Top 15 Digital Marketing Trends You Can't Ignore in 2020

The digital marketing landscape is constantly changing. To help you stay ahead of the curve, below we outline the 15 best digital marketing trends 2020.

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 eMarketer, 86.2% of digital display ads in the U.S. will be programmatic by 2020.

Shoppable posts (social commerce)

For the longest time, businesses were wondering how to get their social media followers to visit their online stores. Now, they no longer need to.

Social commerce refers to buying products directly through social media posts or ads—you don’t need to leave the site or app. These shoppable social media posts aren’t exactly new per se, but since Instagram Checkout launched in 2019, they’re rapidly getting more and more attention.

And why not? Shoppable social media posts just make sense. At least 54% of people on social media use it to research product purchases. The goal is to create fewer steps for your shoppers, not more, so selling directly on social media decreases the chances of sales abandonment.

Chatbots

Chatbots will continue to be an important part of digital marketing in 2020. This AI-based technology uses instant messaging to chat in real-time, day or night, with your customers or site visitors.

Surveys show that:

• Chatbots will power 85% of customer service by 2020
• Top benefits of chatbots are 24-hour service (64%), instant responses to inquiries (55%), and answers to simple questions (55%)
• 63% of respondents prefer messaging an online chatbot to communicate with a business or brand
• By 2022, chatbots will help businesses save over $8 billion per annum
• 80% of businesses want chatbots by 2020.

Direct messaging

In a bid to get more personal with customers, brands are taking the conversation to DMs. As a means of streamlining customer service and assisting in sales, direct messaging is becoming one of the hottest digital marketing trends of 2020.

Through messaging apps like WhatsApp, Viber, and Facebook Messenger, or through private messages on social media like Twitter or Instagram, brands are building stronger connections with their customers. These forums offer the convenience of text with the immediacy of a phone conversation, all in an environment the user is already familiar with from talking with friends.

Brands find DMing customers to be effective for forging relationships, whether addressing complaints, taking sales orders, or even just goofing around. The big stipulation here is the customer agreeing to it—a customer DMing you first is worlds apart from you DMing them first.

Personalization

If you want to stand out in 2020, you need to personalize your marketing – and that means personalized content, products, emails and more.

Consider these personalization stats:

• 63% of consumers are highly annoyed with generic advertising blasts
• 80% say they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences
• 90% claim they find personalization appealing

Kevin George from EmailMonks asserts that “personalized, triggered emails based on behavior are 3x better than batch-and-blast emails.”

Micro-influencers

Influencer marketing has been a digital marketing trend for a few years now. It’s been so successful, though, that big-time influencers are now calling the shots. It’s not enough to send them a free sample in hopes they’ll review it—there are payment tables and pricing lists. Social media “influence” is now a commodity and an expensive one at that.

Rather than competing with global enterprises for the top-tier influencers, small- and medium-sized businesses are opting instead to work with small- and medium-sized influencers.

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:

1. 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

And don’t just think YouTube. There are plenty of ways to drive higher engagement with your video marketing, as you can make a video post or start a live broadcast on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn.

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 routines
• 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.

Voice search plays an important role in providing all the relevant information that people are searching for through audio content. AI is getting smarter and the number of errors made by voice assistants like Alexa, Siri and Google have reduced greatly.

Social Media Stories

First, Snapchat came out with the concept of “My Story,” then Instagram and Facebook stories were introduced, and then YouTube unveiled their own story format: Reels.

Since these types of stories disappear after a set period of time, this is a great opportunity for marketers to make good use of FOMO (fear of missing out).

The benefits of using social media stories include:

• Increased brand awareness
• Constant engagement with followers
• Cost-effectiveness
• Increased traffic to your web page
• Opportunity to reach younger audiences
• Get inspired by some of these ways to use social media stories:
• Use polls within Instagram Stories
• Add links to your social media Stories
• Take advantage of Snapchat geofilters
• Add location tags
• Add mentions for other brands and your fans
• Give the live video a try when creating Stories
• Invite followers to explore more with clear call-to-actions

Browser Push Notifications

Push notifications are on the rise, with 85% of online stores using them in 2019. Consider these other stats:

At least twice as many people sign up for web push notifications compared to a newsletter.

Only 10% of the best email marketers can achieve a newsletter sign-up rate that matches the performance of the web push.

6.4 hours is the average time that passes before the recipient opens a newsletter. In the case of a web push, the recipient will see the message immediately.

The updates to the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) and stricter filters have dented the potency of email marketing. Moreover, the younger audience favors other methods of communication and prefers to deal with fewer touchpoints when engaging brands.

Sentiment analysis

Most of the human communication is trying to figure out what the heck each other is thinking. And while hundreds of thousands of years of biological advancement haven’t aided us much in understanding each other, after just a few years of machine-learning technology and we’re already making progress.

Sentiment analysis, or social listening, is the practice of analyzing the reactions of users and customers to a product or service, typically on social media or other places online. Online reviews and posts aren’t always a black-and-white “I like/dislike this.” There’s a big gray area with varying degrees in between. Maybe a user likes the product on a whole but one particular feature gets in the way. Maybe the product is fine just not what they were expecting.

Content Marketing Continues to Dominate SEO

In November 2019, Google rolled out some major updates to its search algorithm. The updates included the new BERT system, which is designed to aid Google in its efforts to understand the natural language that people use in their search queries.

The advice from Google’s John Mueller is that “rather than chase the latest SEO trends, it’s more important to ensure a site has fast speeds, useful links, and well-written content.”

Stats from the Content Marketing Institute:

• Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing and generates 3x as many leads.
• Content marketing has lower up-front costs and deeper long-term benefits than paid search.
• 615 million devices now use ad blockers, which means your ads are not being seen by as many people.
• Small businesses with blogs generate 126% more leads than those without blogs.
• Content marketing rakes in conversion rates 6x higher than other methods.

Interactive Content

Speaking of instant access, that brings us to one of the fastest-growing digital marketing trends in recent times: interactive content.

In 2020, we’re destined to see a shift from traditional text-based content toward dynamic, engaging content that offers users an immersive experience. For example, think about:

• Quizzes and polls
• Embedded calculators
• Augmented reality ads
• 360-degree videos

User-Generated Content (UGC)

User-generated content (UGC) is a potent resource for marketers who want to tap into the Millennial and Gen Z markets. You can encourage your audience to share unique content by offering them an incentive, such as a discount, or even partnering with them for a good cause.

Aerie, a women's clothing company, “made a pledge to stop retouching photos of models in its bathing suits. And for every Instagram user that posted an unedited photo of themselves in a bathing suit (using the hashtag #AerieReal, of course), Aerie now donates $1 to the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA).”

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.

• Target CPA – Generate new leads and customers for a maximum cost per acquisition that you set.
• Target ROAS – Set your sights on getting the best return on your advertising spends.
• Maximize Conversions – Rack up your advertising conversion rates, whether your aim is to get more email subscribers, downloads, or product sales.

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