The changing trends of digital marketing in 2020

The move into 2020 with the impact of COVID-19 also comes with a shift in digital marketing. New trends are entering the marketplace and your company needs to pay attention or you may be forced by the wayside. With the need to become more visible and reach more customers, the digital marketing of tomorrow offers advancements in emerging technologies as consumers demand a more integrated experience.

The New Shape of Social Media with Augmented Reality (AR)

Content marketers are already using AR to promote everything from makeup to humanitarian campaigns. While Augmented Reality (AR) is also being used as a mainstream technology in social media, since then, the experience has improved and become more accessible. 

Unlike virtual reality, Augmented Reality (AR) doesn’t require a headset, which makes it easier to adopt. The technology superimposes digital content onto the real world in front of you, altering the existing space – all you need is a smartphone and forward-facing camera in hand. 

Augmented Reality allows the user to see the unseen, imagine art in its original setting, and understand how objects were used and experienced in people’s everyday lives. It’s an exciting way to incorporate the latest technology into the visitor experience.

When we think of AR on social media, Snapchat’s face filters are likely the first thing that comes to mind. Before Snapchat’s filters, though, there was Google Glass. Augmented Reality (AR) found new life in smartphones and social media apps. Through filters and effects, AR began to stumble toward becoming a mainstream reality as users experimented with and found ways to use these features. 

Facebook’s released filter and effects features on several of its apps, but a key element of Facebook’s AR strategy is its Camera Effects Platform, which includes its AR Studio and Frame Studio. The platform encourages designers and developers to build interactive features and effects, opening the idea of AR on Facebook to a massive creative force.

Younger social media users love to play with face filters. But face filters aren’t just for fun and games. Businesses can use branded filters to easily promote their brands on social media. With AR, users can “try on” products while browsing items on social media platforms like Instagram.

Augmented Reality can boost user engagement with Immersive Experiences. A static image or a standard video can only capture the attention of users for so long. Augmented reality, on the other hand, provides users with a truly immersive experience that can keep them engaged for longer.

As social media platforms improve their AR features, businesses can make augmented reality a key element of their social media marketing strategy.

Influencer Marketing may gradually collapse

In recent years, traditional celebrity endorsements have taken a back seat to brands’ influencer-created content. And as long as Instagram and other platforms continue as go-to places for many shoppers, influencers will keep racking in thousands of rupees as quickly as their posts acquire likes. 

Big brands pour millions of rupees into influencers now, but by and large, they’re either not measuring or not seeing the results they could get from alternative marketing spends. 

Over the years, companies have developed applications to help brands determine which influencers are best suited for their digital campaigns. Essentially, brands can send deal flows to influencers and track their campaigns’ performance by using Influential’s dashboard.  

Closing the loop becomes necessary. That’s the holy grail of digital marketing. It’s not just getting people who can speak word-of-mouth about you, but tracking that can lead to a higher increase in sales, better sentiment, overall response that’s different than just hoping a TV commercial is watched.

Understanding the Customer Journey

Data-driven marketing is an essential and effective tool, but how that data translates to the customer journey will be paramount. In digital marketing, the customer journey is an important factor that can lift you as well as down. This includes your homework on ensuring customer’s data, research, personas, and much more. 

Today’s digital consumer finds information and makes purchases across multiple channels on various devices. As a result, your organization may not even be part of the customer journey. The choices consumers have are almost limitless, with each journey being defined by the consumer based on real-time interactions. Convenience is no longer defined by distance, but by the ease of digital tools, the consumer has access to at every step of the journey.

From a retail perspective, sites like Pinterest now offer “Buyable Pins” that allow consumers to purchase without ever leaving the site. Instagram supports the shopping process through posts, and Facebook Messenger has added payments.

With enhanced digital tracking capabilities, we can see how consumers interact online, and what prompts their decisions. This provides companies with a much deeper understanding of individual consumer buying behaviors and even emotions during the journey.

Marketers have the opportunity to deliver a timely message to those researching a product or service, potentially partnering with future or current customers or members from research to consideration through the purchase and engagement steps. In addition, marketers can use retargeting campaigns on the consumer’s preferred social platform, prompting them to partner with your bank.

Professional and Engaging Live Video

The video will continue to be a trend in 2020 but not just video, professional live video. Every social media platform is jumping into live video and adding new features monthly to their platforms. Live video is a great way to connect with your audience, and the shaky, holding-a-phone-in-your-hand live video won’t be acceptable anymore.

The paradigm of Contextual Targeting 

We are talking about digital marketing trends 2020. Contextual advertising is the placement of ad campaigns on websites or site pages that are directly relevant to the ad you’re running. With contextual advertising, your business can use a few ad formats, including:

• Video: A video ad, like one on YouTube, can target user interests by what they’re watching.  
• Native: A native ad can feature contextual targeting. In appearance, native ads look like they’re a natural part of a website. They align with the visual design of a site. 
• Behavioral: A behavioral ad combines the context of a page with a user’s behavior, like their location or pages, visited. For many businesses, behavior and context offer a powerful approach to online advertising.

Major brand advertisers are turning to new forms of targeting, such as contextual targeting, to find and reach consumers. By running through ad exchanges, private marketplaces can use data for targeting while strongly limiting the number of available URLs and advertisers allowed to interact on them.

Identity-based targeting is also on the rise. Marketers are working with platforms and publishers that require logins or have device IDs, targeting consumers who opt to receive such ad messages.

By operating at the page and keyword levels, contextual targeting technologies can surface new inventory on pages that would have previously been ignored. The technologies can also help avoid uncomfortable positioning in ostensibly safe environments. Media buyers are using new forms of contextual targeting that go well beyond the tactics of years ago when they treated the web similarly to newspapers and magazines, placing ads adjacent to content in editorial sections about topics relevant to the ad messages.

Key Takeaways

Search Engine Optimization continues to be popular in the world of Search Engine Marketing, thanks to what it has done for companies in the past years. However, the year 2020 has led to new trends in SEM, including paid search, PPC, paid social, and others.

Digital marketing will see some changes this year as the 3V’s– Video, Visuals, and Voice – see further incorporation in Search Engine Marketing.

Automation in Pay-Per-Click advertisements will become more popular as more businesses realize the importance of automation in becoming competitive in the industry. Automating a PPC campaign will streamline and optimize PPC campaigns as companies no longer need to handle the labor-intensive parts of the campaign.

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Big Data will further optimize Search Engine Marketing campaigns and make them more cost-effective. These three will work well with PPC automation since they can help predict a business’s target users, help generate more personalized marketing campaigns, and help with making PPC more effective, especially when optimizing keywords, predicting CTRs, and others.

Watching videos is also common among online users, and both businesses and consumers will see a rise in video usage. People tend to trust brands that they get to know through video advertisements, which is why digital marketers now use videos extensively in their SEM campaigns.

PPC advertising will also see the use of virtual reality, smart bidding, and alternative search engine marketing platforms. Consumers will continue to use new technologies as they become available, resulting in the growth of the online market and the appearance of new opportunities for digital marketers to make use of.

As digital marketers adapt to the online market’s growth, they will need to revolutionize their methods of creating their online advertisements to ensure that they get better results.