Road to 2020: Varun Duggirala shares digital marketing trends to embrace in the New Year

Varun Duggirala from Glitch encapsulates the decade that went by while paving the way towards Road to 2020 through digital marketing trends.

Its been an interesting decade for the advertising, marketing, and entertainment industrial complex. I would go as far as to say that we have seen more disruption in this last decade than the last many decades combined. Especially in terms of digital marketing trends.

Think about it, if someone had told you in 2010 that you would spend as much time on figuring ways to market on something called a TikTok video? Or where people could create short music videos off their phones or that an entire career can be built by YouTube stars making videos about everything from unboxing products to DIY beauty videos, not to mention that entire business would have been built from people's homes by selling products off e-commerce marketplaces.. the list is endless.

But we might already know it all that is mentioned above, the question is what are the trends going ahead and what points do we keep in mind for the new year.

Here's looking at five digital marketing trends for 2020 and beyond...

Brands will focus on acting more like publishers

It's been something that’s been an epic of discussion for a while now but the last 2 years have shown that when brands start curating and creating content that consumers want to consume rather than content that interrupts what they generally consume, it creates stronger long term brand loyalty.

Recent work by Swiggy as well as work done by brands like Netflix & SOCIAL Goat (Diageo) is a testament to this becoming a serious play rather than something that was earlier experimental. It's also something that could over the next decade be a revenue driver ( single-digit % but revenue nonetheless and that’s going to be the real game-changer).

E-commerce will widen its grasp on the market but the players will also expand as will brand-owned E-comm experiences.

As global trends show Amazon's domination could come upon one big hurdle, brands becoming wary of selling on its platform (Case in point being Nike's recent pullout from the platform to its own).

In India, it will also see disruption from one new player, namely Reliance. The innovations across the sale, distribution along with subscription models are going to define the sales pipeline of brands and thus define any and all forms of performance-based marketing that brands do. Especially creative performance marketing that combines highly focussed creative assets with precision performance marketing.

In-housing by brands will scale, but not in the way we think!

Brands In-housing marketing functions that would have traditionally stayed within the realm of the Agency have been called out as a signal of doom for the advertising agency business. But it actually comes with a silver lining. It allows agencies to provide in-housing services to brands by enabling on-site talent and capabilities in what can be called “brands having their cake and eating it too”.

What’s the positive for Agencies?

Constant and always an engagement with a client enriches the relationship for the longer term and gives them both larger ownership and a larger seat on the table.

Also read: Road to 2020: Content Marketing the 2020 way…

Content, content, content…

Content creation is an always-on activity for brands. Now, this will go further by brands and marketers expanding the scope of what they can create by not just building large scale programming calendars but by dabbling in formats of all kinds. This can be achieved via creation by iteration and not by mere perfection.

This will mean that the production partners become as crucial for brands. The factor entails that all agencies need to think and breathe production. It's a great time to be in the business of creation.

Audio will have its moment

From being relegated to a has-been, audio through podcasts and voice services is making a serious play by growing in the number that matters, engagement. Then consider the cost of creation and the captive audience with high investments coming from all platforms.

Podcasts are the medium for the future because when the audience has an attention issue, don’t just give them a short video. Give them the passive listening experience that audio enables. Not to forget, Alexa is everywhere now. So marketing through voice just got very interesting.

Now, the question that arises is what will the new decade bring? More of the same. Massive disruptions and lots of opportunity for those who can navigate the state of flux which is now the new constant.  

This article piece is authored by Varun Duggirala, Co-founder/ Content Chief - The Glitch