The Changing Face of Digital Marketing in 2020.

Brands and consumers are connecting differently. Society is so switched on and online, and the way we search for what we want has changed.

Running his own tech and marketing business over the last decade,” digital media consultant Dave Walter has seen changes to the way consumers search for his clients.

“With new devices like Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa, voice search on our smartphones, and navigation in our cars, how we find what we want is dramatically different to say 5 years ago Dave tells us.

The client needs to focus on finding where their audience is ‘hanging out’ in their spare time, what they watch and buy, and where they spend their time online.

Fortunately, the digital space is flooded with the use of cookies, statistics and surveys. We can get a good indication of our audience from social media interaction, local census and survey data, as well as through our website visits and enquiries.

“Knowing our audience is the first step in a successful marketing campaign!” he says, as he points towards the audience insights tool on Facebook business manager.

“Know where your customers are looking, and you can work on making your brand show up there.” he adds.

In a recent update to its search algorithm, search engine giant Google has explained how it is now focused on what it calls search intent, using a new system named Bert.

Google’s neural network-based technique for NLP (natural language processing) pre-training, BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. *

The system or process of better understanding what is typed or entered into the search bar is search intent. This is what Google is trying to successfully manage better by understanding the whole search query, and not just singular words.

As we know, adding a word before or after another word in a sentence or question can totally change its meaning or intent. With the growth of voice search and search phrases rather than single keywords, you can understand the change to the way Google’s search engine operates.

Bearing this in mind and remembering that the world’s most popular search engines are Google and YouTube, the way brands get found needs to be watched by business owners, and they need to adapt to these changes.

“Get listed in every relevant directory listing, and make sure you are active on Google’s Business and Map environments” Dave says, “and don’t forget that your social content can play a big part in getting noticed online.”

Search engine results often include a mix of web and social content, video and images, news articles, podcast episodes, shop products and more.

Google Search accounts for over 87% of the global search market, compared to Bing Search at just over 5%. **

Dave advises his clients to have an open mind when creating their next marketing campaigns. “Consider a mix of search and social content, as well as traditional billboards, signage and in store material, and make sure you are everywhere on Google.”

When he says everywhere, Dave is referring to the different ways businesses and brands can show up on the search engine giant.

Mobile and desktop searches are both handled differently, and the search results page consists of a mix of paid and organic content.

Depending on what your business sells or shares will decide on where you need to be to get found on Google search.

In his podcast, The DriveSocial Podcast, Dave mentions the way search has changed and how brands can attract consumers in different ways in 2020.

The next few years will be interesting as we see trends of augmented reality, social filters and video content taken to the next level. Will there be new ways to search? Will there be new platforms that challenge the likes of Facebook and Google? Time will certainly tell.

About Dave Walter and DriveSocial:

Dave Walter is the owner and founder of DriveSocial, an Australian based marketing business focused on helping clients make better use of digital resources.

Footnotes * Published on Searchengineland.com. Welcome BERT: Google’s latest search algorithm to better understand natural language. ** Data from Statista. October 2019 figures. Global market share of search engines 2010-2019. Published on December 3rd, 2019 by J. Clement.