Coming into a new year (and a new decade!), we’ve got the beginning of the roaring twenties ahead of us, and now is a great time to look to the future. Using our crystal ball, we’ve made a list of all the crucial 2020 digital marketing trends your business needs to make the most of the next 12 months and beyond.
Personalised Ads and Data-Driven Campaigns
Dubbed as the ‘future of marketing’, companies are still looking towards personalisation (or in some cases, hyper-personalisation) as the most influential trend for 2020. Algorithms are using AI to gather more intelligence on consumer preferences – from our names to our favourite colours – to work out what our favourite shows and products are going to be.
Business giants like Amazon and Netflix are already successfully deploying powerful predictive content recommendations: the dawn of individualisation is upon us, and personalised ads are set to only become more responsive, efficient and reliable.
Chatbots
Chatbots offer the ‘best of both worlds’ when it comes to Digital Marketing – combining AI automation with immediate customer service by making conversation with anyone who visits your site, immediately. By programming Chatbots to respond to frequently asked questions such as ‘What’s your returns policy?’ or ‘How much is this?’, you can give your page visitors an immediate and accurate response, without the need for constant monitoring.
Chatbots also use machine learning, so your integrated AI system will continue to learn and respond in greater detail to more queries the longer you have it in place! You can place Chatbots on your website, Facebook page or customer service portal.
Further Dominance of Video Ads
Whether it’s education, entertainment, or anything in between, organisations have caught onto the fact that high-quality video content is an incredibly efficient method of engaging online users. Organisations are using video-based marketing to increase conversion rates by sustaining customer engagement over a more prolonged period of time than images or written content alone.
In part, this is a knock-on effect from the rise of social media over the last decade as visual media is rapidly becoming the primary touchpoint for many companies. From Facebook pages to news articles, online written content is now nearly always accompanied by a video that summarises what we’re being told.
This dominance of Video Advertising also signals a shift in attention – as people are turning away from heavy amounts of written content and instead consuming bursts of short content through their phone screens on what is physically a much smaller scale.
The success of social media giants Tik Tok and Instagram has proven how popular video-based content is, particularly to young people. The rise of influencer culture has brought in its wake a new marketing trend: personality-based marketing. The meteoric rise of influencer endorsements via Instagram and YouTube shows how effective informal, video-based marketing can be in reaching out to consumers.
Further Development of Voice Search
From Siri to Alexa, the emergence of AI has been quickly integrated into our day to day lives. Voice recognition technology when combined with AI means that a wealth of information isn’t only available at our fingertips, it’s coming straight into our kitchens and living rooms.
The rapid ascent of voice search does however bring up some issues: primarily the future of SEO. As SEO relies upon users entering a search engine and evaluating the results, voice search threatens to cut out this phase entirely and deliver vocal results directly to consumers.
The ability to make purchase decisions through as little as two vocal commands is a logistical triumph for companies such as Amazon, but the rise of zero-click results means that SEO may need to adapt in order to survive. But what does this mean for the future of digital marketing?
In terms of SEO, the rise of voice search has resulted in more long-form searches in search engines – as more conversational terms and queries are changing the face of SEO as keywords and phrases have become longer.
Voice assistants such as Google Assist are also now answering vocal queries by pulling search results from featured sites, making them a priority to attain. With an increasing amount of searches becoming voice initiated, optimising your site for vocal search and beginning to implement a voice search strategy are definitely things to consider in the new year. Thankfully, optimising your site for voice search follows the same fundamentals as traditional SEO optimisation, making it viable for small and large businesses alike.
The Death of SEO?
Bad news for SEO fans – this trend signals another hurdle that SEO may have to try and overcome. Unless you’re in the 19% of people using Bing or Yahoo, we are all at the mercy of Google. And as Google has begun to internally dominate search results and continue to improve their algorithms, SEO is becoming a far more refined practice, hence many people ominously calling this transition ‘The Death of SEO’.
Long gone are the days of saturating keywords into every nook and cranny of a webpage – Google now provides results based on user intent, previous webpage history and natural language patterns. SEO becoming increasingly more personal makes keyword search a little more complicated, to say the least. And as Google pushes its organic listings further and further down its front page, the less clicks our organic search results are going to receive.
Want Some Guidance Going into 2020?
If you want a hand with your creative campaigns or marketing, or you’d just like to have a chat, please get in touch! We’d love to hear from you.
The post 5 Digital Marketing Trends to Look Out For in 2020 appeared first on Knapton Wright.