“Digital Marketing = SEO + PPC + Marketing Automation + Social Media + much more”

Digital Marketing plays a crucial role in the growth of a business. The latest technologies and tools have forced organizations to adopt digital marketing for leading the competition. In this blog, we have mentioned the digital marketing trends of 2020 that can help generate higher ROI.

Social Commerce and Shoppable Posts

Buying products directly through social media or ads without leaving the site or app is termed as Social Commerce. Shoppable social media posts are not a new thing. Pinterest was one of the first channels that offered shoppable posts. But shoppable posts grabbed a lot more attention since 2019 when Instagram Checkout was launched. Instagram Checkout helped Instagram users to complete their purchase without switching apps or signing in to an unknown store. It also prevented the risk of sales abandonment.

For selling your products, it is not necessary to be an e-commerce brand. You can sell a few pieces of branding merchandise and get higher returns by enabling transactions through social media.

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic Advertising refers to utilizing artificial intelligence technology to automate ad buying for targeting a more specific audience. Real-time bidding is a time-consuming and stressful task that can be automated. Such type of programmatic advertising is fast and more efficient and leads to higher conversions and lower customer acquisition costs. Tasks such as ad buying, media buying, customer targeting, and performance tracking can be easily handled by the software. Hence, automating such tasks helps you to concentrate on other more important tasks.

“E-marketers had forecasted that 86.2% of digital display ads in the US will be programmatic by 2020.”

Chatbots

Chatbots is an AI-based technology that will continue to be in trend this year. This technology uses instant messaging to chat with customers in real-time. Consumers prefer to interact with chatbots rather than interacting with a customer care executive over the phone. Such virtual assistants provide outstanding customer service as they are available 24X7, respond quickly, recall your purchase history, need no break or salary,  and do not lose patience. They can automate repetitive tasks that help you to focus on your core business. Therefore, more businesses should involve chatbots as it is one of the fastest-growing digital-marketing trends.

“According to a survey, 85% of customer service will be powered by chatbots by 2020”.

Video Marketing

People mostly prefer to learn about new products through videos. With the increasing usage of mobile devices, long-form sales pages and emails are difficult to read on small screens. So, the best way to present the same information is through a format that works perfectly in all devices (mobile or desktop).

“A website that includes video is 50 times more likely to drive organic traffic as compared to text.”

Since video content is more compelling, Google gives higher ranking to pages that include videos. Moreover, it is easy to reformat video content. For instance, if you have recorded a video for your YouTube channel, you can use its audio for making a podcast episode.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing means marketing brands through influencers such as well-known celebrities and Instagram or YouTube personalities. Influencers help to spread the word about a product or business through their social channels. Consumers trust the opinion of an influencer more than what the brand claims about itself. Hence, influencer marketing is much more authentic than corporate advertising.

It is important to find influencers by searching for people who reach your target demographic and then sponsor them as brand advocates.

“Leveraging influencers for brand marketing can generate an ROI that is 11 times more than any other digital marketing methods.”

Voice Search

“According to a source, 50% of the searches will be voice search by 2020. ”

Nowadays, people prefer to interact verbally rather than typing their queries. Smart devices like Google, Alexa, and Siri are also in sync with the way people want to search, discover new things, or do shopping. When a person asks a device to search, the device replies verbally. It may give a few choices or only one choice.

In 2020, more businesses are exploring new ideas of using smart speakers as a lucrative channel for driving sales. If you want to target voice search users, you must ensure to write in a conversational tone and focus on keywords that people generally speak. In this way, your website will get the coveted position zero or featured snippets on Google.

Social Media Stories

Snapchat was the first social media platform that introduced the concept of “My Story” (short and sweet pictures or videos that disappear after 24 hours). As this concept got more and more popular, other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram also introduced stories, and YouTube introduced its own story format, “Reels”. All these stories disappear after a certain time period. Hence, marketers took advantage of the fear of missing out (FOMO) and started to increase brand awareness through social media stories. Such stories helped businesses reach a younger audience, and increase traffic to their websites. It is a cost-effective method and helped in constant engagement with followers.

You can use social media stories in various ways such as add location tags, use polls within Instagram stories, and add links to your social media stories.

Interactive Content

Interactive Content is one of the latest digital marketing trends. Interactive content means anything on which the user clicks, swipes, or interacts with online.

“93% of marketers believe that interactive content is a highly effective approach for educating the consumer or buyer.”

Unlike traditional text-based content, interactive content is more engaging and memorable. It is more likely to generate better results for your business needs. Therefore, this year more companies will use different types of interactive content (such as Quizzes & Polls, Embedded Calculators, 360-degree videos, and augmented reality ads).

Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing means marketing across multiple platforms such as apps, email, social media, and blogs. This strategy enables businesses to connect with consumers on more digital touchpoints and offer better user-experience.

If you deliver a seamless, consistent voice and cohesive brand message across all channels, you can experience much better results.

 “According to a report, Omnichannel marketing engages its customers over three times as compared to a single-channel approach.”

Marketing through multiple channels leads to higher customer retention, higher purchase frequency, and higher average order value.

With the improvement in AI technology, companies can use machine learning and data insights to understand customer behaviors in a better way and then personalize it to the maximum level.

Conclusion

“Digital marketing is a game-changer for any business.”

We have listed the most popular digital marketing trends for 2020 that can make a huge difference in any business. Digital marketing trends keep on changing, which is why one has to keep an eye on the latest trends and accordingly plan a strategy to generate business profits.