Digital Marketing Trends 2020 – Things You Should Not Ignore

Digital marketing is booming and you cannot ignore it. The impact of digital marketing was steady in the 90s, but it has become a necessity now, just after a few decades. There was a time when content posting on the social media platform, was enough for the business awareness and promotion but now, customer behavior is the most important factor. If you are not interacting and communicating with your audience properly, you are not going to stand for long.

Digital marketing is vast and has a lot of techniques and methods. If you execute it properly, it can increase the business profits by boosting the demand for the services or products a business offers.  If you want to succeed in your business, just be active and follow your audience.

Many businesses are adopting the latest digital marketing tips and techniques, while others are still using the old things that were hot in previous years. However, one should not forget that the new technologies are changing the game. Therefore, if you want to flourish your business to success, you must move faster and take marketing strategies of your company to the next level.

When you are performing the marketing of a business, it is important to adopt the latest trends to make your business ahead. So below are the latest trends in digital marketing that you should use for your business.

Voice Search

Voice Search is becoming popular and increasing day by day. Thanks to Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and other smart searching interfaces. In 2016, 20% of the voice searches were done only on Android devices and the count is increasing. As per a report from Gartner, by 2020, 30% of the browsing on the web will be performed with voice search. The reasons are very much genuine: 

It is very much easier for a user to give a voice command rather than typing a whole sentence.

It is a fast method of searching as it is saving the time of the user. The user just provides voice command and gets the search results. 

This technology of voice search has its own challenges. When a user is doing a text search, the browser shows the list of results on a single page. However, in the case of voice search, the device responds verbally and provides you fewer results or choices. So, the approach of voice search is different than that of the normal search. 

It has been seen that the majority of people use voice searches only when they are looking to buy something from a local business. If you want to optimize your website for local voice searches, then you should optimize your content for long term phrases or keywords. Voice searches are generally longer and are done conversationally. Therefore, you should make your website content in a way that sounds conversational.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is influencing digital marketing as it helps in understanding customer preferences, requirements, and behavior. With AI, you can create more innovative and effective strategies and can increase productivity by automating many tasks. It results in saving both time and cost. Many businesses are using AI technologies to understand their customers’ behavior like their product liking, buying habits, things that customers prefer, etc. By analyzing customer insights, you can have more detailed ideas about which products your customer likes and how you are going to promote that in front of your customers.

By implementing AI in digital marketing, you can enhance your customer experience and can do better promotion of your products and services. As per a study from Blueshift and TechValidate for AI-powered marketing, 26% of the marketers are using AI for optimizing campaigns and 28% are using it for product recommendations. Not just that, 57% of the businesses are using AI to improve customer service, as given by Forrester.

If you are neglecting the collaboration of the AI in digital marketing, then you are losing a big shot in the game.

Chatbots

Chatbots are simply machine algorithms that are designed to serve many purposes but most common is communicating with the customer and serving the solutions according to the customer queries or problems. You will find chatbots from social media to mobile apps and business websites.

With the advancement in AI sector, chatbots can interact with customers and answer their queries just like a human customer support staff.  Although chatbot is not a new concept in technology, still businesses are finding difficulties in adapting it. Chatbots are designed to improve customer service. They are programmed in a way to collect data and monitor consumer behavior.

According to the research from Forrester, 5% of the worldwide companies were using chatbots regularly in 2016; 20% were installing them and 32% were planning to use or test them in 2017. Not just that, as per Chatbots Life’s prediction - 85% of consumer interactions will be handled without any human intervention by 2020. Utilizing the chatbots for your business isn’t going to be bad for your business and customers. 

Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing is more beneficial for a B2C business. Omnichannel marketing consists of all the channels where you can find your customers or where your customers can find you. For instance, you may post something on social media and start interacting with your customer there and then the customer finds you in SEO rankings and then you may contact him/her in the mail to get a prospect and get on the phone to generate a qualified lead. In this whole process, you are interacting with the same customer on all the channels where your customer is present.

The primary purpose of omnichannel marketing is to make the online presence of your business and interact with the prospects on every platform so that your customer finds it easy to interact with you through different channels. It does not just help you in getting new customers, but also it’s a technique to develop a positive customer experience that leads to higher customer retention rates. According to a survey by Aspect Software, businesses that implement omnichannel marketing strategies achieved 91% higher yearly customer retention rates compared to businesses that do not.

Video Marketing

Video marketing is in trend due to the popularity of platforms like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook Live, etc. As per Cisco, the video will provide 82% of internet traffic by 2021. Consumers are spending more time on their smartphones nowadays by watching videos. Therefore, businesses can target video marketing to promote their business services, products and can increase awareness. There are many other ways a business can use video marketing to increase traffic and customer base in 2019. 

• Business event videos
• Customer testimonial videos
• Product walkthroughs
• Brand Stories
• Webinars
• How-to videos and many more.

Not just that, businesses go live when they have any product launch or when they are interviewing any influencer. It will provide them huge traffic and an opportunity to reach the maximum audience. It can establish a brand’s image. Video marketing is not limited to likes, shares, and comments. With the right strategy, it can do wonders for your business and generate leads for it.

In a Nutshell-

With the above-specified trends, you can acquire new customers and enhance their customer experience. However, the marketing strategies, in 2020, require to be implemented accurately to stay ahead in the marketing curve.  Whether you are implementing these strategies or not, one thing is for sure that as the technological advancements will go up, so will the digital marketing ideas, tactics, and methods.