It’s hard to believe it’s 2020, isn’t it? In 2019, new technologies emerged and influenced many areas of the marketing industry and beyond. While many organizations have a hard time keeping up, such innovations certainly continue to pose new opportunities for growth.
To keep up with your competitors in 2020, we suggest that you pay attention to these four marketing trends:
1. Shoppable Posts
What’s a shoppable post?
Shoppable posts refer to social media posts from which users can make a purchase directly on a social network platform. Currently, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram offer shoppable post features.
According to Forbes, 72 percent of Instagram users have experience with purchasing a product on the app. This presents tremendous opportunities for businesses. Shopping is made easier for users, and businesses of any size are able to create sales opportunities while shortening the sales funnel.
Shoppable posts continue to gain popularity. We can even expect it to become the norm in 2020.
2. Smart Bidding
Smart bidding is an automated bidding service by Google Ads that helps you optimize your bids using machine learning.
How does Smart Bidding work?
Smart bidding allows you to 1) choose conversion action at the campaign level, 2) set your bids to change automatically when sales start or stop, and 3) optimize bids over multiple campaigns with a chosen set of conversion actions.
What does this mean for businesses? You will get the most out of your ad spend because Google automates bidding according to your business needs. Google will only set bids for conversions that are more meaningful to your business such as purchases, calls, leads, website visits, etc.
3. Voice Search Optimization
According to Computer World, about 133 million smart speakers were sold globally by 2018. In 2016, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai announced that 20 percent of all Google search queries were voice searches. And this number is on the rise.
With that, opportunities for smart speaker marketing and advertising started to open up. In 2020, we strongly recommend you explore ways to optimize your brand’s content for voice search no matter how big or small your business is.
How to optimize for voice search
Consider starting with these three simple steps to get you on your way for voice optimization:
- Reduce website page loading time
- Write more local content
- Use long-tail SEO
4. Chatbots
What is a chatbot?
Chatbot is an AI-powered computer program that is designed to communicate with online users independently from a human operator.
What does this mean for you? Big or small, businesses can benefit from having a chatbot that can answer common questions for your visitors around the clock. This automated communication process opens up more opportunities to convert visitors into warm leads and shorten the overall sales process. Juniper Networks projected that chatbots will increase yearly retail sales by $112 billion and reduce cost by $439 billion by 2023.
Automation is on the rise, everywhere from Google bidding to 24/7 live chats. Being able to automate simple communications processes will save time and money all while allowing sales to never miss a beat.
If you don’t have your 2020 marketing plan in place with new and improved tools and strategies, we strongly recommend that you get started now. Your competitors most likely already have. Late is better than never!
If you don’t feel confident about keeping up with new marketing trends contact us for a marketing consultation and we’ll help get you there!
