Featured article by Calvin Paige, Independent Technology Author
With a new year comes new endeavors and challenges for marketers who are looking to stay current and ensure their efforts are still relevant to their audiences. There is no doubt that digital marketing has had a tremendous effect on how advertising has changed and adapted to meet different consumer needs and wants. There is also no question that the digital marketing landscape changes rapidly and what may have worked incredibly well for your brand last year may not provide the same results this year.
This is why it’s necessary for marketers to always stay on top of new and emerging trends. The last thing you want is your brand to become stale and fade away into the background because you aren’t up to speed on what audiences are interacting with and paying attention to.
Stay organized
One tip to remember is that no matter what strategy you employ this year, it’s critical you stay organized. One of the most common ways businesses waste time is when employees are trying to sort through and find documents or assets in a cluttered and messy folder. If you’ve ever worked for a company that has a larger team or sends and receives assets from a large number of different players, such as retailers, partners, or anyone who you outsource to, then you know how easy it is to lose files or spend ages trying to track down the right one.
With digital assets still remaining the top way to market to engage with audiences, businesses should ensure they have their file organization systems down pat before the busy season rolls around. Digital asset management, or DAM, software exists for this exact reason, and it can help you and your business stay organized. Brandfolder is a great example of DAM software that does it all for you, so you spend less time looking for assets and more time creating.
Ready to get started? Here are the top four digital marketing trends that are essential for any business in 2020.
1. Personalized customer experiences
There has been an undeniable shift in how marketers target people over the last few years, but this year is the year customer experience will become a priority for many brands. Where it used to be all about convincing your audience that they need to buy from your company, it’s now moved towards providing customer experiences that leave your audience wanting more, hopefully with the goal of getting them to return to your brand in the future.
Personalization is essentially the new baseline approach to marketing. Offering your social media and website visitors some sort of personalized experience will help immensely when it comes to converting them into customers. Otherwise, your message is too generalized and doesn’t give your visitors the impression that their experience is all about them. Find out what your business can do to personalize every visitor’s experience in some way, both online and offline.
2. Automation
From automating SEO to customer service inquiries to mobile marketing, automation is making the marketing playing field much more even. Smaller businesses with much lower budgets than huge global companies will have the same opportunities to market to their audiences, despite having such a massive budgetary discrepancy. A marketing playing field that is more even across the board means that you need to leverage automation and AI in order to do well. If all of your competitors are using it and you aren’t, you won’t last very long. AI and automation move faster and changes and updates quicker than humans, so if you want to compete, you have to get on board.
3. Shoppable posts
Shoppable posts isn’t exactly a new idea, but since Instagram launched Instagram Checkout in 2019, it’s been rapidly growing in popularity to the point where 2020 will see it become a staple marketing technique. Marketers know the general goal is to reduce the number of clicks it takes for a customer to go from browsing to purchasing because every click along the way is just another opportunity for the customer to drop off. Fewer clicks mean more conversions, so it’s no surprise that brands are jumping on the latest technological trend of shoppable posts.
With shoppable posts, businesses can link specific products in social media posts directly to their online store to save visitors from clicking out of the post, searching for the item and eventually getting to the store. Instead, you can keep your visitors on your post, page or app to discourage sales abandonment.
4. Micro- and nano-influencers
Influencer marketing is another marketing trend that has been around for a few years now, but the way it’s done is changing. The massive success of influencer marketing meant macro-influencers are now the ones with most of the control, and it’s become quite an expensive endeavor to create influencer campaigns.
Instead of spending a huge chunk of cash on top-tier influencers, smaller businesses are working with smaller influencers who charge less and still have the attention of audiences brands are after. Working with micro- and nano-influencers (influencers with less than 50,000 followers) also offers a better ROI since they are more affordable, have a higher engagement rate than popular mega-influencers, and are open to creating more customized campaigns for a variety of niches.
