Posted 18.12.2019
By Rob Twells
With the new year fast approaching, it’s important you start planning for the next year of business. Now more than ever, it’s key that you stay on top of trends to keep ahead of the competition. This list is compiled of all the digital marketing trends that you need to keep an eye on and consider for your marketing campaigns in 2020.
In the coming year, it is going to be key to make sure that your digital campaign includes video. With Youtube being the second most visited site on the internet, and more minutes being watched than ever before, getting onboard with this upward trend is going to be a big part of digital marketing in 2020.
It has been predicted that video will consume 82% of all traffic by 2022, with nearly 3 trillion minutes of video being watched per month. Focusing on building organic video content is key to boosting SEO performance too. Not only can video be found on Youtube itself, but also within Google searches! Focus on including videos on your landing pages to help visually explain your written content, better engaging your audience in the process. Putting out this type of visual content is going to be a huge help as it can be distributed across several different platforms to reach and engage an even wider audience.
Not only can you market yourself using your videos, but you can capitalise on the ad space that video streaming sites can provide. With 78% of people watching online videos every week, and 55% viewing online videos every day – why not make the most of the ad space that companies like youtube are offering?
In a recent study carried out by Sparktoro, we learned that less than half of all Google searches now result in a click. This could be due to the increased amounts of Google’s featured snippets, making it increasingly simpler to find the answer to your query without having to click onto a website and search through the content. A key example of this is through live sports scores, flight information, hotel reviews, restaurant reviews and recipes. So whilst this means that in the coming year just because your traffic may drop slightly, don’t worry, remember to focus on your SERP visibility as well as traffic.
With Google becoming much smarter through artificial intelligence-based algorithms, old school SEO is becoming a thing of the past. No longer is it a case of changing page metadata and adding more content. There are Google submitted patents in place that use user engagement signals, such as time on a page and user click-through rates that are used as ranking factors.
What does this mean for your business?
Make sure you have a closer working relationship with design and development teams to structure your page for optimal UX (user experience). It’s also a good idea to start measuring advanced UX signals in Google analytics, such as average session duration and bounce rate to get a better idea of user behaviour. You can also use custom Javascript events to measure content consumption depth, single element (button) engagement, rage clicking (3 clicks in 1 second). These insights will allow you to understand what is being positively consumed on your landing pages, and make better informed structural changes to improve engagement rates.
With the wide variety of sites and methods that you’re now able to market through, it’s worth not going full steam into one method and making sure that you distribute your resources to see what is most effective. Why not try a ‘test and learn’ budget? This it allows you to be nimble and change the way you’re marketing as trends change. A good example of this most recently is now being able to put ad spend into sites such as Pinterest and Reddit. Marketing is all about experimentation, discover what works best for your organisation.
First it was Snapchat, now they’re everywhere. Stories have taken social media by storm this year, with the introduction of Instagram, Facebook and Youtube it’s allowed you to:-
By putting out limited offers on your story, you can give your audience FOMO (Fear of missing out), and increase your conversion rate. Also, the use of polls on social media stories allows you to see what your customers are wanting and can build hype around an event. Make the most of all of those interactive features on social media.
Mentioned 2 years ago in our ‘Upcoming Marketing Trends 2018’ micro moments are all about offering the user what they need in the moment a need to go, do, know or buy basis. With 2020 being the year of 5G and with more of us on our phones than ever, the need for information ‘in the moment’ will only grow. So what does this mean for your business? It’s your job to focus on providing the information users want when they want it, as quickly as possible.
With the Facebook scandal of 2019, online security and privacy have become a big concern to many. Earlier this year, Apple introduced ITP 2.1-2.3, essentially limiting the use of Google analytics. You can no longer track users’ activity across domains and between visits more than a day apart, it will still be reporting traffic but the original source may be classified inaccurately as direct as opposed to organic or paid. ITP has very significant implications for web analytics, and breaks user tracking in some major ways:
This trend is expected to carry on into 2020 with Chrome and Firefox also following suit and increasing their privacy features.
Voice assistants have been a massive trend this year. The use of the Google nest, Amazon’s Alexa and Facebook messenger has grown considerably, and it is predicted that over the course of 2020 the number of users will rise to over four billion. In the marketing world, we’re already reaching a stage where these assistants are starting to be monetised by the use of voice ads.
Visual search platforms such as Pinterest have seen a huge traffic increase from 250 million monthly active users to 291 million. Being able to shop and search visually is a fresh change for a lot of customers as they are able to find similar products to what they like, helping users to discover new brands, and better convert from the platform.
Interactive content is set to become massive in 2020, so how are you going to make the most of it? There are many ways to make your content interactive, from simple online quizzes and polls up to full-scale projects with AR/VR/360 Video. A brilliant free feature you can do on your social media is the use of shoppable ads, by having these adverts you can easily convert a click into a sale because it takes your customer straight to your products with ease.
One of 2019’s biggest trends has been automation, and in 2020 this is set to continue. PPC is now able to be largely automated however, involvement will help to add value through intelligent budget diversification and smart audience targeting. Fundamentally, poor data will result in poor decision making, using as much first-party data as possible will boost the performance of any automated bidding platform. Expanded audience targeting has already begun rolling out in Googles’ affinity audiences for search and seasonal event audiences – expect more advanced audience targeting options in 2020 as major platforms continue to compete for advertising spend.
Let our digital marketing team help you out and make the most out of the marketing trends going forward! You can book a free consultation with us here.
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