5 New 2020 Digital Marketing Trends Businesses Can’t Miss
As with fashion, digital marketing also has its own trends. There are many tools and techniques used in marketing that have come in and out of being used by brands, but the more people use these the more they are used by others. You could think of it as a type of word of mouth, I suppose. When someone sees something working they’ll pass their thoughts on to others who will then repeat the process. However, it doesn’t always work like this, as with all trends they only have a certain amount of time to develop. Factors such as bad publicity, or even something as simple as the trend becoming out of date and something new coming along in its place changes these trends.
Take a look at Tik Tok, for example, this is a social media trend that was very popular amongst young people for a while and was a good way for marketers to reach a younger audience. However, with the news around countries banning the app, this is a 2020 digital marketing trend that could leave as quickly as it came.
The definition of ‘trend’, is “a general development or change in a situation or in the way that people are behaving”, therefore, let’s take a look at how the 2020 digital marketing trends we’re currently seeing are developing.
1.Video Marketing
First up on our list of 2020 digital marketing trends is the use of video. While video marketing has been around for a while, technologies such as Biteable are making it easier for smaller businesses with limited budgets to produce engaging video content. As a result, more and more brands are able to take advantage of video marketing, so if you’re not then you should be!
You may not think your brand would benefit from video content, however, we respectfully disagree. Since 2015, digital video consumption has increased by approximately 23%, with US viewers spending around an hour and a half every week just watching online videos. When you also take into consideration how easily videos can be watched on Smartphones and shared via Social Media, we think it’s pretty clear that Video Marketing hasn’t even begun to take off as a digital marketing trend.
Videos are an engaging piece of marketing that help a brand/influencer to connect with their audience by creating a personality behind the brand. This is highly linked to the use of influencer marketing and social media stories, which we will look at in more detail next.
If you’d like more information on how this 2020 digital marketing trend can work for your business, take a look at our previous article on the benefits of video marketing.
2. Influencer Marketing
The popularity of Influencer marketing has been growing for a few years now and shows no sign of slowing down. This is due in no small part to the likes of Instagram and YouTube becoming an increasingly popular source of income and career for people that began creating content in their spare time. Influencers are a great way of advertising products in a more realistic and genuine way than corporate advertising, as it is often carried out via social media platforms that already help to provide a more relaxed form of advertising than traditional methods.
A number of consumers will trust an influencer’s opinion of a product more than what the brand trying to sell said product is saying themselves. So much so, that the supermarket chain Iceland, stopped with celebrity endorsements and created a campaign using real-life mums. They now work with popular YouTube channel, Channel Mum to promote their products amongst the vloggers that make up the channel.
As a matter of fact, a whopping 63% trust and influencers opinion, with 58% of people having bought a new product in the last 6 months based on one of these opinions.
You will notice that celebrities and influencers now have to disclose when they are being paid to talk about a product. This is down to the fact that more and more brands are using this form of marketing and consumers should be made aware of what type of content they are consuming and interacting with.
If an influencer misleads consumers by not clearly labelling an endorsement deal, this may breach consumer protection law, or industry rules in advertising. Therefore the advertising standards agency created a guide to help influencers know the rules on sponsored content, which can be found here.
With laws like this being put into place, it just goes to show that Influencer marketing is here to stay and is worth considering if this is the right fit for your audience.
3.Social media stories
A third of Instagram stories with the highest views come from businesses, so this is an obvious social media trend that should be considered as part of your marketing strategy.
They create a small sense of urgency to stay updated with the news of brands as a result of the 24hr time frame that they are live for. Brands often use social media stories as a way of reposting customer pictures of them using their product or service, as well as engaging customers, via polls, Q&A’s, and previous live streams.
This is a 2020 digital marketing trend that is increasingly being used to engage a brand with its consumers, and it partners perfectly alongside influencer marketing.
4.Artificial Intelligence
This 2020 digital marketing trend is something that most of us use day-to-day without even realising it. It is “one of the major technologies behind voice search and smart assistants”. So if you have an Amazon Alexa, a Google Home, you ask Siri questions, or you simply have facial recognition on your devices, you will have used and may know that we are talking about artificial intelligence. However, we are obviously talking about marketing here, so how is this involved you may ask?
Well, PPC campaigns can be run through machine learning, “which manages all aspects of a campaign, through statistical learning methods and bid management”. The benefits of using artificial intelligence is that the data used to automated systems, in turn, reduces the time that humans have to work on tasks and more easily targets the relevant audiences.
Other ways that artificial intelligence is used in marketing is through personalising newsletter content using the information from your subscriber lists to chatbots. However, with this 2020 digital marketing trend, you will obviously need a significant amount of data in order for an automated technology like this to work. What’s more, it’s important to consider which options are best for you and not to overuse the technology, as you still want your customers to feel like the messages you are conveying are organic.
5.Interactive Content
Considering a lot of our spare time is spent on social media and online shopping, it comes as no surprise that interactive content is a 2020 digital marketing trend being used by brands to engage with their consumers.
Social media platforms now give you the ability to set up shops and link selected parts of your post to the relevant areas on your Ecommerce platform. This allows customers to easily find items on your website that they are interested in from seeing on your social media. Not only this, but it also shortens the buying process, meaning that there is less time between seeing the items and purchasing them so people are not as likely to back out of making purchases.
Shoppable posts are also a useful way of reaching new customers, because, for example, an influencer may tag a brand in a post to show where they’ve bought something, from which consumers may then go to visit the said brand’s Instagram. Once they have reached the Instagram page consumers can instantly get an idea of the pricing of items without even having to visit their website.
Other forms of interactive content that could become 2020 digital marketing trends (or maybe 2021 trends) for industries such as interior design or architecture are augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). This immersive technology allows consumers to think outside the box and not have to imagine what a product will look like in their home. From an architectural point of view, things can be scaled up to allow buyers to see what their new home will look like once it has been built while it’s still just a blueprint! They will actually be able to see the final result before construction has even begun.
If you’re interested in finding out more about immersive technology and how this could work for your brand, get in touch with Fuel today.
****************
We could go on forever going through the 2020 digital marketing trends, but we would be here hours and we really don’t want to bore you with a 10-page report on all of them. That said, if you’d like to discuss how to keep your business up to date on the latest trends and utilising the relevant tools to help your brand grow, the team at Fuel Communications would be happy to help.