What are some of the digital marketing trends for the year 2020?
How can business capitalise on the trends & better engage audiences?
As the year comes to an end, we would like to gift an article of knowledge.
The digital marketing landscape is constantly changing, we hope to help you stay ahead of the curve and guide you on your marketing strategy with these 5 digital marketing trends,
1. Hyper-personalisation
2. Social Messaging
3. Interactive Content
4. Optimised Websites
5. Advanced Native Ads
Editor's note: With almost a decade working on marketing and digital imperatives across industry verticals, proactively staying ahead of the digital curve, here’s are some of 2020 predictions for digital marketing and how companies can leverage on them.
5 Digital Marketing Trends for 2020
1. Hyper-Personalisation
a: 1:1 marketing
b. Personalised comms
c. Predictive analytics
Personalisation, content and experiences. This opens the door to having a stronger connection with your customers. Email communications. Wait, it’s 2020 and we are still talking about emails? I know what you are thinking! The key to it is relevancy and value of the contents. Email marketing is still one of the most effective and viable methods to get a customer’s attention. Oberlo reported the ROI of email marketing as of February 2019 was 3,200%.
Ever wondered why the thumbnails on Netflix are constantly changing?
Netflix’s algorithms are learning what kind of creatives resonate with you. When a creative resonates with you, you are more compelled to give it more attention. Attention is hard to come by in this era.
Pro tip: Leverage on today’s technologies to define users’ actions trigger to help you deliver automated highly personalised communications and creatives based on user intents.
Deliver hyper-personalised messaging of relevancy coupled with gorgeous, pixel-perfect creatives that are multi-variate and backed with user data points
2. Social Messaging
a. Social media messaging as customer comms channels
b. Instantaneous messaging and efficient chatbots
A research concluded 4 out of 5 Millenials, rather engage in a conversation with an AI chatbot than a customer service hotline agent. Instant messaging seen 4x higher engagement rate than email. Digital natives expect instantaneous replies. Call your kids and they will rather reply you on WhatsApp/ telegram with GIF.
Social media channels, WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat, Facebook Messenger are becoming prevalent ways for the business to communicate with their prospects and customers.
Business owners and enterprises, put yourself in the shoes of customers, will you prefer to interact and purchase a product/service from a brand that responds to you responsively or one that replies “Thank you for your query, please send in your query using the following format to hello@republicasia.co and we will reply to you in 5 - 7 business days.”
Pro-tip: Strategically shift from being on the platform(s) that your customers are, to effectively leveraging on them. Find answering customers questions operationally challenging? Pre-programmed your Facebook messenger to provide commonly asked questions and taking the repetitive load off.
The integration of social messaging is as simple as installing an additional line of code on your digital touchpoint that will allow customers to connect to you via WhatsApp/ telegram/ messenger.
3. Interactive Content
a. AR/VR, Voice and Videos
b. Shoppable posts
c. Quizzes and animations
Type, click, tap, scroll. Ever wonder what we do during our pockets of time? We research and consume bite-sized contents on our mobile devices. Thinkwithgoogle defines micro-moments as moments of time when people reflexively turn to a device (i.e. smartphone) — to act on a need to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something, or buy something.
With the rise of our patterns of consumption of contents during micro-moments, micro-contents rise to popularity (Instagram stories, Quora, Medium etc).
The raw nature of live videos, user-generated contents makes contents more genuine. With live videos sharing, an influencer, a customer, a brand advocate or the brand itself armed with a smartphone can share their unedited opinions, showcase how the product/ service fits into their personal/ work routines and interact with audiences live.
Once the audiences land or discover your contents, reduce the inertia and steps required for them to convert. Can you get the audience to indicate intent or convert while on the same micro-content platforms without exiting the platform? (e.g. Instagram shopping)
Pro tips: Repurpose your contents to various bite-sized contents and format. Videos, images and infographics. Find out which keywords are your customers and prospects searching for online. Build your contents around these trending or high-volume keywords.
Leverage on slick visuals, a hint of witty copy, informative contents with targeted keywords to seed and help micro-moments discovery.
4. Optimised Websites
a. Site performance leap
b. 5G and networks
c. UX and Quality content
Page speed and web design are vital to SEO, CX and conversion. Truth to be told, research indicated 1 out of 4 users will abandon a page if it doesn’t load in four seconds. In South-East Asia, websites across industry verticals currently takes an average of 7 seconds to load. Google advocate for 3 seconds.
The speed and interactivity of the website will leapfrog in time to come with the rise of 5G and better networks connectivity.
Pro tips: Strike an impactful impression above the fold, fast and communicate what you must succinctly. You have a few seconds to make an impression to someone offline. In the online world, you have 3 seconds window to make that happen. Don’t beat around the bush. Use a supporting hero visual and communicate your product/ value proposition above the fold.
Above the fold is defined as the visible portion of the webpage that your audiences see when they first land on your webpage.
5. Advanced Native Ads
a. Conversational ads
b. Maturity of marketplace ads
Imagine having ads that help you prospect highly qualified customers? In 2018, Google started rolling out conversational ads. Think about interacting, conversing and converting within the same display ad. Yes, automated.
Through the online advertising campaigns we managed at Republic Asia, we have seen non-interactive and flat visual ads conversion figures fails in comparison to interactive ads.
Attracting audience eyeballs with an emotive visual ad and the compelling hook are given in yesteryear. In the upcoming years, your business ads need to effectively converse and provide all the personalised information to your potential customers.
Pro tip: Structure your contents/ FAQs and experimenting new ad technologies that enable you to immediately automate customer service/ pre-sales capabilities for online audiences. These automations should support audiences the moment they see the ads, the information they need individually and the capabilities to process payment within the same ad window.
What do you think of the above trends? Shoot us an email at hello@republicasia.co on your thoughts or if you like to find out how Republic Asia can help your business to leverage on the above digital trends.
Editor's footnote: It is interesting how much has evolved over the last decade. We are no strangers to digital evolution and advancement. The decade of iPod, Spotify, Friendster, Facebook, MSN messenger, WeChat and platforms. Today, algorithms are closer to ruling the world, but for the better. Perhaps in the near future, my grandchildren will AR beam into an immersive classroom of the future co-taught by AI quantum processors. - YS (Digital Director)