With the new year comes a whole host of new marketing trends to be aware of. In the fast-paced digital industry, technology is constantly evolving and new trends emerging. To be a cut above the rest, you need to stay tuned with the latest marketing trends.
Our main marketing goals, regardless of trends, have always stayed pretty much the same – to grab and maintain the attention of our audience. So, without further ado, let’s take a look into the future at four essential trends for 2020 which will shape marketing that will help support your marketing strategy.
Life cycle marketing
Think about the amount of time and money you spend on trying to make people aware of your product and service. Now, imagine they just buy from you once and then you have to start again. Bit of a slog isn’t it?
If you aren’t doing it already, life cycle marketing is a must for 2020. Putting all your efforts into attracting, retaining and then, of course, wowing your customers. Now is the time to provide your customers with the kind of communications and experiences they want, need and like as they move from prospects to customers to then advocates. Learn what your customers want, segment your communications, make what you say relevant and ensure you give them the communications they want.
To be a master of lifecycle marketing, you need to have a genuine understanding of your audience along with the stamina to grow and retain your customers over a long period of time. By looking after your customer base, you will see the rewards and whilst it does take a lot of time will pay dividends.
Conversational marketing
First, we sent letters, then we faxed, then came the power to email, now we have instant messenger and live chat (staring intensely at those three grey dots). Whilst technology has changed our intentions when we communicate at the core haven’t. And why is that? Because people still expect what we communicate to be relevant, helpful and empathic. Only now…We have the technology to scale that up.
The belief that creating relevant and timely web, email and social conversations will ultimately have a bigger impact on boosting relevance and trust. Creating a feedback-orientated approach to marketing to drive engagement, grow the customer base and develop loyalty. Simply put, conversational marketing is developing the marketing you do based on what your customers want.
Four top tips for perfecting your conventional marketing from Hubspot:
1. Conversations must happen in customer time – Consider response time, responding to customers in a timely manner but also not messaging in the middle of the night, ensuring your customers have the answers they need at the right time.
2. Conversations are scalable- Often one on one conversations can be resource heavy, consider technology as a way of supporting this to ensure your conversations are scalable.
3. Conversations have context – Your CRM is integral to this. Context means gathering, storing and making customer data accessible e.g. purchase history, job title, contact details. The more you know the more you can personalise conversations.
4. Conversations meet customers where they are- This means conversations should happen on the channel most relevant to your customer, don’t force a conversation to happen via email or phone if your customer could just as easily send a social message.
Insights-driven marketing
What better and more effective way to drive your marketing strategy and optimise results this year than with analytics and data? This year make it your resolution to make the most of what data you have available, improving your data-driven marketing so you can uncover the needs of your customer base.
Whilst an element of reactive marketing is exciting and often produces good results, planning with data ensures you can build on the successes of past activity to make sure you’re on the right path. Use data to see what your customers are wanting, how they are responding to your campaigns and most of all how you can use this data to analyse performance and also build for future activity.
Looking for some inspiration? Take a look at 10 ad campaigns inspired by powerful customer insights from global web index.
Optimisation for voice search
Remember when Siri came out in 2011, a fun novelty piece of tech that not many thought would become a serious digital trend by 2020. Well, now it’s something we should all pay attention to.
Did you know that every day, about 3.5 billion searches are done on Google and a third are performed by voice command with this number expected to rise to 50% in 2020 (stats from digitaldoughnut). This, in turn, means that if your website is not fully optimised for voice search, you could be missing out on a great deal of visitors. How do you ensure you’re optimising your website to make the most of these rising stats? Here are a few tips on big changes you’ll need to consider:
1 – Keyword research for voice search – Remember people type and speak differently
2 – Site structure – Do you have a FAQ page?
3 – Content strategy – Use questions in your content
4 – Structured data optimisation – Make sure your content is relevant and up to date
And finally… Get ready for future developments and be ready to be reactive!
Find out how Spindogs can help with your digital marketing for 2020 – contact [email protected], call on 02920 480 720 or get in touch below!