All hail to the digital world of the 21st century! Digital Marketing Trends – The magnificent realm of technology where we can count on the power of the internet to find a quick fix to all our needs and problems almost magically.
Ain’t being surrounded by countless digital wonders just amazing?
We live in times when everything from communication, education, entertainment, shopping, and even healthcare has become highly digital and internet-driven.
The growing digital needs of the consumers made 34% of the companies to go through a digital transition and encouraged another 31% to start a digital transformation program very soon.
In this high-tech age, adopting a digital-first approach to marketing allows companies to reach out to an enormous targeted audience easily, which in turn boosts their brand image, sales, market share, and value.
But wait, what exactly digital marketing entails? Wondering this, then read on to find the answer:
All You Need to Know About Digital Marketing
Today, easy access to top-notch digital technologies such as smartphones, Windstream internet, digital TV or radio, Americans spend more than 11 hours of their day on their electronic devices. Hence, digital marketing is extremely crucial for all businesses to create brand awareness and loyalty to fight the cut-throat competition in the market.
In layman’s terms, digital marketing encircles all advertising, marketing efforts, and tactics that involve the use of electronic devices or the internet to reach out to customers where they spend a huge chunk of their time i.e. online.
For Digital Marketing Trends: digital marketing, businesses use online channels such as social media platforms, email, search engines, web applications, and websites to engage and interact with existing or potential customers to offer them an enhanced customer experience.
These days, while traditional marketing can still be seen in print advertisements, physical or telemarketing, brands are extensively using numerous digital mediums to grab endless marketing opportunities. This, in turn, allows them to target a greater market share and bag as many customers as they can to ensure their survival.
Since almost all brands nowadays have a website, social media presence or access to various digital platforms, digital content and marketing have become increasingly common as customers rely on them to make buying decisions.
Whether consumers want to purchase Spectrum TV essentials, beauty products, washing machines, diamond rings or even cars, they immediately jump on the World Wide Web to learn about brands. That is why 47% of the purchases in the world are made online.
To cut it short, if you own a business and want to stand tall amongst your competitors then embracing digital marketing tactics or digital marketing trends and tools enthusiastically is the key to achieve success in this high-tech age.
Types of Digital Marketing Campaigns
To enrich your knowledge further, let’s just quickly skim through the 5 main types of online digital marketing that can help a business drive engagement, traffic, revenue, and conversions.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization allows marketers to increase a site’s or website page’s ranking in the organic or unpaid search lists of search engine results pages.
As per HubSpot, 64% of the marketers tend to vigorously invest in SEO for better gains as SEO increases a brand’s visibility, reach and authority efficiently by getting more visitors, traffic, digital branding, and conversions.
SEO is done via various practices such as guest blogging, producing high-quality content, using images and videos, Metadata, direct mail, and many more.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Considering there are more than 4 billion internet users in the world, SEM aids businesses target market online through posting ads on search engines such as Bing, Google or Yahoo.
Search Engine Marketing is one of the most key types of digital marketing techniques that help brands optimize their brand’s presence and conversions via paid and unpaid advertisements.
Content Marketing
This is one of the most significant types of digital marketing that involves managing and executing various kinds of engaging digital media content such as blogs, e-books, infographics, videos, landing pages and social media posts to attract an audience.
By designing, distributing, publishing, promoting and sharing attention-grabbing yet relevant content on different digital marketing channels allows brands to catch and convert targeted users into long-term customers.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
SMM is one of the newest and most sought-after types of digital marketing that enables marketers to build and improve their brand image in a contemporary yet strategic way.
This type of digital marketing is used by many businesses these days to optimize their brand’s, product’s or service’s image as up to 40% of digital users rely on social networks to learn about brands or products.
Creating and posting high-quality and well-targeted content or ads that are jazzed up with gorgeous text and videos on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest or Snapchat, etc. is the key to a successful SMM campaign in 2020.
Email Marketing
Since there are 3 times more email accounts as compared to Facebook or Twitter accounts, email marketing can be quite fruitful as a digital marketing campaign if done the right way.
Most of us have left a website at some point in time after abandoning a filled shopping cart. Haven’t we?
With email marketing, brands can build deeper relationships with their customers through relationship marketing that allows them to generate leads and ensure conversions at a nominal cost as compared to traditional mediums.
It enables marketers to communicate with them via well-designed emails. These emails have reminders along with product descriptions or recommendations based on their preferences that might ignite their interest to make a purchase.
Key Digital Marketing Trends in 2020
Digital Marketing landscape is constantly evolving and being outdated can adversely affect your brand’s outreach and reputation. To help you stay ahead in the game, we have decided to give you a quick rundown of the 7 top-of-the-line digital marketing trends in 2020.
AI and Everything Nice
Do you know what a chatbot is? A chatbot is an intricately built Artificial Intelligence (AI) software that can simulate a chat with a customer in human-like language via websites, mobile apps, messaging apps or over the telephone.
Since customers want everything and they want it right that instant, using chatbots can help businesses upgrade their customer service by offering 24/7, prompt, personalized and focused interactions to customers without lags.
AI can gather detailed data insights on customers and analyze it thoroughly, which allows bots to automate basic customer support operations. This way potential customers won’t turn away after waiting in long-queues to talk to a customer sales rep.
Unlike human marketers, chatbots don’t need any rest or sleep and can offer a 24 hours service. That is why according to Oracle’s search report, 80% of the businesses are ready to employ chatbots this year, making it one of the top digital marketing trends in 2020!
Give a More Engaging Email Experience
Since email still remains an integral part of communication, this fruitful digital channel will continue to be used by digital marketers in 2020 with a little revamping here and there.
In 2020, highly appealing, well-designed and pixel-perfect emails will take over plain newsletters and drab text emails.
Email marketing will be carried out in a way that the emails look less like texts and more like gorgeous web pages that come with engaging videos, clickable buttons, and other engaging features.
These well-articulated email designs with their visually tempting UX designs will attract customers, increase conversions, boost sales and build a better customer base and brand image.
Create Shoppable Posts
Even though shoppable posts were introduced on social media platforms two years ago, they still continue to be a digital marketing trend in 2020.
Since many people buy products directly through social media, creating and publishing shoppable ads or posts on social media spaces such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, etc ensure direct selling, save customer’s time and reduce the chances of sales abandonment.
It doesn’t matter what kind of business you own, as long as you are able to bag customers via interactive ads, you will experience minimum bounce rate, shrink sales funnel and get greater returns by permitting social media transactions.
Amp-up your Voice Search Game
In 2020, digital marketers cannot ignore voice search as it is predicted that this year 50% of online searches will be voice-based, skyrocketing voice shopping to a whopping $40 billion by 2022.
Using long-tail keywords to facilitate voice search will allow brands to give relevant information to people who are searching for a good or service via using voice search or assistants such as Siri, Alexa or Google.
Many brands such as Nestle, Paypal, Domino’s and some others have already started to incorporate voice search in their digital marketing campaigns to offer more value-added content to their customers.
AI-driven Advertising
AI and machine learning are capable of collecting, interpreting and analyzing customer behavior and purchasing patterns based on their recent online activity, geo-tagging or recent searches.
Just like chatbots can efficiently interact with users to optimize customer service, AI and machine learning algorithms can be designed to optimize your online ad campaigns.
In 2020, using an AI-driven software for ad placement, performance tracking, media buying, and targeting customers will not only bring fruitful results but will save a lot of time and energy for a marketer to focus on other tasks.
Searching for appropriate advertising avenues and carrying out real-time bidding can be nerve-wracking and using AI automation will help a business deal with these tasks easily.
Also Read: Excessive Social Media Usage: Reason Behind Anxiety, Insomnia, and Loneliness
The rise of Social Influencers
Social influencers have been playing a significant role in aiding brands to achieve their digital marketing goals as there is a whopping 88% of customers who rely on online reviews to make purchases.
However this year, brands are more inclined towards approaching micro social media influencers with smaller following instead of reaching out to huge internet celebrities. This way their products don’t get lost in the noise of innumerable paid reviews and sponsored posts on a big influencer’s feed.
Another reason why micro-influencers are gaining traction is that other than mailing free samples to the big influencers, brands also need to pay them to post reviews on their channels, which adds to the cost.
This majorly applies to small-scale brands that are willing to penetrate the market and increase their market share and value. Small-scale influencers may have a little fan following but they can help a brand directly target a potential audience qualitatively by establishing one-on-one conversations with followers.
If we only look at micro-influencers on Instagram, their engagement rate is 7x greater than influencers with a larger number of followers. The increasing numbers and popularity of micro-influencers have made them one of the major parts of digital marketing campaigns of brands in 2020.
Get in the DM
This year, Facebook Messenger, Instagram DMs or social apps like WhatsApp or Viber will not only be used by people, but also by brands to carry out personal interactions with their customers.
Since 89% of the people use social networking apps, communicating with the customers via DMs (Direct Messages) will allow brands to address their complaints and queries, take sales orders and promote their product in less time as compared to over-the-phone conversations.
With DMs, companies will be able to target a larger audience with more personalized yet prompt interactions that can help them in building a broader customer base.
Takeaway
In 2020 and beyond, digital marketing is all about enhancing the “content experiences” of customers to offer them more personalized purchasing mediums, engagement, and interaction.
As digital marketing trends rapidly evolve in the digital marketing world, its high time for brands to gear up to cater to needs of the fast-growing tech-savvy population of this age who loves eye-candy and speedy responses.
Since this article has enlightened you on various emerging and exciting ways to enhance your customers’ experiences, have you decided yet which ones you’ll be trying first to revamp your digital marketing campaigns?
