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8 PRETTY VICIOUS MARKETING TRENDS IN 2020
Updated: Jan 31, 2020
I hope you all had a Pretty Vicious New Year and start to the new decade. For the majority of businesses, January brings fresh ideas as well as challenges. Technology isn't slowing down, but what does this mean for your brand. Here’s 8 Pretty Vicious #marketingtrends for 2020.
2020 TRENDS AT A GLANCE
Inbound
Live Video
Customer experience and service
Personalisation
Visualisation
Search (SEO)
Voice search
Artificial intelligence
INBOUND ( CONTENT MARKETING)
Outbound marketing tactics are steadily becoming considered disruptive as they interrupt the audience's experience. It’s becoming more and more ineffective to reach prospects, which is why for 2020 you should be leveraging #inboundmarketing. However, inbound requires you to produce not just quality, but valuable content tailored towards your target audience, buyer personas, and their needs.
LIVE VIDEO
Live video is highly consumed by users, and people spend three times longer watching #livevideo than they do watching pre-recorded video, making video the most popular way for consumers to learn about new products and services. Live video grabs the attention of audiences on social and taps into the ever-growing “FOMO” people are feeling when online. It’s easier to consume and let’s be honest, we're often just too busy to stop and read.
Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/state-of-video-marketing-new-data
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND SERVICE
You’ll need to ensure your business has a focus on experience and service. Meaning prospects and customers should have enjoyable experiences and interactions with your brand and not become an afterthought once they became a paying customer. You should focus on delighting your customers through every stage of their lifestyle. Get #CX right and they’ll become advocates and often promoters of your brand for you. Think Ease, Educate and Engage.
For example:
Ease - mobile-friendly or even an app, as well as quick and simple payment
Educate - knowledgeable staff, marketing that conveys value
Engage - personalised content, a relatable brand image
PERSONALISATION
The possibilities of personalisation have increased significantly with technology, far beyond personally addressing emails and more towards 121 experiences between brands and consumers. Consumers have now come to expect it from their interactions with brands and it’s another string in the bow of “providing relevant experiences” to individual customers.
VISUALISATION
Research continues to prove that people prefer visual content to plain old text. Visuals are easier to remember and adding #datavisualisations, infographics, images, and videos to your content will make it more interesting and attractive. Which, in turn, will help your message to be absorbed better too.
If you're interested in making your own data visualisations, head over to Visme's easy-to-use graph maker. It comes packed with tons of data visualisation tools, including free templates, animated and interactive graphs, data widgets and more.
See how one small business owner
SEARCH ( SEO)
SEO will continue to be an important driver of traffic in 2020, much like visual search, mobile and voice search is changing the way we use search engines like Google, making features such as featured snippets the norm. Featured snippets on SERP’s provide the information you’re searching for right on the Google search page, meaning you don’t have to click through to a website to get the information.
VOICE SEARCH
Your smart speaker probably has voice search incorporated which is a huge “Branded skills” opportunity for businesses. Even if your brand isn’t ready for #smartspeakeradvertising, it’s important that your content is optimised for voice search to help consumers find your brand and answer queries quickly.
Big brands such as #Domino’s are becoming major players in the voice space. Domino’s first launched its skill on Amazon Echo back in 2017. With that skill, users with Echo and Dot devices were able to interact with a character named Dom who was the Pizza giant's "voice personality” who responded to queries in amusing ways.
Consumers can also place orders via voice, as long as they first set up an Easy Order profile in the Domino’s app. More recently, Domino’s has invested in its own voice recognition technology to take telephone orders coming into its store locations.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
No doubt that in this decade computers will not only be smart but also capable of learning and thinking, just like we do. Scary thought, right? Spending on research continues to rise, but we’re yet to fully understand the wider social implications, but the incentives are there. From monitoring and refining business processes, real-time personalisation to cybersecurity—the robots are definitely coming.
#AI becomes increasingly useful as data becomes more accurate and available. In 2020 more devices will run AI-powered technology and there's a growing increase in the number of businesses using AI-powered technology and automation to assist their marketing efforts.
Big data, supported by AI and predictive analytics, is also helping brands to learn more about their audience and customers by enabling hyper-personalization of customer experiences and marketing messages at scale.
So, while technologies such as AI and data-driven marketing will certainly be big trends for 2020, it will need to be balanced with a focus on people, as well as technology. 2020 will be the year of the customer with the focus on building great customer experiences and engaging them for long-term relationships.