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.