According to Gartner, 85 percent of customer-to-business interactions will be handled by chatbots. That means you’re likely to speak to only 15 percent of your customers. The rest will decide without ever making contact with anyone in your company.
This transition from human interactions to technology-based interactions is a consistent theme with most of the biggest digital marketing trends. Let’s look at 10 top marketing trends coming up in 2020.
1. Virtual and Augmented Reality
As mobile devices like smartphones and tablets get more powerful, they’re able to provide immersive virtual and augmented reality experiences without any extra hardware. You don’t need funny-looking glasses or a powerful desktop PC to get an immersive experience.
This technology means companies can provide a virtual “showroom” for their products no matter where the customer is located. For example, Ikea’s smartphone app uses augmented reality to let customers visualize a piece of furniture in their own homes. The customer can insert any item in their catalog into the room they’re standing in.
2. Personalization
Blasting the same message out to all your customers is getting less and less effective. If the message doesn’t speak directly to your customer, they’re not going to pay attention.
Email might be one of the oldest digital marketing channels but it’s still one of the most effective ways to reach your customers on a personal level. With proper list segmentation, you can target sub-sections of your list with highly targeted messaging.
3. Content Marketing
It’s been a digital marketing trope for decades but “content is king” is still as true as ever. The internet is full of information about every topic imaginable and your market knows that.
Providing people with valuable content that can help them solve a problem or meet some other need will bring them into your orbit. Once they’re there, you can work on converting them into a customer.
4. Video Marketing
As connection speeds get faster and bandwidth grows, people watch more and more video online. YouTube has been the second largest search engine for over a decade.
It’s not only YouTube though. Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok are putting more and more emphasis on video content. People spend more time watching video every year, especially live video. The time spent watching Facebook Live video quadrupled in one year.
If you don’t have a video marketing strategy in place for 2020, you’ll be missing a big chunk of your potential audience.
5. Position “0” Marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO) has been an important marketing strategy for as long as Google has existed. The goal has always been to get a number one position in the search results.
Going into 2020, that goal has changed. Now the goal is to land at position 0.
Google featured snippets are displayed above the main search results. This information is pulled from the site Google thinks is most relevant and these snippets get a huge share of the search attention.
If your website is the source of those snippets, you’ll capture a much bigger share of the search traffic.
6. Conversational Marketing
With the huge amount of progress in artificial intelligence and machine learning over the last few years, technology like chatbots and messaging apps can hold conversations with customers. This lets your customers interact with your business any time of day or night, from anywhere in the world, and you don’t need a 24-hour staff to make it happen.
Smart speakers like Alexa and Siri play a part in this type of marketing as well. Those devices are being used for purchases where customers may never touch a keyboard or see your website.
7. Marketing Technology
Marketing technology, or MarTech, is becoming more powerful as technology improves. Many things that have been done manually by humans are being automated by MarTech.
This includes things like SEO, ad testing (both A/B and multivariate testing), customer messaging, and content curation and management. As technology continues to become more powerful going into the new decade, this trend is likely to continue.
8. Consumer Privacy
Privacy has become one of the highest-profile factors in digital marketing over the last couple of years. Customers are becoming savvier about how much of their personal information is available to the websites they visit and many of them are taking steps to protect their information, such as installing ad and tracking blockers.
Companies that make privacy a priority will have an advantage. It means having to work harder to connect the dots between various stages in your marketing funnel but the extra effort will have a good ROI with customers who are conscious of their privacy and security.
9. Influencer Marketing
Along with becoming more privacy-conscious, consumers are also becoming more skeptical. One of the biggest side-effects of this shift for businesses is that it’s harder to convince people of the benefits of your products and services.
Many consumers turn to social media influencers for recommendations. These people are celebrities within a highly-focused niche and have built relationships with their followers. Partnering with influencers in your market may not reach as many people as a widely-recognized celebrity but the people they reach will be more likely to buy what they recommend.
10. Micro-Moments
With the explosive growth of mobile devices over the last decade, most of the people in your market have a computer in their pocket. This lets them look up anything they need, right when they need it. These are known as micro-moments.
Micro-moments solve one or more of 4 problems:
- I want to know
- I want to go
- I want to do
- I want to buy
It’s the last one, I want to buy, that is the most powerful. If you can provide what people are searching for and make it easy to buy, you’ll generate a lot of new business.
Where Do You Start with These Top Marketing Trends?
Knowing what the top marketing trends are for the start of the new decade is only half of the equation. You also need to know how to take advantage of them. And putting them to work for your business can be challenging.
Not everyone has the digital marketing skills to take action on these trends and even if you do, is that the best use of your time and effort? If you’d rather focus on what your business does best and leave the marketing to experts, the Witmer Group can help.
We provide an innovative, flexible approach to digital marketing to get your business in front of your most valuable audience. We offer a range of digital marketing services and can create a customized strategy that’s perfect for your business.
Get in touch with us today to discuss your needs and find out how we can help you grow your business.