What are the 7 most important digital marketing Trends for the year 2020?
In the General matter, when we talk about the year 2020, we are actually talking about the future that we imagined, read in books, or watched in Psy-fi movies. After global lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, everything changed, and this catastrophic incident which is still with us, put the effect on every aspect of human life, in particular, it reshaped, modified and definitely evolved Digital Marketing.
From 2019, consumer behavior was changing, the pattern was smooth. Hereby, after the Covid-19, people as we know our buyers, totally differed and the way that Digital marketers have to interact also did. By the way, this Virus is not the only purpose that leads to these trends. It rather is the digital Darwinism (constant evolution of Digital marketing) that makes most of the changes.
This article discusses the most important trends on Digital marketing world and we hope that it delivers a thorough insight for the reader.
1) Social media marketing is changing
The concept of social media marketing is, in fact, all activities that a marketer does to illustrate a certain product and service on social platforms.
There are various types of these platforms, which starts with the Giant of them, FACEBOOK.
Facebook has been the first social platform that ever used for business and marketing. Basically, this social media owns approximately 2.6 billion active users (one-third of the world population) and despite the negative approached that accrued after users’ data breach, it is still the King of the road!
However, companies and SMEs are joining a boycott movement to prevent from using Facebook’s ADS Centre as an aftermath of that data breaching, followed by its failure to protect users from discrimination, bullying harassment, and false information spreading.
When we are observing that in the year of 2018, each person on average spends 5 hours on social media, that means it should be our marketing field too.
From the Year 2018 afterward, Facebook has felt the alarm of losing its active users to other social media. According to the latest research, 30% of its users are above 65 years old!! That is a strange result for a platform that supposed to be for the young generation.
The research result gave a prediction that by the next decade, Facebook will be wiped out for Generation Z (born from 1997-2012).
Conversely, other social media platforms are rising powerfully. To name a few, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and a newcomer from China town, TIK TOK.
The companies, and the business, no matter small or big, are spending more time and budget on these new social media, which they are more interactive with customers, simpler to use, visually oriented and youth lover!
It might be so rare to find someone who has no social media account and does not upload any picture or a video of something on them. People found social media a good alternative world to socialize together safely!! This trend belongs to the years before curbed by Facebook, but the trend of socializing is changing and inclination is on other platforms.
As a matter of fact, the trend of social media is redirecting, so your business needs to do as well.
2. Video marketing is becoming ahead in content creation
Motion picture and visual marketing are still the most attracting method of absorbing new leads, generating more audiences, and new customers. In the late study in term of evaluating the effectiveness of various format of contents in attracting audiences, more than 70% vote to video contents, while less than 13% goes to content and texts.
Although, there was a time that for producing a video, you probably had to spend thousands of dollars and many days in the editing room.
But now you can do all things you need to make a video for any purpose, from entertaining to advertising, by your Smartphone. It’s now becoming a normal habit to film your job, edit it by an application, and let it be consumed by your audiences.
As in the beginning, I wrote, Covid-19 changed everything, and digital marketing also. Due to the long-term lockdown and Covid-19 high contagious feature, people are terrified of doing actual socializing, going out, buy from stores, eat outside, and interact with real people.
That compulsory sedentary which nailed them at home for longer hours, has made them to spend their time watching videos on their Mobile or Laptop, and as easy as it sounds, their behavior changed to watch videos more than ever. This is the cause that live-streaming companies like Netflix skyrockets its Stock on market.
This growth in video marketing put an obvious effect on other marketing platforms as well. For example, Email marketing, a final weapon of attracting consumers to your brand, conversing them to buy your product, or to just arise their awareness, has actually been modified in contents contained by Video.
No doubt that a simple content in an email won’t reach to the target that a digital marketer is seeking for. Email content has to be more interactive, include demo videos and other visual contents to drag customers in.
Staying at home, and being accustomed to watch more videos, is resulting in the popularity of Video marketing compared to other forms of content.
3. Messaging applications are boosting up
Message marketing is another part that is a subcategory of digital marketing. It's better to know that messaging applications like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram are not just for sending text or voice messages or calling each other. In fact, they are a profitable way more than that.
They allow Digital marketer to interact positively with the numbers and accounts, send latest updates to the customers, entertain them with fun videos or educate them with serious ones.
The application of Telegram put a step further. It helps you to create a Channel, use bots, take orders completely automated and more importantly, it is greatly safe and secure.
This application is based on Blockchain technology and even it gives you access to mining Bitcoin in it! If you have a group of friends and colleagues in the IT field, you will see that all of them have a Telegram account, and that is because of its security.
In term of messaging application mass a usage, currently, the Facebook messenger has 1.3 billion active users who are sending and receiving 55 billion messages per month, and WhatsApp that has 1.6 billion of active users who are sending 2.2 billion messages per day! The Telegram only has 100 million of active users, which people are coming to this application and opening accounts in an increasing chart.
The statistics and the growing trend are satisfying enough to give more credit to messaging application in your Digital marketing strategy in the year 2020.
4. Content marketing is more interacting than before
It is confidently easy to say that, despite all the innovations in Digital marketing, Content writing is still a persuasive method to attract audiences and bring them in to check your website, see your post, or have your question answered by you. However, content marketing also faced modifications.
From the year 2018, after the newest Algorithm of Google search engine named BERT (Bidirectional Encoder representation from transformers) by Jacobe Decline, become the newest algorithm to the Google search engine, it fundamentally changed to the way that Google understands the content.
Since then, Google search engine understands the texts of a blog or an article way better, more humanly and more inclined to put the easily understandable contents in its SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). As Google itself announced after introducing the BERT, its giant search engine shows the websites with the faster loading speed, useful linked, and well-written contents.
Apart from the above context, a blog or an article, or even a caption has to be more interactive than before. It means that the audiences want content that can easily click on, answer question or ask them via that link, get the answer easily, and they are looking to interact with the contents that are more casually, still relevant, and useful.
One of the things that better to add here is that, we all know that our audiences are losing their patience to read a long article, for this reason, we are minimizing it to less than 200 words in average. Despite that, HubSpot statistics from more than 2000 users indicating that long articles are attracting audiences more than short ones and they spend time on reading it if it's deserved to be read.
It shows us that people still want to read content, and it matters in their decision to purchase something if the contents are accurate and valuable. Meanwhile, they are in need of interaction, no matter by a video, or by a blog. They want their opinion to be heard, valued, and responded.
5. Businesses going to grasp Omnichannel Marketing
What Omnichannel marketing actually means? In a simple word, using multiply platforms in marketing and connecting them all to a landing page to have a circle of audiences is called Omnichannel marketing.
In details, Omnichannel marketing helps your brand to be shown in various platforms, draw the traffic to your target page, or your website and build several touchpoints with your audiences.
By the year 2020, no company could survive if they are not on several platforms. Being just in one social media and having a simple website is kind of a joke now! Marketers have to utilize all social media and webpages of theirs engaging together in a way that builds a community around the company.
For a Marketing manager, controlling all these platforms to be active and alive, could be somehow impossible. Nevertheless, AI could be a great assistant to ease the confusion of bombardment of information and data targeting the digital marketing manager.
Artificial intelligence is penetrating deep in digital marketing platforms. We will explain them below.
6. Artificial Intelligence is more involved in the Digital marketing strategy
What is Artificial intelligence? Well, I am sure that you know it because it's all over us. Artificial intelligence is an independently thinking machine that able to communicate and work with a human. It totally depends on what sort of data is in its database, but they are not just a sophisticated tool, they are a thinking entity that according to their programable mind, could perform a simple or highly delicate job.
We always have been looking to have a loyal assistant, someone or something that can be trusted, and reliable to do something exactly in a way that we want. We have dogs, a loyal animal, and totally trustable, but they can not think definitely logical.
Artificial intelligence nowadays is surrounding us, whether in a form of a Chatbot, to answer the FAQ (frequently asked questions), take the orders, send the audience a link, or in a form of a Robot. They are capable of thinking and the positive advantages that they have is they do not argue, do not tired, and their error is way lesser than a human.
In Digital marketing analytics applications, such as Google Analytics, we are using AI to do the analysis and give us the result. Digital marketers totally trust the statistics and data that Machine learning analytics delivers us. These data aids us to draw our plans accurately, and know our customers persona and habits way better.
In digital marketing, we are using AI in Machine learning in our social media, google search results, and lots of other sectors. For example, when you open up an Instagram account, the Instagram machine learning just need less than a month until totally understands you.
As a Digital marketer, your Instagram business account aids you in your postings, analyzing your audience’s behavior, and many other things. There are Instagram virtual assistants that you can attach to your account, and they post behalf of you and reach your engagement without you.
Undoubtedly, they are dominating the jobs one by one, but we cannot ignore their contribution to our world or digital marketing that making us progress and reach to our customer in an efficient way.
7. influences marketing has a new face
With the simplicity of making videos and uploading it on social media specifically YouTube, a new Digital marketing section created that named influencer marketing.
In a simple word, influencers are those who do a certain job or activity and show it to a large audience. They are usually pretty and lovely (it's not 100% for all) and depend on their audience they will produce various sorts of videos, that they are the leading person in it.
Some of them show their normal life (Kim Kardashian), some others are politically inclined to a party, and some other just play video games such as Ninja.
Influencer marketing is cooperating with these people to advertise your product by using it during recording their video, or just speaking about it. No matter what business you have, or what produce you offer, there is an influencer who has thousands of followers that are ready to buy from you if the influencer consents its value.
The trend of influencer marketing is not new, but it has a new feature. From recent years, virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa initiated the first interaction of AI with a human. By the way, We are experiencing that virtual Influencers, same as an animation character, have a social account, and owns followers.
The phenomenon of Virtual Influencers is so exciting that companies are looking to have one for themselves. Thanks to the advancement in visual creation technologies, its not difficult to make one, and give it personalization in accordance with your customers Persona.
Do you know Jady vales? She is a virtual influencer that works for YOUPORN. She talks about her daily experience of using YOUPORN products, and she knows her followers as human, so she knows that she is not!
Making a virtual influencer is one of the trends that you as a digital marketer should consider, as it is not expensive as an actual one and you can customize it whatever you desire, and finally, they are efficient.
By and large, The world is constantly changing, and people who are working beside it, has to change. The Digital marketing is a never-stop evolving field that confronts by new technologies and new inventions that occasionally would destroy everything that a digital marketer designed and developed. We as a digital marketer should be fully up to date, and be informed from daily innovations, new trends, or even a simple hashtag that is used by a large group. At last, Digital marketers should be multi-tasking.
Source: Google, Digital marketing Institute, blockchain