6 Digital Marketing Trends Every Business Should Consider In 2020!

In 2020, we’ll see new digital marketing trends alongside some older, ongoing trends that are still effective. If you’re out-of-date with your digital marketing trends, you’re limiting your brand in both reach and repetition. You may be blissfully unaware of new marketing trends, but your target customers and your competitors are not. And since the digital marketing scene is constantly changing, you definitely have to make your business stand out of the crowd. Here's a summary of the top 6 digital marketing trends we will see explode in 2020.

Shoppable posts

As number of Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest users are growing and buying impulses are triggered through feeds and stories, businesses are realizing the impact social can have on their ecommerce sales with measurable numbers and increased traffic. According to Instagram, the number of active worldwide users is 1 billion and 90% of them are following shopping brands. "Social commerce" refers to buying products directly through social media posts or ads while you don’t need to leave the site or app. Since Instagram Checkout launched in March 2019, shoppable social media posts are rapidly getting more and more attention. Why? Because they just make sense!

 At least 54% of people on social media use it to research product purchases. The goal is to create fewer steps for your shoppers, not more, so selling directly on social media reduces the chances of sales abandonment. You don’t even need to be an ecommerce brand. As long as you sell products, no matter how few pieces they are, you can see bigger returns by allowing transactions through social media.

SERP position zero & Optimizing for featured snippets

The rise of featured snippet on the search engine result pages (SERP) has been so notable. The featured snippet appears in the highly coveted “position zero” in Google’s search engine results pages, making you don’t need to click through to a website to get the information you’re looking for anymore as it’s right there on the Google search results page.

This on-SERP information may appear in various places, but the most sought after position is right at the top of the page, before the organic listings. This position has been dubbed “position zero” as it’s often the only information that a searcher will view, it’s highly coveted as it is on the top list of digital marketing trends 2020. Over 60% of search results returned by Google are now position zero search results.

As a result, more marketers will be investing their resources in On-SERP SEO, which is the practice of optimizing web pages with the goal of claiming as much space in Google SERPs as possible. This boosts your click-through rate (CTR), driving more organic traffic to your site and increases the likelihood of claiming the top spot.

Voice search

Voice search has started to pick-up pace and just as predicted few years ago “50% of online searches will be voice-based in 2020”. Besides using smart speakers like Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana or Google Home to answer users' questions, brands can leverage these devices to provide voice-service for their customers. Additionally, AI is getting smarter and the number of errors made by voice assistants has reduced greatly.

The increasing use of voice search has made it important for companies to rethink their digital marketing strategies in 2020. For example:

•         Domino’s allows pizza-lovers to order from the comfort of their couch without having to pick up the phone or even place an online order.
•         PayPal users can engage Siri to send money to friends, family or businesses.
•         Nestlé created a skill that provides voice instructions as you cook.

So even if your brand isn’t ready for smart speaker advertising, it’s important that your content is optimized for voice search. This has the added bonus of making your content more likely to be picked up as a featured snippet or found on position zero on Google.

Social messaging apps

The total number of active users on Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat combined is 4+ Billion. Since people are spending more time messaging each other, it makes sense to market your company’s products and services where your potential customers are hanging out. More businesses are going to expand their customer engagement channels and adopt at least 1 to 2 new messaging platforms in 2020. This will help them effectively communicate with their audience and improve their personalization strategies. This also allows customers who are worried about anonymity to directly reach out to brands and interact using their preferred channel.

Social messaging apps allow personalization and add value to the user experience. In addition, people expect businesses to have a presence on messaging apps because it’s a direct and easy way to interact with them.

Personalization

Increased data collection and advancements in technology have had a huge impact on the level of personalization that is possible and on what consumers expect from their interactions with brands. 80% of consumers say they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences. So, if you want to stand out in 2020, you need to personalize your marketing – and that means personalized content, products, emails and more.

It's asserted that personalized, triggered emails based on behavior are 3x better than batch-and-blast emails. Marketing personalization is no longer limited to automatically changing the name of the person you’re addressing in your email newsletters. Improvements in technology such as AI combined with increased data collection and insights from social media and other sources have made it possible and easy to hyper-personalize everything from content to design to product recommendations and everything in-between.

Micro-influencers

Influencer marketing is a type of word-of-mouth marketing that focuses on using key leaders to amplify your brand message to a larger market. 63% of consumers trust influencers’ opinions of products much more than what brands say about themselves.

Micro-influencer is a term that we’re seeing more and more lately. It refers to the medium-sized influencers with narrower niches—popular enough to be influential, still in touch with their followers and not overloaded with sponsorship offers. Micro-influencers are more affordable and also often have a better engagement rate than the more popular influencers.

Categorized as accounts with around 30,000 followers, micro-influencers had 60% higher engagement while being 6.7x more cost-effective than influencers with more followers.

Additionally, it’s easier to specialize in a niche with micro-influencers, as they often represent niches themselves. Social media “influence” is now a commodity and an expensive one at that. Rather than competing with global enterprises for the top-tier influencers, small- and medium-sized businesses are opting instead to work with small- and medium-sized influencers.

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