Road to 2020: Unmissable Digital Marketing Trends 2020

Shekhar Mhaskar, Chief Growth Officer Isobar India decodes digital marketing trends 2020, helping brands and agencies chalk out their road map.

Twenty Nineteen saw the advent of some of the most promising marketing techniques and practices that will see themselves flourish through 2020 and beyond. And I am sure new ones will start their journey. Most of the trends that picked up steam and will be mainstream in 2020 are those that were technology-driven, data-led, human-centric and personalization-enabled; or a combination of these. I think Artificial Intelligence will stay the leader since it is integral to most innovations and interventions. A look at digital marketing trends 2020.

Voice Search

Voice Search is undoubtedly at the cornerstone of digital marketing going forward. Not only in 2020, but it will see a huge uptake and continuous development through the decade, and who knows, will be the leader of the pack. It is predicted that more than 50% of searches will be via voice. Voice shopping will be on the rise, and brands cannot not take note of this marketing channel. They need to begin now to make amends to their digital assets to be able to adapt themselves and be voice-enabled.

For e.g. along with text SEO, one needs to enable all content with Voice SEO. In India especially, vernacular languages will be of importance since not all voice commands will be in English. There are efforts already made by companies like Google, Jio, and others to develop technology to recognize Indian languages and accents to reach a non-English speaking audience.

Video Marketing

Video Marketing is another area that will explode in 2020. There are more than a dozen online streaming platforms at your disposal at any given time. On an average a user spends more than 60% of their time-consuming video content of different kinds. Studies have suggested that video content leads to an enormous surge in brand resonance and conversion.

However, while creating the content one has to be mindful that videos get viewed more on mobile screens. There are a plethora of video formats that can be used depending on the channels of dissemination, viz. 360 degrees, snippets for social media posts, live video, etc. All achieving different marketing goals.

Also Read: Road to 2020: Native Advertising Trends to look out for

Influencer Marketing

Influencer Marketing has seen steady growth in the last few years, and brands are completely convinced about the use of KOLs to help amplify the brand message to a larger niche market. The trend has also started to witness the efficacy of micro-influencers due to its inherent authenticity. In fact, AI will play an important role to even recommend which influencers to use for better engagement and a higher ROI for a particular mix of brand, product, TG, etc.

Visual Search

Visual Search is a trend that will catch up very soon. With the likes of Google Image Search, Google Lens, Pinterest Lens, etc. brands can drive users to look for avenues – offline & online, to buy their products or know more. Even barcodes and pin codes can be image searched to help users to know more about the products and buy them in the vicinity. Not just products but these techniques along with AI can also give information about historical places, objects, animals and so on and so forth. The opportunities are just so vast.

Conversational Marketing

Conversational Marketing using chatbots with the aid of NLP will very rapidly proliferate in areas such as customer service where the conversation has to be human-like, to facilitate not just basic communication but also product recommendation, personalization, e-commerce solutions, etc.

These are
just a few that I personally think will shine over other digital marketing
practices. There are many more like AR, Social Media Stories, Social Commerce,
etc. I am sure 2020 is going to be the year where all brands will invest
heavily in cutting edge digital marketing innovations to the best of their
ability to rake in the maximum moolah.