How to Figure Out What the Best Marketing Trends Will Be in 2020

 If you’re like me, you’ve probably read tons of articles about new 2020 marketing trends, or new social media trends and practices. Every year, the same thing happens. Every blog talks about what’s going to happen in the next year(s). And sometimes, they’ll even try to predict what will happen in the next decade.

But if you’re also like me, chances are that you are not really finding anything new in any of these articles. Video marketing? Yes, it’s been around for a while. YouTube? Same thing. Vocal search for SEO? That’s definitely not a new trend.

It just seems like all these blogs are saying the same thing over and over again. They’re taking what works now, and they assume that it’ll still work for the years to come.

And that’s valid, how are they supposed to know how things will work next year anyway?

On top of that, most of these blogs seem to be copying each other. They all have pretty much the same content, but packaged in different formats and slightly different approaches.

How Do You Actually Find the New Marketing Trends of 2020?

If you are just reading articles, you may not find what the trends are going to be.

In fact, if you are just consuming blogs and content in general, you may be just reading a slightly edited version of an already existing article published somewhere else. Because that’s what people creating content do: they take successful articles and re-write them without changing the content too much.

So what if all these trends come from the duplication of a misinformed article that was just popular and ranking well on Google? How trustworthy is the information that you can find online?

The key here is to change your attitude towards the problem. Do you want to know what the marketing trends are? Then start figuring them out instead of believing that some sort of marketing expert will give them to you through a blog post, YouTube video, or podcast.

But how can you do that? You can’t predict what will happen, right? Well, they can’t either, yet you seem to trust them a lot more than you trust yourself!

Marketing Is Just About Knowing Where the Attention Is

Marketing is not an obscure science. It’s not as twisted as people tend to think it is. Your job as a marketer is not to manipulate people into buying your junk. Instead, you need to identify who would benefit from your product and find a way to let these people know that your product exists.

So here is how to know what the trends will be: be aware of what people direct their attention to. It is this simple.

With an average of 4 hours and 44 minutes of screen time for American 8-to-12-year-olds and more than 7 hours for teens, it’s no wonder why marketers would spend more time, money and energy advertising on YouTube through paid video ads than in magazines if they are trying to advertise a product to these audiences.

As Gary Vaynerchuk recently stated, companies would spend five million dollars on a Super Bowl ad, and people wouldn’t see it because they would spend the ad break scrolling on their phones.

Again, your job as a marketer is knowing where the attention is.

Don’t blindly listen to what people are saying. Some of them are just trying to trick you into buying their courses, or their product.

You may have been reading that blogging was dead. Yet, you are reading this article.

It’s Easier to Consume Than to Think

Figuring out where the attention is is not only interesting on a marketing level, it’s also interesting on a personal level. It challenges you to think, and to pay attention to people’s behavior.

This thinking process is critical as a professional, as most people would just read countless articles about the newest trends, trusting whoever wrote them, without even opening their eyes and looking at what the world is paying attention to.

Sure, reading articles is easy, and it’s comforting. It may even make you feel productive.

But take a step back — can’t you figure out these things yourself? Wouldn’t it be more relevant?

Give it a try. Pay attention to your surroundings, think for yourself, and stop consuming other people’s content for a second. And always try to remember: what are these marketers trying to sell you with these articles?

Get out of the consumption circle and start thinking like a marketer: you want to target an audience, how can you do that? Where are they already? Where will they be going?

It would be totally inappropriate to encourage you to follow me after reading this article. It would be totally weird for me to ask you to follow me and listen to me after saying that you should think for yourself and stop trusting these marketers.

But I have to say that I am trying my best to help you get a new perspective about marketing through my content.

I’m not here to tell you what to think, nor what is right or wrong. I’m humbly trying to share with you my thoughts, ideas, and framework so that you can achieve more as a marketer. I really hope that this article helped you with that. You’re more than welcome to follow me if you want to deeply change the way you approach marketing, but I’d understand if you decided not to.