Digital Marketing Trends in 2020 You Can't Ignore!

Digital marketing is the act of promoting and selling products and services by leveraging online marketing tactics such as Social media marketing, Search marketing, and Email marketing. When you get down to it, digital marketing is simply marketing.

It's how today's businesses are getting their message in front of their best prospects and customers.

Rule #1 in marketing is to make the right offer at the right time and in the right place. Today, your customers are online: hanging out in social media, staying updated on news sites and blogs, and searching online when they have a need.

Digital marketing puts you in those same channels, so your best prospects can see you, learn more about you, and even ask questions to learn more about you and your products or services. If you're new to digital marketing, it may feel overwhelming to think about mastering all the online marketing tactics used in digital marketing.

Let's take a closer look at the latest digital trend.

At one time, Artificial Intelligence, Data-Driven Marketing and Voice Search Engine Optimization (VSEO) were ambitious concepts bordering on the ridiculous. Today, these innovative digital marketing trends are among the top priorities for most business owners in 2020.

“Each business is a victim of Digital Darwinism, the evolution of consumer behavior when society and technology evolve faster than the ability to exploit it. Digital Darwinism does not discriminate. Every business is threatened.” - Brian Solis

Make no mistake: We live in a time when marketing technology moves fast and consumer interests and behaviours are hard to predict. Marketers can no longer stick their heads in the sand and hope that educated guesses and the same old methods will work forever.

1) Artificial Intelligence

If you haven’t already realized it, 2020 may be the year that a lot of people wake up to the dominance of artificial intelligence (AI). It’s sure to be at the heart of global business and industry in the future – and it’s already taking over many simple jobs.

AI can analyze consumer behaviour and search patterns, and use data from social media platforms and blog posts to help businesses understand how customers find their products and services.

One exciting example of AI in practice is chat-bots (more on that later). MasterCard created a Facebook messenger bot – which uses natural language processing software to decipher what the customer wants and respond as if it were a real person – to automate handling payments:

2) Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising means using AI to automate ad buying so you can target more specific audiences. Real-time bidding, for example, is a type of programmatic ad buying. This automation is much more efficient and fast, which means higher conversions and lower customer acquisition costs.

It’s changing the face of digital advertising so swiftly that, according to E-Marketer, 86.2% of digital display ads in the U.S. will be programmatic by 2020.

“Most search-driven manual advertising campaigns (even those performed with professional tools) take into account three or four targets: the keyword, time of day, and location. Such tools like programmatic demand-side platforms can use hundreds of targeting signals to individualize the advertisement and even target according to lifestyle or behaviour habits when integrated with customer data platforms.”

3) Video Marketing

Video marketing is one of, if not the, most important marketing trend today and likely for the next 5-10 years. These numbers show the importance of incorporating video into your digital marketing strategy in 2020:

• 70% of consumers say that they have shared a brand’s video
• 72% of businesses say that video has improved their conversion rate
• 52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions
• 65% of executives visit the marketer’s website and 39% call a vendor after viewing a video

4) Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a type of word-of-mouth marketing that focuses on using key leaders to amplify your brand message to a larger market. Influencers can be well-known celebrities, but more often they are Instagram or YouTube personalities with a huge niche following who can help spread the word about your business or product through their social channels.

Because Influencer marketing is generally more authentic than corporate advertising:

• 63% of consumers trust influencers’ opinions of products much more than what brands say about themselves
• 58% of people have bought a new product in the past six months because of an influencer’s recommendation

For this reason, Iceland, a popular British supermarket chain, switched from ads with celebrities to a campaign that features real-life moms. Teaming up with YouTube community Channel Mum, it now works with a number of vloggers to promote its products in a more “authentic” fashion. And research shows that 35% of moms trust online videos like the one below more than traditional ads:

5) Voice Search & Smart Speakers

The increasing use of voice search has made it important for companies to rethink their digital marketing strategies in 2020. Consider these numbers:

• 50% of all searches will be via voice by 2020
• 55% of all American homes will own a smart speaker by 2022
• 72% of people who own voice-activated speakers say that their devices are used as part of their daily routine
• Voice shopping is set to jump to $40 billion in 2022, up from $2 billion today

Global smart speaker shipments have almost trebled between Q1 2018 and Q2 2019, growing from 9.36 million units to 26.1 million units.

6) Google Ads Smart Bidding

With intense competition on social media slowly suffocating organic reach, paid advertising will become a more trusted force in 2020. And when you consider the Smart Bidding feature on Google Ads, you’d be a fool not to give it a try.

Google explains that with Smart Bidding:

“Machine learning algorithms train on data at a vast scale to help you make more accurate predictions across your account about how different bid amounts might impact conversions or conversion value.”

In other words, advertisers can hand the reins of their pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to Google’s AI system, which will then optimize their budget to maximize their ROI.

7) IoT Advertising

Never mind our mobile devices and laptops – from smart cars to household appliances to wearable tech, the Internet of Things (IoT) is getting more and more connected:

As per Quantic Mind:

“These days, it’s expected that connected devices and technologies will unobtrusively, and sometimes stealthily, collect data on our vital functions, what we do, where we go, what we share, what we believe, what we buy, who we know, how we move and even what we eat.”

Which means, of course, that brands and marketers want to use (or are already using) this data for their own business and advertising purposes. For example:

• Johnnie Walker has a Blue Label bottle with built-in electronic sensors that can tell if the bottle has been opened and where it is in the supply chain.
• Malibu, another drinks company, takes it a step further, using their “connected” bottles as a digital touchpoint to promote exclusive content.

And as 5G technology matures, more IoT devices will present more on-demand content for consumers and more advertising opportunities for marketers.

As John F. Kennedy once said: 

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”

For anyone in digital marketing, change is an integral part of the job. One must keep looking ahead and strive to embrace new technologies, tools and strategies in order to gain an edge over your competitors.