The digital marketing landscape is continually changing, making it difficult to know where to focus your time. So here’s a round up of the digital marketing trends we think everyone should keep an eye on during 2020.
Google’s speed addiction
Your website needs to (ideally) load in under 3 seconds! Any longer and less pages can be crawled by Google, which can have a negative affect on your search rankings. Check your website loading speed and if it needs to improve, look at compressing files and optimising your images and code.
Mobile
There are currently over 5 billion users accessing the internet on a mobile device. Which means that now more than ever, good UI (User Interface), UX (User Experience) and design are key elements of a good mobile website. Your mobile website simply can’t be treated as the poor relation to your desktop site – especially when evidence suggests that a one second delay in page loading times can affect conversions by up to 20%.
Voice search
Mobile phones are often pre-loaded with ‘voice assistant’ technology such as Siri and Google Assistant, but the meteoric rise of the ‘smart speaker’ (sales are set to exceed 200 million this year) could change the way we shop – and market. Voice searches are typically longer and more conversational in their formation (“Alexa, what’s on my calendar for tomorrow?”), which essentially poses a whole new set of keywords and search queries to consider and target in SEO strategies.
Rise of the chatbot
Chatbot technology continues to become more accepted online as consumers embrace and use them. Combined with a friendly avatar, chatbots can be an excellent way for businesses to qualify customer needs, prior to connection with a real person. However, businesses will need to weigh up the potential ROI, because chatbot development (done well) needs a good sized budget.
Social media
Fast, immediate and relatively inexpensive and with 3.2 billion users worldwide social media will not be moving from digital marketing trends any time soon! Innovation looks set to come from VR (Virtual Reality) & AR (Augmented Reality) – especially for the social eCommerce market. However, as with all marketing, social media needs to be targeted, strategic and creative to be effective.
Video
Video marketing is proving to be very effective for B2B businesses. Explainer videos with a run time of around a minute enjoy (on average) a viewer completion rate of 68% as 72% of consumers prefer to learn about a service or product via video. Huge leaps in functionality on mobile devices has opened up video content and consumption enormously. However, this means the marketplace will likely become crowded, so businesses will need to become increasingly strategic and creative to be heard above the noise.
