Greatest Trends in Digital Marketing to Expect in 2020

In this sponsored guest post, Dainan Gilmore shares his predictions for digital marketing in 2020.


This post is sponsored by Ivacy VPN.

The list of digital marketing trends is just limitless. Taking into account all the modern technological advancements, digital marketing has great potential for development. Let’s talk about what will happen to internet marketers in the nearest future.

1. Short Videos

Due to the huge amount of video content, a modern user gets bored quickly and is searching for something interesting and short – something that takes less time to read, watch, or listen. That is why short videos are a key solution to this problem. According to the statistics, almost 90% of users spend no more than 10 seconds watching ads, and more than half of users get bored after a minute of viewing a video. That is why it makes sense to shoot videos no longer than 10 seconds.

2. Chatbots

Chatbots are expected to conquer the digital marketing industry; by 2020, more than 80% of all business interactions with customers will be managed by chatbots. They will help to order takeaway, choose clothes, book tickets, and advise customers. What can explain such a trend? Using chatbots enables businesses to provide support around the clock, seven days a week. This leads not only to customer satisfaction increase but also to a response rating, which will favourably affect brand promotion. Even if you hide your IP address with something like Ivacy VPN, chatbots will still be able to reply to you in a matter of seconds.

3. Transparency and Honesty

For many years, there was a negative attitude toward marketing: marketers were considered liars because of their false promises and unethical ways of business promotion. However, it is not a case today. If earlier it was possible to attract the attention of customers by making exaggerations, promotions, discounts, this approach to advertising has changed dramatically. Thus, companies apply a policy of full transparency: they openly talk about their products and services. They encourage the exchange of opinions in order to build stronger relationships with customers and raise loyalty in them.

4. Voice Search Options

By 2020, around 40% of all searches made on the Internet will be carried out by voice commands. So if you were to run a successful company, you need to adjust your business to the new trends. With the popularity of voice search options in mind, brands are looking for ways to develop supporting applications similar to Siri, Google Assistant, and Bixby.

Voice queries are formulated more freely and have no restrictions compared to typed ones since their average length is about two times longer. In the nearest future, marketing tools will be a part of voice services: there will be a multitude of applications for voice shopping, ordering food and receiving the .

5. Video Marketing

Video marketing will be the main leader in the online marketing industry in 2019, with almost 80% of online content being visualised and integrated into videos. Due to a variety of video formats, it is easy to adapt content to almost any audience. Video content allows for reducing the distance between the business brand and clients, and most importantly – it meets the customer’s need for accuracy and authenticity.

What is more, video materials provide the opportunity not only to demonstrate the product but also to entertain the user. What’s important here is to define your target audience and adjust your video content to their needs.

6. Content Is a King

Two years ago, Nielsen published the results of a survey that proved that most people trust:

  • people they know;
  • official brand sites;

In 2018, the importance of content for online marketing was just obvious. No surprise that people will trust content in 2020, which will push ordinary advertising aside. The more interesting and informative the content is, the higher the chance that users will choose you.

Here are some interesting facts supporting the claim:

  • constant work with content improvement/ optimisation increases traffic by five times;
  • 80% of customer prefer high-quality content to other solutions;
  • 85% of marketers attribute their success to working with content;
  • visual content will gradually become more relevant than blogs and articles.

7. Real-Time Bidding

Real-time bidding is a solution you should not neglect. Auction advertising purchase will continue to develop in 2019 and 2020. By five years, the market will grow threefold to $90 billion. Working in this way, marketers will use data and technology to control advertising decisions and make sure that customers make the right choice.

8. Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence, whose main feature is its ability to learn as it works on a multitude of similar tasks. The best thing about artificial intelligence is that decisions made by AI require minimal human intervention.

According to Forbes, about 84% of marketing firms have introduced or are introducing artificial intelligence into their work. What is more, 75% of organisations that use machine learning noted a 10% increase in user satisfaction. This trend offers great opportunities for marketers, making it easier for them to measure ROI and reaching more accurate numbers.

With this tool, companies will be able to better respond to their audience and effectively solve marketing problems. AI will gradually take on time-consuming tasks: analysis of advertising campaigns, bidding, selection of keywords, etc.

Artificial intelligence will help you work with data from the CMS and make decisions in real-time. The only thing the marketer will need to do is to monitor the work. In other words, the use of artificial intelligence can significantly increase the effectiveness of campaigns and help marketers achieve goals faster.

9. Native Advertising

Being a competitor of sponsored advertising, native advertising is aimed at naturally merging with the content without being considered an ad. Remember the ad units that Google is promoting placed on the same page as the search results. Exactly the same approach to advertising is followed by many social networks.

The modern audience wants any information to be useful. The same applies to the advertisement. and it is native advertising which is expected to be the best solution to this description. The advantage of this tool is that it gives you a solution to annoying ads and provides valuable information to your potential customer.

10. Audio Content for Greater Coverage

Another way to smoothly integrate the brand into the lives of users is the expansion and development of audio content. A recent survey shows that 65% of those using smart speakers love using their voice-driven assistants, which means that the number of such people will increase dramatically.

For the same reasons, to encourage people to use voice commands and messages, people are looking for content in the most accessible and convenient ways. For those who want to learn something useful on the bus and without putting some super efforts at the same time, audio content is the most convenient option. Once you are comfortable, you will realise that you have one of the most effective marketing tools in your hands.

How can this be used in internet marketing? Since more and more online media is publishing audio content for smart speaker users, audio content is quite possible to use as a part of business content strategy. It is simple enough to make audio recordings in a blog format once a week and thus extend your audience. You will perhaps like audio content so much that you will be working on a separate and regular podcast, where you will share many materials.

What Does It All Mean to You?

The marketing industry is growing fast. It is incredibly dynamic as it is being forced to meet the expectations and desires of modern consumers. High rates and constant customer attention depend on advertising and marketing strategies. By 2020, these should acquire a new look since the online behaviour of users has changed significantly. Technology does not stand still, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage. But if we look into the future of digital marketing, we will see that new developments in this area will not only simplify working with tools but will also bring significant benefits to companies.

Understanding of future trends and their skilful implementation make digital marketing a major tool for brand promotion and business success. No matter if you are a marketer or a business owner, sticking to the leading digital marketing trends is definitely a go-to solution. Thus, you will raise your competitive bar, raise your customer loyalty, and boost your sales significantly.

About the Author

Dainan Gilmore is an enthusiastic expert in cybersecurity and works as a data privacy advisor for bestvpnrating.com.