Digital Marketing Trends to Follow in 2020 [Contributed Blog]

December 18, 2019 - 11 minutes read - Contributed Posts, Infographic, Marketing Trends, Mod Marketing

The internet has expanded in influence since its inception. It is the most revolutionary invention of our time. Every industry, firm, and department has embraced the internet while IoT has become a necessity in any field you can imagine.

With the rise of the internet, companies are constantly trying to find innovative ways to take advantage of it for their marketing purposes. Brands are making an effort to transform how they communicate with their customers and prospects.

The internet has given rise to personalized communication and marketing. Marketers can now sell their products or services in a smart and engaging way. The digital marketing landscape has expanded as a result of the internet’s popularity. Audiences have shifted from traditional media (TV, radio, etc.) to online media (websites, social media, etc.).

Now, the most effective form of marketing is spreading your message to your customers on channels where they are most likely to engage.

Online media has made it easier for brands to pass their message to new customers. Meanwhile, engaging previous customers and providing them with the best customer service has also become manageable.

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Every year, there are new trends that make waves in the world of digital marketing. 2019 brought some amazing new marketing trends for businesses including TikTok, live chat, podcasts, etc.

Digital marketing is transforming on a day-to-day basis. Those who don’t innovate their marketing departments according to the latest digital marketing trends will stagnate.

Below, we have compiled a list of trends that are going to revolutionize digital marketing in 2020

Voice Search SEO

Smartphone usage has increased across the world as more affordable phones entered the market and the internet’s accessibility increased. Because of this, people are now becoming accustomed to voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google. Voice assistants can search for queries asked by the user, read the text, and make Google searches on behalf of the user.

Comscore says that by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice searches. This is why you cannot ignore optimizing your site for voice search.

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Tips for optimizing your site for voice search SEO

  • Understand the behavior and language of your customers. Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. Observe what a typical customer will search for if he was to search for your business.
  • Instead of keywords, optimize your content for long-tail phrases. For example, ‘what’s the best design agency in New York?’
  • Optimize your site for local SEO
  • Work on your FAQ page
  • Get your site to the featured snippets.

Inbound Content Marketing

Inbound content marketing is generating useful content that attracts your target audience. Every piece of content you design is part of an inbound content strategy.

  • You generate content to make prospects aware of their problem.
  • Then, you generate content that makes your prospects realize that your company has the right solution to that problem.
  • After that, you create content to convert those leads into paying customers.
  • Now, you need to retain those customers by providing them with exceptional after-sales service.

(image by Neil Patel)

If you don’t have an inbound marketing strategy in place, then content can only drive up traffic. An inbound content marketing strategy provides you with a process to automate lead generation and conversions using your content.

Interactive Content

Marketers always try to engage their prospects with their content and interactive content does that. Interactive content is a type of content that requires interaction of the prospect instead of just reading or watching your content.

Interactive content includes interactive infographics, interactive web pages, interactive videos, surveys, and assessments, etc.

Interactive content results in better user engagement, captures more data about a prospect, increases brand loyalty, etc.

Here is an example of an interactive web page by San Francisco Chronicle

California fire tracker

Video Content

Consumers have always liked watching videos from brands they like. For companies, videos have proved to be very useful because they can deliver their complex product explanations to their audience visually. Compared to other types of content, videos are the best at converting.

(Image by Hubspot)

According to a report by Smart Insights, 72% of people prefer to learn about a service or a product via video.

Video content is expensive as compared to other content types unless you go with an efficient and budget-friendly video production company.

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Personalized Ads

Many marketers are competing to capture the interest of a specific group of people.

Prospects will buy from the brand they feel most connected to. This means that companies winning in the attention economy are the ones that are able to make every single person in their audience feel like the ad is specifically meant for them.

This approach makes sense because your prospects are bombarded with a barrage of ads every day on their social media and during web browsing sessions. Personalized ads allow you to stand out and offer customers a unique experience.

This can easily be done by retargeted ads; showing the viewer related snippets to the content/product/service they have already seen on your site; setting up automated ‘abandoned cart’ emails, etc.

(Image by Spotify)

Many big brands, such as Amazon, are already working on personalized ad campaigns. They normally offer prospects products based on how they interacted with their website and what kind of products they showed interest in.

Shoppable Posts

Over the last couple of years, social media has been a huge part of every business. With billions of monthly active users, it’s no surprise why that is the case. Brands are reserving marketing budgets for their social media strategy to remain top of mind and increase their influence.

Recently, Pinterest have allowed business owners to sell their products via shoppable posts.

Using simple integration, business owners can import their products to social media. For online e-commerce store owners, this is a gold mine to attract new customers every day.

Instagram has also introduced shopping tags for business account owners. E-commerce store owners can sell their products by using this feature more effectively.

Alternative Social Media Channels

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn have always been major social media platforms.

Many businesses do not realize that there are several other platforms where they can reach out to their customers.

Pinterest has recently gained a lot of attention after it introduced shoppable posts, and many businesses have started to advertise on the platform.

TikTok has also emerged as a major player for the social media marketing game after capturing 500 million users in a short time. More than 50% of the audience on TikTok are aged 18 to 34, which makes it perfect for brands targeting a similar demographic.

(Graph by Marketing Charts)

Customer Retention

Onboarding new customers and clients is exciting but retaining previous customers should also be a business’s top priority. The truth is that attracting new customers is a costly venture while customer retention requires lower investment and yields better results.

According to Bain and Company, a 5% increase in customer retention rates could boost profit margins up by 95%. The benefits of customer retention are impressive which is why companies have started making efforts in this regard.

Loyalty programs transform customers into brand advocates who then act as a referral system, which is great because word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing for any business.

So, how can a company retain customers easily? The answer is social listening. It involves keeping an eye out for unhappy customers and going out of your way to please them.

In doing so, other prospects will see that your brand is doing everything to keep their customers happy.

Conclusion

The field of digital marketing is constantly evolving. If you are an online business, you need to be on top of the latest trends.

Focus your efforts towards learning new things every day and test what works best for your brand. Keep in mind that the things that may work for another business may not necessarily work for you though.

Author Bio: M Ehsan is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Motioncue Studios. He has worked as a freelancer for the last five years. Ehsan specializes in inbound marketing techniques, digital marketing strategy and data analysis for effective campaigns.

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