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The world of digital marketing shapeshifts every year. Just when you think you’ve got a solid foothold, trends change. On this rocky terrain, how can you grow your business and generate sales instead of falling into some shadowy corner of the internet?
Your single best defense against the competition is unique branding. In exploring the top five digital marketing trends for 2020, remember that branding is the springboard for each of these strategies. Building an identifiable, memorable brand will elevate your marketing efforts; just look at Nike or Starbucks. Do they have the best product in the world? That’s subjective.
Yet both these companies have unmistakable branding and customers are fiercely loyal because of it. To build a recognizable brand, you have to leave old marketing strategies in the past. In other words, you have to do more than simply rely on a website to grow your business in 2020.
The mainstreaming of social media and digital marketing has created unprecedented shifts in the marketing landscape. What does this mean for small businesses? You’ll need to take a new approach to keep up with projected marketing trends, increase sales and brand awareness.
Here are the top five digital marketing trends and projections on the horizon for 2020.
1. Video Marketing is King
Only 20 years ago, the presence of a camcorder was enough to clear a room. Now? Every person with a cell phone has a video camera, and the universal shyness about videos is altogether a behavior of yesteryear. People love videos and businesses are picking up on it.
In fact, 85% of marketers use video marketing for business promotion, according to a study by Wyzowl, and it has helped 72% of brands increase their conversion rates.
How can you harness the power of videos to market your business? People watch videos to get information and learn. Your first step as a small business marketer is to outline what relevant information you can share that will help your target customer. Then you can start creating compelling, informative videos.
Here’s how to capitalize on the popularity of online video:
- Create valuable video content that educates, informs, describes, or tells a story that captivates your target demographic.
- Use an affordable online video maker like PosterMyWall to create branded videos from scratch, or create videos from a wide selection of professional video templates.
- Combine engaging visuals with complimentary audio to provide a comprehensive experience for viewers. Upload your own audio, or browse stock audio files to find the perfect soundtrack to your design.
- Now, post your video across all of your social channels: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram Stories, Facebook Live, and Twitter. Short on time? Not to worry; PosterMyWall enables you to easily resize your design to match the dimensions of all your social accounts in just a few seconds.
With video marketing, you can build credibility as a brand, solidify your branding and build loyal customers. What else can you do in 2020 to grow your business?
2. Use Schema Markups and Rich Snippets
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) should be a core component of your marketing strategy. While trends change from year to year, organic search is consistently one of the top drivers of B2B website traffic.
Keyword research, high-quality content, and on-page SEO form the foundation. From there, the projection for 2020 is centered on schema markups and rich snippets. Focusing on these expands your potential to grow web traffic, increase brand awareness, and convert new visitors into loyal customers. What are they and how can they bolster your marketing efforts?
- Schema markup is a webpage snippet that’s been optimized into a rich snippet.
- A rich snippet contains all the pertinent details to an optimized page, including images, pricing, ratings, descriptions, etc.
Confused? Think of it this way: if you have a product page on your website that seems clear to you, but Google and search engines don’t understand the contents of the page, you are unlikely to get organic traffic. Schema markups create the context of the webpage which, in turn, increases your website’s visibility and leads to higher conversion.
Why is this important? There’s potential to increase web traffic by 31% with rich snippets, according to Ahrefs.
Bottom line: people aren’t going to click on the website that contains no information about the product or service they are selling. Instead, they’ll click on the search result that has an image, price, ratings, product description and visual information. Fortunately, you can do all of this and more for free in Google Webmaster.
3. Share Bite-Sized and Informational Content
Just as it’s powerful to share informative videos with your target audience, the same principle applies to other visual content you create. You don’t need to produce Tolstoy-length articles and blog posts to garner credibility and results. In fact, people often favor short, insightful and digestible information. Perfect example? Infographics are educational, concise, and easy to digest.
Take a look at this infographic from Quid Corner, which includes 12 classic sauce recipes. Creating blog posts for each of these recipes would consume hours of precious time. Instead, compiling them into small sections in an infographic with stunning visuals makes it digestible (and tantalizing). The infographic was so effective, it became a staple pin in recipe boards on Pinterest.
To capitalize on this marketing trend for 2020, create relevant, valuable content for your target audience that doesn’t distract from their busy lives. When they pop on Facebook or Twitter, you’ll be there to greet them with a short but meaty helping of informational content. Use engaging visuals to grab their attention before they scroll past your post.
Here’s how you can combine visuals with helpful information to engage your audience:
- Use compelling imagery from stock photo libraries, or start with a free, professionally designed template from PosterMyWall.
- Summarize your message into bullet points, categories, or separate visuals that are easy to scan and read.
- Customize the design with unique fonts and colors to match your identifiable branding.
- Share the design on all of your online channels, and don’t forget to use PosterMyWall’s resize feature to customize the dimensions of your design to match Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and more.
That’s it! You’ve created captivating marketing content that is relevant and helpful to your audience. Still, sharing posts on multiple social channels takes time that you flat out don’t have. Fortunately, with PosterMyWall, you can auto-publish and schedule content to post across all of your social channels from one tab.
And instead of creating dozens of designs, which takes up valuable time, you can resize your design for free to share on multiple platforms. Time saved is money earned.
4. The Future is A.I., and it Wants to Chat
Artificial Intelligence isn’t a robot in an action film or a digital nucleus overthrowing humanity: it’s simply a dynamic marketing tool that makes managing a small business more efficient. While it’s not as glamorous (or scary!) as in the movies, it’s much more effective. That’s likely why in 2020, 80% of companies will use A.I. to increase sales, according to Single Grain.
One of the best digital marketing trends for 2020 is the incorporation of chatbots—auto-responders that answer website inquiries for you. And they moonlight as effective resources for late-night shoppers, which account for a whopping 71.6 % of online customers.
When people want to buy late at night, chatbots are there to help, which can mean the difference between a sale and an empty cart. The future looks bright for A.I., which is why it’s vital to employ these intelligent software bots to clock in while you’re clocked out.
5. The New Facebook Ad Marketing Trend For 2020
Facebook has encountered peaks and valleys, but the platform is still relevant and even necessary for many marketers. Regardless of privacy concerns and other issues, Facebook still has billions of users, and they like to shop. That’s why 67% of social media marketers rely on Facebook as their primary platform.
While it remains an effective strategy, Facebook marketing will change in 2020. Paid ads are a must. Organic reach on Facebook is perhaps 6% of page likes. But with Facebook ads, you have the potential to reach 2.45 billion active monthly users.
There are several ways to use Facebook ads to market your business in 2020, but one of them reigns supreme: Stories ads. Facebook rolled out its Stories feature in March of 2017, and now 500 million users watch Stories every day.
Instead of spending all your budget on newsfeed ads, allocate part of your funds to Facebook Stories ads. Incorporate video in your Stories ads to inspire viewers to take action.
Here’s how to create compelling Facebook Story Ads in 2020:
- Create Story Ads from customizable templates in PosterMyWall.
- Focus on creating video content that entertains, educates and engages your viewers.
- Use all of Facebook’s interactive story features including polls, GIFs, and Geotags to interact with viewers.
- Include a strong call to action in every sponsored post. Don’t skimp here, because this is what makes your ad work.
Make 2020 Your Best Year Yet
Marketing a small business in 2020 requires time, money and methodical planning. And as a small business owner or marketer, resources are in short supply. Fortunately, you can tackle all of the digital marketing trends in this article on a budget.
Christina Lyon is a writer, blogger and musician from sunny SoCal. She’s on fire for helping online businesses grow with engaging marketing copy. When she steps away from her desk, Christina loves reading fiction, strolling the beach and playing music. Visit her website at www.bychristinalyon.com.