5 Big Things to Expect from Digital Marketing this 2020

It’s been a long hiatus period, but I’m back, and I’m here to tell you about what digital marketing will look like this coming 2020.

Some digital marketing trends from the past few years may not be as relevant now, and some marketing strategies may not be as effective in the upcoming months. There are even more options now on how to connect to your current and new audiences, promote products, or strengthen brand loyalty.

As a marketer, it is important to keep yourself informed of whatever it is to come this year in the dynamic world of digital marketing. Here are some things that you can expect in 2020.

Who Run The World? Chatbots.

You can expect for chatbots to be used by more businesses this year.

It’s no wonder that chatbots have become popular over the years. Known as “conversational agents”, they are software apps that copy human speech for interaction, used especially in the sphere of customer service.

In digital marketing, the benefits of using chatbots are that they boost customer satisfaction and save time and costs (hiring someone to monitor and interact with your users can be expensive!) Chatbots can answer questions real-time, which customers tend to be appreciative of. Who wouldn’t like personalised, fast service?

Did You Get My Message?

People are becoming more inclined to talk and transact via private messaging, so companies should seize this chance to expand their customer engagement channels.

We’ve entered a time that messaging apps aren’t chained to personal uses anymore. WeChat Pay has made it easier to pay online, while WeChat, Venmo, and PayPal have offered a venue to transfer money. Facebook Messenger makes it easier to transact with people in the Marketplace thanks to their automated bots.

Hi, I’m BERT.

SEO is still as relevant as ever and is still ever-changing. Google’s recent BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) update in 2019 has especially made an influential impact on SEO.

Why? This update is said to affect roughly 10% of searches and is used to better understand the intent behind these queries; an improvement on Google’s natural language processing.

Google calls it their biggest leap in five years.

But you cannot optimise for BERT, because there’s nothing to optimise for there. The same thing should be done to rank: write great, original, and relevant content for your users. The more you can cover a topic and answer your users’ concerns and queries, the better. After all, BERT is meant to connect a query or question to an answer.

Ready, Aim, Ad Target!

Another thing that’s bound to improve this year is ad targeting. People will largely ignore online ads that have nothing to do with them, but if you give them something tailored to their interests? They are going to convert.

Plenty of companies have caught on to this trend and their strategies are likely to include ad targeting. Digital marketing tools and advertising platforms have gained smarter targeting capabilities, so seize this opportunity as well. Aim for your target audience, and fire relevant ads their way.

The Bottomline of it All: It’s All Getting Personalised

Note how all of these points to one thing: personalisation. It’s the new marketing for 2020 and likely the future, too.

Tailor your message for your audience. Make their every contact with you relevant to them, whether online or offline. Every experience they have with your brand should be all about them.

Big brands have excelled in this game of personalisation- think Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify. If you’ve used any of them, then you know that they send out customised messages at the right time and right place.

Keep this in mind when you’re drafting up your digital marketing campaign this year: personalisation is the new game.

Is Facebook the Best Social Media Marketing Platform for You?

The digital era flourished when we entered the 2010s, the decade that pushed social networks to prominence- like Facebook. Digital marketing expanded to include social media, and so Facebook marketing became a thing.

A huge thing, in fact, that the social network is considered one of the essential tools to have if you are a social media marketer.

With digital marketing expected to be especially more personalised in the future, Facebook will be an ideal channel for modern marketers to use.

Facebook Marketing: Worth the Investment

If you’re a marketer but haven’t incorporated Facebook yet into your marketing efforts, I’m telling you now that it should be at your arsenal. Facebook is one of the top internet game changers and a major industry player. Hard to believe that it had its humble beginnings as a small startup where Ivy League college kids share photos.

All Content Available

All content forms can be shared on Facebook: text, photos, videos, live videos, and Stories. This makes it easier to build your brand image and market your business.

With nearly 2.45 billion monthly active users (nearly ⅓ of the world’s entire population), this is the biggest social media platform with the most diverse audience- in age, demographics, gender, education, and income. A wide user base like this helps you in reaching out to your desired audience and even find prospects, too. 

Facebook Pages

A popular marketing tool that people utilise is Facebook Pages, which are free and easy to set up. Much like a personal profile, a Facebook page holds the information for your brand. People can “like” your page and “follow” it for more of your updates. The more followers you have, the bigger the visibility your brand has on the social network.

Facebook Groups

Marketing became even easier with the introduction of Facebook Groups. Not only do you get to put audiences who are interested or belong to your industry, Groups also have a high level of engagement, useful to offer you product or services to potential customers.

Facebook Ads

Facebook gathers so much demographic data about its users, that it is one of the most impressive targeted advertising platforms. With Facebook Ads, you can put out relevant ads to people who are likely to purchase your service or products. You’re able to make ads that can target people living in particular areas, of a specific age group, a relationship status, interests, and virtually anything that is on a user’s profile.

These ads can range from offers, leads, canvas, videos, carousel, and more.

Because you can customise and choose who can see your ads, Facebook Ads are unarguably more powerful than Pages or Groups.

Like we said, personalisation is the future of marketing, and Facebook is doing a good job at it.

Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Do Facebook Marketing

There are only two reasons why you should not consider Facebook for your business:

1. You don’t have a social media advertising budget,
2. Your business cannot advertise on the platform due to its policies. Tobacco companies, for example, are prohibited from using Facebook ads.

Other than these, Facebook is a channel you must include in your marketing campaign. It’s not just a powerful platform, it’s incredibly flexible- that’s why a lot of businesses in different industries and types are using it. You have plenty of marketing options that you can tailor to fit what your business needs.

Content Marketing from 1700s to Now

Content is king, and it will always be.

If marketers had a dollar every time they’d be told “write good content!”, plenty of us would be millionaires by now! No matter how many updates and changes there will be in digital marketing and the search industry, relevant and original content is a staple.

Over the years, what determines “good” content has changed. Before Google’s Panda and Penguin updates in 2011 and 2012 perspectively, the web was proliferated with low-quality sites and spammy content.

But how did we reach this point? Who, where, and when started content marketing?

1700s: The Formula of Content + Promotion

If we consider the combination of content and promotion as to what is considered content marketing, then our story begins in the 1700s: when Benjamin Franklin published the first annual Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1732 to promote his printing business.

This was one of the earliest idea emergence of creating a copy to advertise a product or business. Even way before the internet came to be, marketers used customer experience, relevance and even storytelling for their content. While the end goal was to generate sales, the approach was not to sell to the people, but to talk them. It’s a useful tip for today.

1990s: The Birth of Computers

Towards the end of the 20th century, the introduction of computers changed the landscape of content marketing. In 1994, the first online blog was made, and four years after, Microsoft launched its first major corporate blog.

Sponsored content sprouted from the ground following the advent of the first blogs, but that’s all that they were then: sprouts. The goal of most content marketing back then was to get people to visit businesses’ real-world locations.

Content marketing and blogging weren’t anything big and popular back then, although that was bound to change in just less than a decade.

2000s: Getting More Digital

Personal blogging flourished in the 2000s; the birth of bloggers who would become influencers. There was at least one blog for any topic you could imagine at that era. Of course, since people had gone online, businesses followed suit.

E-commerce experienced significant growth at the turn of the century. It was this decade where marketers started understanding how content, relevance, keywords and ads can help them generate traffic and leads.

2010s: The Digital & Social Revolution

The immediacy of producing, sharing, and consuming content was even easier thanks to search engines and social networks by the 2010s. And so, content marketers grew in number and importance. Besides blogs, content was also in the forms of articles, eBooks, and white papers.

Marketers began optimising their websites and content for search engine- essentially the birth of SEO. Aiming to rig the system to their favour, marketers also utilised a lot of blackhat SEO techniques. Content quality went down the drain as keyword stuffing, invisible text, link manipulation, and bloated metadata became a common sight online.

But like mentioned at the beginning of this post, Google penalised these websites that used blackhat tactics. The search engine aimed to please the consumers because that’s where the value is. 

What is Content Marketing Now?

There’s a lot that’s changed but the key takeaway of what constitutes as good content marketing is that content should be written for your human audience- natural-sounding, human-like, and of course, relevant.

Make sure that your content marketing and SEO work seamlessly together. One cannot work well without the other; you need both. There are plenty of digital tools at your disposal to create rich, original content that users will love.