Marketing has evolved more rapidly in the last few years, showing no sign of a slowdown in the near future. This applies to the digital marketing landscape as well, enclosing SEO, PPC, social media, and content marketing. As more people are buying things online and e-commerce is growing, there has never been a more important time to get pay-per-click advertising service training from a PPC agency like https://ppcprofessionals.com/
You need to upgrade your digital marketing strategies with the latest trends in today’s internet-connected and high-tech era. This has become essential for businesses to gain success amidst increased competition levels. Because what used to be your panacea last year might not lead you anywhere in the next one.
Table of Contents
Various Channels of Digital Marketing Landscape 2020
Understanding an overview of the digital marketing landscape helps consider the complete realm and prioritize your resources. Let’s have a look at various channels marketers use and how they fit in.
1. Social Media Marketing
Social media is an important channel including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn as huge powerhouses. Besides, Twitter and Pinterest also carry the potential to drive better ROI. Social channels are suitable for business objectives like customer engagement, service, research, and organic conversations.
2. Digital Ads
To meet the branding and marketing objectives of a business, you can simply make use of digital ads. Different platforms such as Social Ads, Display Ads, and Video Ads can help reach a mass audience with ease. However, you should consider one from each of these that fits into your strategy. Also, ensure that you use automation for results as AI makes reporting and analysis of digital marketing results smarter.
3. SEO
Search Engine Optimization is known as the power source for generating hot leads. Achieving the top 3 positions is important because mobile and voice search takes up a huge share of traffic and earning. It can sometimes take years of knowledge to truly understand what it takes to get a specific business website to the top 3 positions of Google organically. Once that is understood generally, there are little nuances within each business vertical that is impossible to know without working within that vertical beforehand. Therefore, to give yourself the best chance of ranking in the top 3 via SEO methods it’s best to hire an SEO agency with significant experience in your specific industry. An easy example of this would be if you owned an auto repair shop then hire an automotive SEO company.
4. Conversation Marketing
In today’s marketing arena, the conversation has grown to be one of the exciting trends. It enables valuable interaction between companies and customers. Mimicking human dialogue helps adapt innovation and smart speakers in conversational messaging, interface, and research query processing. Verbal communication and relevance in a personal tone are known to impact more than email, web, and mobile-based conversations.
5. Lifecycle Marketing
For business growth, your main focus should be on spreading awareness and closely following customers for better prospects and leads. To create a rewarding customer experience, digital tools play a huge role. But online marketing isn’t considered as a driver of revenue from potential customers instead to achieve goals like customer retention.
For effective marketing, communication with a customer over the entire lifecycle should be considered. To review the use of offline and online media among customers, businesses can adapt account-based technology and marketing automation. In the case of the B2B segment, digital marketing activities deliver effective results for thetop of funnel activities only. However, the results are less impactful in the case of re-targeting as well as the bottom and middle funnel activities.
6. Insights-driven Marketing
To optimize the results of digital marketing, businesses use insights and analytics to drive the performance. More marketers are now using data-driven approachesto improve ROI in the digital marketing landscape.
7. Email Marketing
It is still an effective tool despite the immense growth of messaging and social media. You can incorporate the email into your marketing as well as the funnel strategy.
8. CRM
CRM is a tool used to store and access information about customers. However, a few privacy laws have made its use a challenging task for various businesses. Though it is important to capture the information from your customers, it should be done the right way.
9. Mobile
Mobile space is prominently used to define digital marketing landscape today with chatbots and messenger gaining hype. Thus, without a doubt, all digital platforms like websites, ads, social, and email should be mobile app store optimization services.
10. Websites
With every business havingits own website, faster sites for mobile users have become the need of the hour. This is why clear, simple, and clean designs are trending higher than complex ones in the digital landscape.
Digital Marketing Trends 2020
For a better understanding of the landscape, it is essential to know the latest digital marketing trends 2020.Following and incorporating these into your strategy can help generate better results.
1. Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence has emerged as the largest opportunity for commercial businesses, nations, and industries for the next few decades. Besides, business growth by determining consumer behavior and patterns, it will also likely aid an increase in the global GDP. In fact, within the next few years, AI latecomers might find themselves lagging behind in the digital marketing landscape.
AI can also help businesses by collecting data from blog posts, social media platforms, and other sources. This data can be used to understand how the audience finds your services and products. An example of this is the use of natural language software with Facebook messenger to respond to customer queries. This can also promote conversions alongside automating the handling of payments similar to a real person. As of now, artificial intelligence is being implemented in various areas like:
- Chatbots for the customer service
- Product recommendations
- Email personalization
- Basic communication
- Content creation
- Transactions that are E-mail commerce
2. Programmatic Advertising
With a programmed ad, AI can be used to target more specific customers and automate sales. For example, real-time bidding is a kind of ad buying. Automation has proven to be far more efficient and faster in lowering the costs of customer acquisition while increasing conversions. Generally, a search-driven advertising campaign takes into account three or four preferences like time, day, location, and keyword. On the other hand, programmatic platforms can use multiple targeting signals for individual, specific advertising. They also integrate other preferences like user behavior, habits, and lifestyle from the customer data platforms.
3. Chatbots
Chatbots plays an essential role in the digital marketing landscape. Its AI-based technology uses real-time chats and instant messaging to interact with customers or visitors through the day and night. Chatbots are responsive always, respond to queries promptly, recall your whole history accurately, and most important don’t lose patience. This is why many customers prefer to interact with them. A virtual assistant not only delivers amazing customer service but also automates repetitive tasks. Thus, you can rest assured of meeting expectations of customers while focusing on other important tasks.
4. Personalization
The digital marketing landscape will see the growth of personalized products, content, and emails, etc. Customized content is never easy to create. This requires access to a range of data such as consumer behavior, buying history, link clicked, and more. However, it will likely become a necessary aspect as consumers get annoyed with general advertising. Besides, most customers prefer doing business with a company that offers a tailor-made experience.
For example, Amazon and Netflix leverage the power of personalization to promote recommended movie titles and products. Other major brands also incorporate personalization in their campaigns such as Cadbury, Easyjet, and Starbucks. Easyjet launched an email campaign that was data-driven and made use of the customers’ travel history. Using this, they created personalized stories suggesting travelers where they would like to travel the next time. And, when they sent unique emails, click-through rates increased drastically as compared to the non-personalized emails.
5. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing refers to key leaders driving a brand’s message to the mass audience. Influencers can be famous celebrities but YouTube and Instagram personalities with a huge following are preferred. They help spread words about your business or product through their social presence. While AI can also partake in this segment by helping businesses find the right influencers quickly with ease. While influencer marketing is growing due to its potential for generating a positive ROI:
- This approach helps eliminate spambots and fake engagement
- With NLP, you can determine the influencer performance
- Evaluate the influence of an influencer
- With ANN, you can predict the incentives as well
6. Messaging apps
Messaging apps have become the most common channel of communication among internet users. Businesses are likely to gain an advantage of this high rate of use as:
- Statista says Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion active users per month
- And, communication between customers and businesses amounts to billion messages per month.
- 55 million messages are exchanged on WhatsApp, having a monthly active userbase of 1.6 billion.
- Also, WhatsApp, Messenger, and WeChat, the top social messaging apps, have more users than Youtube and Facebook.
People spend more time chatting with each other. Providing customer service over messaging apps will add value to the customer’s experience through a personalized approach. Being an easy and direct way to interact with customers, businesses will use these apps to:
- Boost sales
- Provide assistance and support
- Deliver the information
- Involve a person in events
- Cultivate the contact
7. Visual Search
Visual search allows a user to upload an image for fetching more related results. The search tool in Pinterest allows users to upload a photo to search for similar or related items. However, visual search technology adds much more to just image search:
- When you are shopping through your favorite sites or magazines, Pincode type technology allows you to find inspiration.
- Pinterest partnered with Target allowing users to search the desired catalog from the real-world or by using specific products.
- An image search engine used by Google, Google Lens, recognizes landmarks and objects through the phone’s camera app. CamFind is also a visual search mobile app that allows finding anything from your mobile by simply clicking a picture.
8. Voice Search
This segment offers an effortless way of providing information related to the search term that a user provides through voice. Voice assistants such as Siri, Google, and Alexa use AI to evolve and minimize errors. In addition to providing search results, voice search also creates an optimized and unique user experience. Brands are likely to use it to encourage relationships and create brand loyalty.
9. Omni-channel Marketing
It is the process of using different channels to deliver seamless support experience. Omni-channel builds upon the aspects of the multichannel experience. Most SAAS companies offer robust tools for effective handling of customer service requests across channels. Customers demand personalization and want to able to view products on one channel and purchase on the other. However, if you fail to keep up with up-to-date trends, someone else can hit the target. To understand customer behavior and personalize at an individual level, big data and AI play an important role in the digital marketing landscape.
10. Predictive Analytics
This practice combines the use of predictive modeling, machine learning, and data mining. And, analyzing the data can help identify patterns and predict the future as well. Predictive analytics has gone widespread and a sophisticated approach in various industries. For example, a credit score. Having this score in hand helps predict a person’s financial behavior and predict future activities and leverages.
In digital marketing, it helps improve segmentation, individual personalization, and advanced scoring. This, in turn, helps enhance the loyalty of customers. Whereas, Augmented Analytics is used to automate data insights because it utilizes natural language and machine learning. In the coming year, predictive analysis is expected to grow more and include smarter technologies, promoting data-driven strategies.
11. Progressive Web Apps
These web apps are actually websites that work similarly to mobile apps. They provide functionalities that are native to a mobile app such as push notifications, quick load time, working offline, etc. Thus, progressive web apps allow developers to develop web apps for any device as well as a platform. With mobile users increasing year by year, the use of these web-based replicas of mobile apps might increase.
12. More Emphasis on Geo-fencing
With the increment of mobile use, the use of geofencing has also increased. It allows real-time targeting that is based on a customer’s location. A text message or push notification sent to a mobile user when he enters or leaves a restaurant is an example of geo-based targeting. With local SEO gaining more hype, marketers are likely to focus more focus on geo-fencing in 2020
Final Words
The digital marketing landscape has evolved significantly with the evolution of the connected era and new technologies. With this rapid growth, it is essential to have an understanding of digital marketing trends 2020 to develop better strategies.
