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Digital marketing trends for 2020

Digital Marketing Trends For 2020

Digital marketing trends are always changing. What worked last year might not work this year. If your digital marketing tactics are outdated, you’re limiting your brand in reach and conversion. You may be ignorant of new digital marketing trends, but your target audience and your competitors are very much abreast of these trends.

You need to stay on top of marketing trends and tactics to know what works.

To help you and your brand stay ahead, we have highlighted eight (8) best digital marketing trends for 2020.

1. Chatbots

Chatbots will continue to be an essential part of digital marketing in 2020. A chatbot is an AI-based technology that uses instant messaging to chat in real-time with your customers or website visitors.

They’re also referred to as virtual assistants, and they offer outstanding customer service by meeting customers’ expectations and automating repetitive tasks – which means that you can focus on other important work while your bot helps you to convert customers.

Many brands are already using this chatbot technology, you shouldn’t be left out.

Benefits of Chatbots

  1. Provides customer experience and satisfaction
  2. Increases customer engagements
  3. Display products available for sale
  4. Facilitates transactions and conversions
  5. Saves cost
  6. Saves time

2. Voice Search

Voice search plays a vital role in providing all the relevant information that people are searching for through audio content. AI is getting smarter, and the number of errors made by voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google has greatly reduced.

This is the year that companies can no longer ignore voice search. There are a lot of things you can do to optimize your website for voice search, but the most crucial change involves using long-tail keywords that people are more likely to speak than type. Like “how to get plantain frittata in Lagos” instead of a shorter keyword like “plantain frittata in Lagos.”

The increasing use of voice search should make your company rethink its digital marketing strategies in 2020.

Many brands are already including voice search in their digital marketing strategies to deliver value-based content effectively to their customers.

3. Private Messaging

Even as 2020 approaches, many brands have already started shifting their focus on how to better maximize private messaging apps. Smartphone apps like WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat are already gaining popularity. And instead of using just emails, brands are adopting the use of private apps as well as private messaging groups.

This is all in a bid to get more personal with customers. Now brands are taking the conversation to DMs. As a means of streamlining customer service and assisting in sales, direct messaging is becoming one of the efficient digital marketing trends of 2020.

Due to the kind of experience it gives both the brands and their customers, brands find sending direct messages to customers to be a more effective way of building relationships, whether it’s addressing complaints, taking sales orders, or even just goofing around. And interestingly the customers love it so.

4. Personalization

If you want to stand out in the coming year, you need to personalize your content marketing, and that means personalized content, products, emails, and more.

Right now, only a few companies are using some form of personalization – and most of them only know about using first names, it’s more than that.

Recent research has shown that personalized email campaigns receive 26% higher email open rates and 41% higher click-through rates than emails with no form of personalization.

The main benefit and reason for personalization is having the control to reach your target audience in the best way. People feel more connected to a brand when they feel like they are being spoken to personally and treated special.

By collecting user data from list segments, surveys, or studies, you’re in a better position to create more relevant and effective email campaigns towards targeted audiences based on their buying habits, interests, and behaviors.

Look at this scenario, if your target audience likes fashion and music, you can include pop culture references when sending your emails, creating blog posts, or even in your email opt-in forms to deliver a more personalized experience with your content.

Your audience will appreciate the references and better relate to your brand, which will ultimately boost conversions.

5. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing isn’t a new trend, but note that it’s not going away any time soon. Influencers used to be huge celebrities or “internet celebrities” with tens of thousands of followers but now, more than ever, brands are turning to people with much a smaller social media following but yet specific and engaging audience to be influencers. These kinds of Influencers are referred to as “micro-influencers”.

Taking advantage of influential people on social media allows you to reach their audience with a voice, that they are willing to listen to and they trust.

You can find influencers by looking for people who reach your target audience and sponsoring them as brand advocates; they don’t necessarily need to have a large following. Brands that use influencers to spread their message experience a higher Return on Investment than they do with other digital marketing methods.

5. Content Marketing

Is content still king in 2020? YES, but not only content creation. In 2020, we’ll be entering an era where content distribution will take over as the new King of content marketing strategies.

Not only does content demonstrate knowledge and expertise to potential customers reading your content, but it’s also what search engines put in their search results. In short, content fuels the fire that is your search engine optimization, so it’s best to never stop creating content and distributing them via the right platforms. This year, ensure you focus on creating interactive content, personalized content, and videos too. Most importantly, share them on the right channels.

7) Video Marketing

Video content is one of, if not the, most important content type today and likely to be around for some more years to come. That should tell the importance of introducing video content into your digital marketing strategy in 2020. Here are some fun facts about video content from consumers

70% of consumers say that they have shared a brand’s video

72% of businesses say that video has improved their conversion rate

52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions

72% of businesses say that video has improved their conversion rate 52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions Click To Tweet

65% of executives visit the marketer’s website and 39% call a vendor after viewing a video

The fun part and best thing about videos is that it makes it easy to reformat your video content.

 Imagine that you’ve recorded a video for your YouTube channel. Instead of just publishing it on YouTube, you could also do the following.

  1. Transcribe, so you have a text version of the video
  2. Publish the transcription on your blog under an embedded YouTube video for better rankings
  3. Upload the raw video with the transcription as subtitles to Facebook
  4. Turn the transcription into a blog article of course with some extra addition of relevant stats and images
  5. Rip the audio alone and use it as a podcast episode, if you have an audience for podcasts
  6. Use the video thumbnails in your email marketing campaigns and the word “video” in subject lines which is bound to increase the chances of the email being opened

8. Social Commerce

Social commerce refers to buying products directly through social media posts or ads, and you don’t need to leave the site or app. These shoppable social media posts have been around, but Instagram launched theirs in March of 2019 and called it “Instagram Checkout” and now they’re rapidly getting more attention.

The goal is to create fewer steps for your shoppers, not more, so selling directly on social media decreases the chances of sales abandonment.

With e-commerce and social media, both growing at alarming rates, it’s no wonder brands are using the two together to maximize opportunities for sales.

Social media is integral to digital marketing, and visual platforms like Instagram are gold for marketers. Better yet, visual commerce is taking off as more consumers are willing to buy products through ads they see in their feeds.

E-commerce brands hope this will reduce the risk that customers will abandon their purchase because they have to switch apps or sign in to an unknown store.

By now, you’ve heard that Instagram is hiding likes, and with all the fuss, you’d think that the photo-sharing app was on the decline. Think again.

Social media is integral to digital marketing, and visual platforms like Instagram are gold for marketers. Better yet, visual commerce is taking off as more consumers are willing to buy products through ads they see in their feeds.

You don’t even need to be an ecommerce brand. As long as you sell products, even just a few pieces of branding merchandise, you can see higher returns by allowing transactions through social media.

If you have a Shopify store, it’s as easy as linking accounts (for Instagram) or installing a plugin (for Snapchat).

It’s Doers That Win With Digital Marketing

So, there you have it – our instructional guide to some of the most important digital marketing trends you can’t ignore in the coming year. You can read this, but if you don’t use it, then you’re leaving a lot on the table when it comes to getting more customers.

For any brand using digital marketing in their business, change is an integral part of the job. You must keep looking ahead and strive to embrace new technologies, tools, and strategies to stay on top and ahead in the industry, and have the edge over your competitors.

Need help? Send us an email: [email protected], or call/WhatsApp: +2349086160358.

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The Brand Ally is a web design and digital marketing company. We provide great website designs, mobile app development, SEO, social media marketing, and Google Ads.

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