Digital strategies are all about innovating and improving existing tactics.
When a trend is adopted by the masses, it eventually stops helping marketers stand out – forcing them to move on to other avenues to outpace the competition.
Take long-form content, for example. Over the past few years, it was hailed as one of the keys to content marketing and SEO success.
However, now that almost everyone is producing long-form content, these assets alone won’t help you rank.
Therefore, it’s important to innovate and improve upon existing trends and strategies.
The 5 Potentially Powerful Digital Marketing Trends for 2020
From web design trends to the incorporation of “micro-moments”, 2019 has seen many changes in the realm of digital marketing.
Looking beyond 2019, here are 5 potential digital marketing trends of 2020 that may change the game as we know it, forever.
The War Against Search Engine Monopolies
With 63,000+ Google searches per second resulting in massive potential for traffic, websites need to abide by search engine rules or accept the consequences.
However, that could all change.
Genius, a company that uploads song lyrics, found out in 2016 that Google was copying lyrics from their website and displaying them on knowledge panels – without attributing Genius as the source.
After being consistently ignored by Google, Genius came up with a (genius) solution to catch them in the act:
They began watermarking Morse code in curled and straight quotation marks that spelled “Red Handed,” in their lyrics.
As phenomenal as that was, it didn’t do much in terms of getting a reaction out of Google.
That is, until June 2019, when The Wall Street Journal published an article shedding light on the situation.
In response, Google blamed anonymous licensing partners and vowed to attribute the actual sources of lyrics in the future.
However, by this time, they had already faced a lot of backlash as industry leaders (such as Rand Fishkin and Barry Schwartz) sided with Genius.
Realistically, content creators themselves have little influence against search giants, so publications will play a crucial role moving forward.
Could such incidents put an end to search engine monopolies?
This may entail:
Mobile OS Optimization
Due to Google recently prioritizing mobile-first indexing, marketers now have to emphasize more on making their content mobile-friendly across both iOS and Android.
However, considering a recent political scandal involving a major tech player, a new mobile OS is expected to hit the market.
This may entail:
10X Growth & Relationships with Community Building
AR & VR Marketing
Companies such as AMC Theaters are already leveraging AR and VR marketing.
By 2020, even more brands are expected to jump on the bandwagon.
In order to keep up ecommerce businesses will have to create interactive shopping channels, further optimize user experience, and add new levels of personalization to the customer journey.
If this trend finally kicks off and the VR and AR technologies become the norm, it could usher a new era of consumer marketing.
And of course if businesses are to leverage this technology they will need need to optimize their content and funnel for AR and VR devices.
This may entail:
Greater Emphasis on Psychological Variables
Understanding your consumer’s psychological drivers will help you optimize your marketing campaigns.
Platforms such as Facebook have been offering demographic and ad copy A/B tests for some time now (allowing marketers to run experiments on the fly).
This lets them:
Smart marketers go one step further and layer in analytics tools (such as heat maps) to better understand audience behavior for visitors on their website.
With platforms accessing this website data, algorithms have a better understanding of user intent with every update. This may force psychological variables to become the norm in 2020.
Here are the implications for marketers:
Starlink to Give Rise to Untapped Markets
SpaceX’s satellite constellation, Starlink, is set to provide fast and affordable internet connectivity worldwide – giving rise to billions of new internet users.
In May 2019, the first 60 of 12,000 satellites were launched into orbit.
Needless to say, Starlink has been a hot topic in the global science community, but the general public doesn’t realize its true magnitude.
Here are the implications for digital marketers if all goes to plan:
What It All Means
With such momentous potential changes over the horizon, digital marketers should begin considering how they can build upon current strategies to align with future possibilities.
For starters, here are a few quick ideas:
By conceptualizing and executing plans based on tomorrow’s landscape – today – we can capitalize on the entire life cycle of a digital marketing trend.
What other digital marketing trends can you think of that will have a noticeable impact on 2020? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Image credit: Shutterstock
Zee is Chief Executive Officer at Xoobo, a digital marketing agency that is on the bleeding edge of the industry.
Ratcheting up what it means to be a marketing agency in today’s age, Xoobo’s goal is to bring clarity to the digital marketing space, empower businesses with… View full profile ›