Bharat Subramaniam, Managing Director, Big Trunk Communications, talks about the latest digital marketing trends in 2020. He also discusses about how mobile marketing will significantly align digital marketing efforts with performance and business growth.
“Digital”
is increasingly becoming the most potent weapon in a CMOs arsenal. With highly
curated and customized content outreach, digital marketing has empowered brands
to transform customer engagement, and drive performance. We have been intently
listening to the best minds in the industry on digital marketing to understand
agents of this transformational change.
Mobile
Marketing Will Drive “Growth”: CMOs across businesses are
increasingly relying on digital marketing to transition from brand awareness to
performance marketing. While they admit the importance of brand awareness, they
are keen on enhancing performance, increasing revenue per user, and connecting
the cohort/ community of their users or services through engaged brand
communities. Mobile marketing, in-app engagement and notifications and the user
engagement data captured thereof, will enable micro-segmentation and superior
targeting. Mobile marketing will be the vital cog that will significantly align
digital marketing efforts with performance and business growth.
CMOs will
increasingly drive budgets towards engaging audience across mobile apps to
create a native and immersive experience which grabs the complete attention of
the customer and induces desired call-to-action successfully. 360-degree
marketing agencies should build expertise and execution capabilities in mobile
marketing to leverage this trend.
OTT
Platforms will challenge the duopoly in digital advertising: People
are always in search of good content. Digital content and Video consumption, complemented
by internet penetration and broadband access, is on the rise. There will be
around 225 million viewers of videos on smartphones by 2022 in India which is a
steep rise from the 2018 figures which stood at just a little over 100 million.
Video streaming sites such as Hotstar drive very relevant traffic for targeted
users such as cricket enthusiasts during IPL. As per a recent KPMG report, 15%
of the advertising monies in India will flow into OTT platforms. What else is
breaking this duopoly? Well, its e-commerce sites like Amazon. In the US, it is
catering to nearly 4.6% of all digital advertisement spends. In India too,
Amazon is reshaping customer behaviour. Consumers are directly searching Amazon
for the products and Google is losing search volumes to Amazon. Will it lead to
Advertising dollars being spent on e-commerce sites?
Micro-Moments
Marketing will enable market share expansion: The
smartphone is the first port-of-call for information, peer reviews and
purchase. The genesis of a purchase decision at the smartphone screen is a
common occurrence today. Micro-moments are those few important seconds or
minutes when you have the attention and buying intent of the audience. It is
worth leveraging these moments to gain in business and increase market share.
More than 90% of the audience is not committed to a brand while searching for
information online. There is ample research to prove that more than 34% of the
consumers have bought the product or service of a brand they initially did not
intend to buy. Micro-moments are also important because people discover new
brands in such moments.
Marketers
will try to increasingly move their bucks to tap into these micro-moments for
the above-mentioned reasons. Digital marketing agencies who have done quality
work in capturing micro-moments and translating the attention of consumers into
business will have a definite edge.
I think
2020 will mark the beginning of a tectonic shift punctuated by the following:
In
conclusion, should we safely assume that “Content is still the King”?
It’s a
little deeper than just that.
While
Content will remain the King, it will be presented like a Rockstar who might
just blow you away with the contextual experience.
This will
happen through new-age mobile innovation techniques wherein content syndication
will be taken to the next level. Brand stories will become part of the
narrative as against just an irrelevant ad banner popping up because a brand
could buy media. This will create immersive and highly curated experiences and the
resulting brand stories will be well etched in the customer’s minds to create
the desired influence and call to action.
Now,
extend this to the oldest mediums in marketing such as Billboards and it marks
the genesis of Digital-Out-of-Home advertisements. This will lead to a
complete transformation of traditional hoardings. And, with programmatic
advertising coming in, we will see the era of contextual advertisements being
served on hoardings based on the footfalls, time of day and multiple other
parameters.
The
Digital Frenemies: Technology and Marketing:
The power
of data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will create the most
immersive customer engagement that has ever been made possible. Progressive web
apps, chatbots, etc. will completely transform customer interactions and
conversations. When marketing and technology collaborate in an unprecedented
manner, interfaces will transform into experiences (Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality).
We are
stepping into an exciting decade which will be an era of experiences backed by
in-depth knowledge about the customer. Personalized and highly relevant
experiences will become the new normal. The brands that adapt to this new
normal will shine. What’s more, they will definitely outshine the competition.