For the past decade or so, 2020 has been the benchmark year used in whitepapers, blogs, and magazine articles to represent a new era in marketing. Now that 2020 has arrived, many of the predictions made over the past decade have come true.
Mobile devices have become the dominant player across all platforms. AI-assisted marketing has become widespread across the entire marketing industry. Social marketing has experienced a massive surge in popularity (with traditional marketing/advertising platforms becoming less and less relevant).
It’s certainly an exciting time to be a digital marketer, but how can you capitalize on all of these industry changes? Below we cover five marketing strategies for 2020 that will help you increase conversions, maximize your reach, and make this decade one of your best yet.
Focus on the Customer
Whether you’re in B2B or B2C, 2020 is poised to be the year where the customer is more important than ever. There has been a shift brewing over the past decade (especially the past few years), where marketers are changing their attitudes towards customers.
The focus isn’t on conversions anymore (at least, not entirely). Rather, marketers are now focusing on how to deliver positive customer experiences. The point behind this shift is simple: happy customers lead to more sales (or conversions, new clients, contracts, etc.). Gary Vaynerchuck (CEO of VaynerMedia) is a vanguard in the area of customer experience.
Gary’s brand of digital marketing focuses more on delivering value to the customer, rather than trying to extract value from them. Think “the customer is always right” – just at a much higher level. Use the following tips to enhance your brand’s customer experience (CX) this year:
- Make your brand’s services convenient to the customer.
- Ensure that each customer receives the highest level service possible.
- Your online services need to have easy, seamless payment methods.
- Focus on providing an intuitive mobile experience.
- Incorporate CX principles into every aspect of your brand.
Visual Content is Essential
Digital content has evolved from being primarily blogs and articles, to encompassing nearly every single form of media in existence (i.e. video, audio, image, etc.). If your brand isn’t focused on creating visual content, it’s missing out on a massive opportunity to build leverage with its target audience.
There’s a reason why the most popular social media platforms are visual-based. Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok all employ visual forms of media (as opposed to Twitter which is mostly written communication). Obviously, your brand should already be on all three of those visual platforms (and if you’re not on them, you need to make accounts/start posting immediately).
Visual content isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. In order for your brand to take its marketing to the next level, you need to be putting out high-quality visual content daily (across all major platforms). Ideally, you should be doing this several times per day (per platform).
Personalizing Your Brand’s CX
Personalization has been a trend for the past few years, and it will continue to grow (to the point where nearly every brand will employ some form of it down the line). 2020 is the start of a new era though, and this means that the personalization strategies of yesteryear will no longer be relevant.
Hyper-personalization is the new buzzword in AI-based marketing circles. Developments in AI technology (and data analytics) have allowed us to move beyond inserting a customer’s name into an email blast. We’re at the point now where our online (and real-world) behavior can be predicted (and utilized via marketing), and make no mistake about it – big brands (with bigger budgets) are already doing this.
Redeveloping Your Marketing Strategy
Marketing has always been more complicated than it seems, and it’s easy to try and reduce your strategy down to a few tactics. However, in order to have a truly successful digital marketing strategy in 2020, marketers need to align their goals with the ideals of the brand(s) they’re working for.
Strategically, your marketing plan needs to coincide directly with the goals of your company. This doesn’t mean focusing on increasing sales. That should go without saying. What this means is making sure that your marketing strategy and your brand’s vision share a symbiotic relationship with one another.
This doesn’t mean that your tactics should fall to the wayside though. Now more than ever, you need to have clearly defined tactical goals (and know exactly how to achieve them). Customer experience, analytics, digital marketing tactics, and your brand’s identity all need to align with each other. This is the essence of strategic marketing.
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