writing. Emails now look and function like a mini-web pages wherein clickable buttons, links and other interactive functions are present.
These highly polished designs do more than just impress, they improve conversations. Readers are more likely to click stylized buttons with accompanying images than they are plain-text.
Using webpage-based email templates is not enough today, you have to do an extra mile with the use of stunning visuals and UX-centric designs. In order to have a good response and outcome as far as sales or income is concerned, you have to have your emails more enticing, attractive and engaging as possible.
Direct messaging
Nowadays, businesses are having much stronger connection with their consumers through the use of messaging apps like Facebook, Viber, WhatsApp and other private messages on social media like twitter and Instagram. These apps provide convenience in messaging using mobile phones. Messaging costumers is an effective way of building rapport or relationship with prospected or regular customers whether addressing complaints and accepting sales orders.
Optimizing for featured snippets
One of the reasons digital marketing trends change so rapidly is because the platforms they depend on change rapidly. Just look at Google, which updates its search algorithm thousands of times a year.
But as search engines evolve and become smarter, marketers need to adjust too. More and more search queries have featured snippets, which enjoy a lot of real estate on the first page and get a lot more clicks than the other search results. That is why it is crucial to keep them in mind when creating digital marketing content and optimize each piece of content for featured snippets, using clear and well-structured content.
Google is trying to get better at delivering content to humans, so we need to take these changes into account and adjust our search engine optimization techniques accordingly.
For marketers in 2020 it’s more important than ever before to create extremely high-quality content that covers topics thoroughly yet clearly and that is well-structured and easy to understand. We need to write for humans and for search engines alike, and make sure we do not neglect one or the other.
Vlogging
With the ongoing success of YouTube, Instagram Stories and Snapchat, video blogs are more popular than ever. As opposed to other video types like explainer videos or short films, vlogs are more personal and direct. Vloggers speak directly to the viewer (PewDiePie style), creating a more personal and direct connection—obviously a great boon to marketers trying to forge stronger relationships with their customers.
More than just complaining about how the barista screwed up your order, vlogs can also be practical and strategic. You can live-stream special events that not everyone has access to, like a business conference or a musical concert. You can also post other homegrown content your customers would want to see anyway, such as celebrity interviews or behind-the-scenes looks.
As video marketing continues to rise, we’ll likely see more subcategories like vlogs emerge. Learning to differentiate your video content now will help accommodate future trends.