5 Marketing Trends to Help You Grow in 2020

If you’re a business owner or a blogger, it’s important to adapt to the latest marketing trends in order to keep growing your audience and engagement. 

Imagine being alive back when the telephone became a commonplace item in the average household. Imagine how the world of marketing must have shifted in the years that followed, as businesses realized they could reach out and speak with potential customers in their homes.

At our current rate of technological evolution, these kinds of paradigm shifts occur yearly and even monthly. With modern technology, there is always a new version, or a new clone, or an entirely new product that blows the previous version out of the water. The phone is still a good example. How many years ago were we using flip phones and other clunky, now outdated hardware?

The more that the worlds of technology and marketing integrate, the faster developments can occur, and the more opportunities there are for people like us to find success. You just need to keep an eye out for emerging trends in tech and marketing.

SEO is Changing, Likely For the Better

According to Google, 20% of all search on their engine is voice search. However, many projections expect that number to rise to 50% by the end of 2020. This means that search engine optimizers will need to adapt how they select and plan for keywords, but it isn’t the only major shift occurring in SEO.

With recent advancements to their algorithms, search engines are more efficient than ever at delivering the best match result to search queries. This means that many of the SEO “tricks” which professionals have been using for years are becoming less effective, while strong content is as kingly as it has ever been.

Additionally, the super powerful SEO service Ahrefs announced in 2019 that they intend to build their own search engine to compete with Google, with the intent of introducing radically different values. A new major player joining that market would have a massive impact, and if anyone knows how create a search engine, it would probably be Ahrefs.

Digital Marketing is Still Getting Bigger

Digital marketing was one of LinkedIn’s most in demand skills of 2019, and that trend appears to be continuing along the same path. It makes sense; digital marketing is more cost-effective than most traditional methods, and often more effective overall as well. With more and more people becoming ingrained with their online world, it’s a small wonder businesses are investing in the means to reach them there daily.

The amount of skills encompassed under the umbrella of “digital marketing” is also increasing. Think about how separate sales and marketing were ten or twenty years ago; now, most marketers are expected to know how to write, craft, and run ads on multiple platforms.

With the tools and methods you can use to reach your audience constantly evolving, it makes sense to hire a specialist (or several specialists) who can focus on those aspects of your business for you.

Customer Lifetime Value is Booting Out Other Metrics

Smart businesses with their eye on longevity are realizing across the world that focusing on customer/client lifetime value rather than shorter term metrics is often best for their bottom line. This has already led to a massive growth in value-first marketing.

Customer lifetime value is a measurement of not only how much value a customer has provided a company, but also how much they MAY provide a company in years to come. Value-first marketing involves giving away something for free (often information) in order to demonstrate the business’ prowess.

The classic example of this is the lead magnet, which is generally a digital download given away in exchange for a potential customer’s contact information. If you’re trying to build an email list without a good lead magnet, you may find it slow going – that’s like fishing without bait.

Artificial Intelligence is Very Real and Powerful

While we’re (probably) not at risk of being conquered by an army of Terminators any time soon, AI has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. More and more marketing softwares are successfully using artificial intelligence to automate tasks which previously required skilled staff hours. 

Think about a chatbot that can intuit the mood you’re in based on the messages your write, and deliver custom-tailored offers based on your current emotional state. That might sound like sci-fi, but marketers are already using AI to optimize ad campaigns, and to analyze consumer behavior on social media. As more and more people become proficient at creating useful AIs, it will become much more prevalent in readily available software.

Content is Becoming More Interactive and Personalized

With online audiences growing every day, content creators can afford to be more and more specific with the type of consumers they target. This means we can expect to continue to see a rise in things like quizzes, surveys, and Click to Tweet boxes that give marketing teams data they can analyze and work with, or feed to their pet AI. 

Developing web apps is becoming more affordable for smaller companies, which will allow them to create unique online interactions with their customers that go deeper than just communicating on social media. Of course, social media platforms are on the cutting edge of this, using advanced algorithms to make your news feed as interesting for you as possible.

Overall, video marketing is still on the rise, and its popularity shows no sign of waning any time soon.

Closing Thoughts

This post wasn’t meant to be a roadmap like some of my tutorials, but rather a series of insights for you to consider and apply to your own best interests. Due to the changes in SEO and content marketing, I think 2020 is a great year to start a blog or website of just about any kind. Opportunities for making money online are still expanding as the customer pool continues to grow.

But you don’t have to work online to take advantage of digital marketing trends. If you have a brick and mortar business, applying digital marketing techniques will bring more customers to your door who are more interested in your products and services. That’s the beauty of targeted marketing; you waste less effort on the uninterested folks. 

Want to stay in touch? You can join my email list or contact me directly. I’d love to hear from you about your business goals in the new year!