Trend watch 2020
This next calendar year is going to be pretty awesome. According to future predictions - admittedly made some time ago - 2020 is the year that all roads were going to be replaced by pneumatic tubes (hurrah, no potholes!), we would live in flying houses, telepathy and teleporting were expected to be commonplace and we would finally land on Mars.
Evidently, not all predictions come to fruition but - undeterred - we decided to come up with some predictions of our own. Hopefully, our 2020 digital marketing trends watch will land slightly closer to the mark.
Increased use of Artificial Intelligence: to be fair, this one isn’t too far removed from some of those early 2020 predictions. AI is now not only commonplace in the industry but in our homes too, think Chat Bots and Voice Powered Search for example. Alexa, Google and Siri are probably uttered as frequently in some homes as the names of the people who live there. Our prediction for 2020 is that the growth of voice search will place a greater onus on brands to connect with smart devices that are always connected and always on. And the next big disrupter? We reckon Conversational AI will take things to a whole new level. Watch this space.
Greater personalisation: A study showed that 79% of consumers feel frustrated if the content isn’t tailored to them, placing the responsibility firmly in the hands of brand marketers to create customer-centric content. We predict that brands will invest more in high-level segmentation of audience to generate stronger, hyper-targeted advertising and avoid blocking by consumers. Forbes Magazine states that unrelated ads or brands that keep on bombarding people with their irrelevant advert will be disregarded by 49% of people – a frighteningly high percentage given ad spend. But the flip side is that if your brand consistently sends tailored messages, 36% will respond by buying the product.
Bigger reliance on influencers: good, authentic influencers help brands to create transparency and trust. Our 2020 prediction is that we will see brands striving for strong influencer relationships, promoting brand alignment and loyalty. Brands that provide guidelines around impartiality and let products speak for themselves – rather than trying to influence the influencers – will gain more in the long term.
More agile marketing: the interesting thing about agile marketing is that it requires an experimental mindset, using data to inform decisions but being prepared to test, learn, refine. This iterative process can be a steep learning curve for marketers that have previously developed a strategy and then stuck with it because it was in the plan. Nevertheless, we predict that agile marketing will become the preferred approach in the coming years, as brands reap the benefit of more engaged consumers.
Search Engine Optimisation as you’ve never seen it before: SEO has always been a constantly shifting landscape but the pace has picked up on this ever-evolving technology and we predict this trajectory is only going to get steeper. Changes in the search algorithms - like Google’s BERT - have profoundly affected the user’s search results. Search is getting smarter and other advances mean that search engines are learning to predict what you'll search for and provide the best results. This means that brands will need to work harder to provide high quality, search relevant content geared to users.
Need help planning your digital marketing strategy in 2020? We’d love to hear from you, get in touch.