Succeeding in digital marketing requires you to be forward-thinking. You need to be aware of new trends, technological advancements and changes in consumer behaviour if you want to be successful. Unfortunately, this can be challenging if you don’t know where to look.
In most cases, searching the internet and keeping up to date with the latest industry advancements is a sure way to form your digital marketing strategy. To help you out, we’ve collected a list of the most important trends to focus on for 2020 when forming your marketing strategy.
Important marketing trends
To start, let’s take a look at some of the most important general marketing trends to focus on.
For starters, lifecycle marketing is quickly becoming a well-established marketing option that aims to create an always-on marketing approach across multiple digital channels. This is a holistic approach to marketing that focuses on everything from the customer’s initial interactions with your brand to actions that retain customers.
Next, insight-driven marketing is becoming a huge deal thanks to the increased popularity of analytical tools which help to provide a consistent stream of up-to-date information. This leads to easier decision making and improved predictability.
Lastly, there’s also the trend of digital transformation. More and more people are switching to digital devices like smartphones to receive the latest news and updates about their favourite brands and products, but they’re also being used to purchase products online. By focusing on these mobile users with your digital transformation, you’ll be reaching out to a much wider audience and also pull in many first-timer users that don’t use desktop computers.
Now let’s take a look at platform-specific trends.
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing trends
PPC trends are shifting towards automated processes, essentially creating set-and-forget campaigns that don’t require much interaction. More advanced versions of this are often controlled by artificial intelligence or machine learning processes that allow for improved targeting accuracy.
Search marketing trends
Search marketing remains largely the same. It’s still an important backbone in marketing but there are a couple of interesting developments such as the rising popularity of voice search and multilingual SEO.
Social marketing trends
Social marketing will focus on micro and nano-influencers in the future with a heavy emphasis on word-of-mouth. Alternative platforms will also be a focal point as more social media-like platforms continue to grow in popularity.
Email marketing trends
Email marketing won’t directly change in 2020, but there are a couple of outside changes that could affect it. For instance, the rise of insight-driven marketing will likely affect email marketing by providing more verified leads as opposed to blindly marketing email lists and hoping for the best.
Video marketing trends
Thanks to larger data caps and the introduction of super-fast 5G networks, video marketing is set to make an explosive return in 2020 with long-form videos, 360-degree videos and video integration across the marketing funnel. Video personalization may also take off in 2020 if technology allows for it, and a data-first approach will be utilized for future video marketing applications.