Marketers and brands are constantly seeking out new ways to best communicate with their customers, grow brand recognition and connect with potential customers, All in an effort to drive sales and ultimately revenue.
Over the years new technologies, customer behaviors and platforms push marketers to alter their strategies and advertising techniques.
Here’s a quick look at the top ten marketing trends for 2020.
Continual advancement of data analytics and analysis based marketing
Marketing ROI is an important metric to make sure that you are getting more out of your marketing than what you putting into it. Utilizing data analytics that carefully track spend, conversion, targeting, engagement and placement can help you to make more informed and data drive decisions. We always recommend A/B testing with any advertising campaign; especially digital campaigns as this will let you have the information necessary to continually refine your marketing spend and reach over time.
Virtual and Augmented Realty
Engagement is key for any advertiser. The more engaged an audience is, the more likely they are to make a purchase. Virtual and Augmented reality have become more accessible to more brands than ever before. Whether a basic 360 video or full blow virtual reality game like experiences, your audience connects and engages with virtual reality in a way that no medium has done previously. Particularly for tradeshows, if you want to be in the top 5-10% of stands, strongly consider building a VR experience, you’ll be amazed at the traffic it will generate. VR will continue to become more widely adopted over the next few years as it becomes more mainstream.
Video content
A few years ago, video content was a great addition to any online presence, but now it is basically required. SEO algorithms favor companies that have rich content such as videos, and videos are a great way to show off a product, case study or just build engagement through a promo video. For tech startups and app companies, having a great explainer video for your website and app store is so universal now, that for any product launch a video is on the “essential” list of things to do.
More closely adjusting marketing to current events
Brands are reacting quicker to current events than ever before. Social media including facebook, youtube, linkedin and instagram have given marketers a direct means of reacting to news and current events. Taking advantage of this ability can give brands an immense rise in social media shares, likes and exposure particularly if the brand is taking the “public’s side” in current situations.
Changes in Social Media
Social media changes very quickly and figuring out the best way to take advantage of the newest trends in social media can be challenging. Marketers have mixed feelings about Facebook, as the recent pull of ad spend by companies like Honda has shown, but in our judgement facebook is here to stay and with so many people on facebook, it can’t be ignored. Tiktok and linkedin are also becoming more popular as tools for brands. Linkedin provides a unique B2B targeting ability that is generally less effective on facebook or instagram.
SEO is evolving – Always
SEO experts are always testing the latest changes to google’s search algorithin, and 2020 is no different. The focus is even more so on creating meaningful content that your audience wants and that is relevant. No longer is keyword and backlink spamming good enough. Google takes into account your page headline, how likely a user is to bookmark a page, how often the material is referenced, page loading, content quality. The list continues, but for any company with a large web presence, continuing to optimize SEO and search engine ranking is key, both for large national companies or smaller regional Tennessee companies. In order to stay on top, you have to continue to push yourself to build better and better content that provides meaningful information to viewers.
Mobile is still half of web traffic
There is no excuse in 2020 to have a website that doesn’t work well on mobile devices. Around 50% of total web traffic is on mobile devices, particularly instagram, Facebook, reddit etc. So it is no surprise that if your website doesn’t work well on mobile, you are being penalized by google’s algorithm. Beyond the SEO ranking aspect, you need a website that works well on mobile BECAUSE HALF OF ALL INTERSETNUSERS SEARCH ON MOBILE! So you would be potentially losing out on half of your web traffic if your site doesn’t convey and convert well on mobile devices. This trend will continue as more and more smart devices are sold including web browsers in cars and on treadmills!
Interactive is key
Marketers don’t just want a viewer to look, listen, or see something; they want them to interact with them! So regardless of what media type you focus on try to build interactive content. This could be something as simple as a poll on social media, a simple game, a web calculator on your website or more complex VR or 360 videos. Interactive content gets viewers involved in ways that traditional content can’t. Now is the time to start thinking about interactive content of some kind, if you competitors have it and you don’t well you’re in trouble! And if they don’t and you do, then it is a clear advantage for you.
Omni channel advertising is now critical
Advertising used to be less integrated between channels. There are so many channels now that it is easy to let some slip through the cracks, but your brand’s messaging and content needs to be seamlessly shared across all channels. Many times as you analyze data for each channel, you’ll find certain channels tend to work better overall for your brand or for certain types of content than others. As you optimize your spend, you can make these alterations to continuously push your ROI up by increasing ad spend for channels that are performing well and lower it for ones that are not. The key is to always be utilizing every channel you can and always be trying something new as a test. Reaching your customers in more places presents more opportunities for them to make a buying decision and to garner more interaction with them as well as simply expand how many potential customers your brand comes in contact with
Messaging in Apps and Text
Utilizing messaging systems on website and across social media platforms is another way to build a relationship and level of personalization that can differentiate you from your competitors. Over the last few years more and more people are using various messaging services and apps, the brands that are able to leverage these to their audience will have a clear advantage to those that do not.
2020 Marketing trends
2020 is proving to be a challenging year for companies around the world as supply chains are disrupted, stores closed, entire industries put on hold. It’s hard to know when things will return to normal or what long term consequences the world will face following the coronavirus pandemic, but what is for certain, is that the companies that are able to quickly adapt will be the winners long term. Marketing is no exception during this time, try new things, continue to refine your current plan, perhaps now is the time to rethink your web content, add a form of virtual reality or interactive content. But one thing is for certain, now is not the time to stop or slow down your marketing, you can be assured your competitors are working hard right now to get ahead, so don’t let them!
Volan Media is a Knoxville, Tennessee based advertising solutions provider that excels in web content, website design, video production, branding solutions and interactive virtual reality experience construction. We’ve work with companies small and large to push their brand to the next level. Give us a shout if we can help!
