22 Digital Marketing Trends for 2020 You Should Know
Because we’re starting a new year, and because we want to hear what some of the most known marketers predict for this year, we made this 2020 digital marketing trends roundup.
We’ve been making this digital marketing trends roundup for 6 years in a row now, so I really want to say a big THANK YOU to all the digital marketing experts who sent us their predictions and recommendations for 2020!
Whether you think that your focus should be on privacy, empathy, communities, or engagement, I strongly recommend you to read all the 2020 digital marketing trends below because you can find 20+ predictions that you probably won’t find elsewhere.
>> Read the full article here <<
Also, if you find this article useful, don’t forget to share it on your social media channels.
What are the Most Important Digital Marketing Trends in 2020?
Donna Moritz
Visual Content Strategist & Founder
Video and Audio are two trends that will continue to rise and rise in 2020:
- Video — more than ever we need to be able to mobilize and create video content at speed without the bottlenecks of outsourcing. Individuals and teams need to be able to create video in-house and share it to social platforms with a strategy, repurposing content for different formats. Episodic or serial video content will also become more and more popular across not only YouTube but other formats that encourage us to watch in seasons or series, such as Facebook and IGTV.
- Audio — we’ve never been more mobile and more busy, so the ability to find content through search and listen — via audio — is only going to grow. Obviously podcasts will continue to go from strength to strength as part of that, as well as the technology that allows us to “do” things based on voice commands and search. So, we should consider creating content with voice search in mind, and start hinking about what people are looking for (and what they will find) after they say “Hey Goolge…” or “Alexa…”.
Andy Crestodina
Co-Founder / Chief Marketing Officer
The decline in clickthrough rates from search are having a huge impact on website traffic for tons of brands. The reason? More SERP features (featured snippets, maps, videos, people also ask boxes, etc.) are pushing down the organic listings and therefore the clickthrough rates.
Compare these two search results page for the same phrase, four years apart:
How to respond? Since Google will answer all the simple questions with short answers that don’t require the visitor to click, your job now is to create content that answers tough questions with a lot of detail.
Go big. Go deep. And stay focused on a more narrow set of topics.
Jessika Phillips
President and Relationship Marketing Strategists
I believe in 2020, brands are going to see a shift with online marketing and it will start with the dramatic rise of “Dark Social” conversations. Meaning more people are moving into private conversation channels which are not easily tracked. Channels like messenger, groups, select group stories and niche communities will cause brands that haven’t been focusing on Relationship Marketing techniques (to build/host their community conversations and create brand advocates) to either spend more on their pay-to-play model, which will only increasingly get more expensive or dive into earned attention through what is working — relationship marketing.
The business mindset shift is focusing on how your ideal customers can belong with your brand versus just buying from your business. Belonging creates a stronger sense of customer loyalty and grows the opportunity for customer word-of-mouth advocacy. In order to do this, brands will need to focus on building a brand from the inside out through culture, story, experiences, delight, delivery, accessibility and community.
We will see smart companies re-focus on their home bases like their websites to build better experiences and accessibility; an example might be having automated processes online for convenience. They will focus on speed via conversational marketing with chat, growing personalized experiences with dynamic ads, video emails, text-to-do-business, specific SEO and experience-based marketing efforts overall.
Using native tools like messenger subscriptions that are rolling out, appointment setting and purchases on Facebook, shopping on stories, and convenience-based integrations will make doing business easier by reducing friction.
Collaborations will still be important and I feel brands will try to find a new kind of “influencer” to build a deeper connection with their audience. Focusing on telling client stories, team member stories or aligning with feel-good causes or taking big stances on what those influencers believe. Overall, their story will need to be authentic and truly felt and the process must be easy to do business with them in order to win, keep, and activate their audience to want to be an advocate for them.
I see brands focusing on building a brand story with a foundation rooted by the heart and personality of their culture. In short, I feel we will be taking a lot of online business marketing back to the basics of business — being #unfiltered — simply showing up to be real, build relationships, focus on community, have a clear strategy and cut out the cheesy old school marketing tactics.
Jeff Korhan
Author, Speaker and Founder
Craft Marketing That Makes People Feel Something
Going beyond getting buyers to know, like and trust a business will be one of the top digital trends in 2020. To do that you have to craft marketing that makes people feel something.
You can trust somebody without wanting to be friends with them. That’s one of the problems with marketing. It needs to create feelings that extend further than trust.
You’ll see some of this in Super Bowl commercials where the creative and financial investment is huge. For the rest of us, the challenge is making entertaining or inspiring marketing that is so compelling people believe it will make a difference in their lives.
Like those Super Bowl ads, this type of marketing is not always going to break through and resonate with its audience. But if you do it often enough, you’ll occasionally craft something worthy of the promises it makes.
Christina Garnett
Digital Strategist
1. A focus on empathy: Brands need to showcase that they aren’t just using social media for broadcasting. Customer experience will continue to be a major way for brands to win or lose their audience.
2. A focus on fun: TikTok and Instagram showcase that we loved to be entertained. Businesses need to find opportunities where they can appropriately have fun with their content.
3. A focus on privacy: With TikTok bans, Facebook scandals, and CPPA, more and more consumers are focused on privacy. Businesses need to ensure they are doing what they can to protect customers.
Ravi Shukle
Social Media Consultant & Country manager for Agorapulse UK & Ireland
Conversations matter
2020 will prove to be the rise of authenticity and relationships for brands on social media. With the recent news of Facebook and Instagram testing hiding like counts, it will be even more important to focus on those engaging with your profiles over likes.
While automation such as bots and AI can help streamline your sales process, it won’t help you to get to know who your customers are. That’s why it is crucial that you take time in 2020 to really talk to and understand your customer’s needs from their hobbies to their pain points.
This will allow you to then tailor your marketing to their exact needs and not make them feel like just another number.
Speedy replies
The latest research carried out by Smart Insights reveals 37% of consumers who use social media to complain or question brands expect to get a response in under 30 minutes.
This means that in 2020 it will be even more important to keep an eye on your social media inbox to ensure all comments and questions are being answered in a timely manner.
There are two key ways you can monitor this activity:
1) To keep multiple tabs open from each of your social networks to ensure you ready to respond as soon as a message comes in.
2) Look into using a social media management tool to help bring in all your social network comments into one inbox making it easier to keep track of and manage. Here’s an example of this feature using Agorapulse.
Micro stories
With algorithms changing almost weekly it can be hard for businesses to get seen in their newsfeeds. That is why in 2020 businesses need to focus on micro-stories on social media — creating visual content with pictures and video.
This involves creating short bursts of content no more than 15–30 seconds in real time and sharing it on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram stories, Snapchat and even TikTok which allows users to easily consume and engage with your posts.
These platforms have allowed increased reach for businesses by having the ability to add location tags, hashtags, mentions, and even stickers to help increase the visibility and engagement of your stories.
All it takes is just 15–30 seconds of content per day — try it for yourself!
