“Digital marketing is not the art of selling a product. It is the art of making people buy the product that you sell.” – Hecate Strategy

SEO, PPC, content marketing, and social media marketing make the digital landscape come alive. It’s ever-evolving! For 2019, we predicted that the world of digital marketing will be dominated by artificial intelligence and chatbots, voice search, video marketing, programmatic advertising, and content marketing. Being in Q4 of this year, we couldn’t be more content knowing that these predictions were a 100% accurate.

While these trends continue to proliferate, the world of digital marketing would see some interesting additions in 2020. Like every year, here’s our quick take on the top 5 trends that we think would rule the digital marketing realm in 2020. Read on!

1. Interactive Content: People love to interact. If you give them the opportunity to connect with your brand via 360-degree videos, AR/VR, shoppable posts, quizzes, and polls; there’s nothing like it. This kind of content breaks monotony, it’s new, fresh, and original. 93% of marketers agreed that interactive content is effective in educating its buyers versus just 70% for static content. Every piece of interactive content is a form of a call-to-action (CTA) with or without another CTA. It gives your site visitor a reason to stay on the page other than just being informative or sales-y. Interactive content is shareable and shareability increases brand awareness. Therefore, interactive content is going to be big all through 2020.

2. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality: According to Gartner, by 2022, 70% of enterprises will be experimenting with immersive technologies, like AR and VR, for consumer and enterprise use and 25% will have deployed to production. AR boosts the visual impact of sales presentations since it aims to create three-dimensional thinking. Prospects can not only see those presentations in front of them but also around them, which allows sales teams to close deals faster. VR is one of the most immersive of reality technologies. PlayStation VR, Google Cardboard, and Oculus are a few mainstream means of VR availability. Brands are working towards making as much use of these immersive technologies as possible, to increase sales and enhance their customer experience. 2020 is when we’d see better immersive technology unravel.

3. New-breed SEO: The conversion rate for SEO is 14.6%, firmly beating the 1.7 conversion rate for traditional outbound methods. It’s no wonder that staying on top of the SEO game is every digital marketer’s priority. However, SEO hacks that may have landed your pages on the first page of Google Search last year may not just be outdated but could jeopardize your website rankings or worse, even end up in a Google penalty. Search algorithms constantly change and majorly affect the user’s search results. Our prediction is that the search engine industry will tirelessly work on these algorithms next year to improve the quality of search results and of course, steer clear of Google penalties.

4. Social Commerce: It’s no surprise that the eCommerce industry has flourished plenty in the last decade and so has social media. Smart marketers put two and two together and made social commerce the norm. Brands are now selling their products directly on their social media platforms and making the most of their social advertising. A few examples of social commerce are shoppable stories and posts, social commerce plugins and apps, and ads on social media networks with CTAs that redirect to eCommerce sites. 36% of internet users in the US say that social networks have become as important as other information sources for making product choices. Since statistics never lie, it’s safe to say that social commerce will continue to be a hot digital marketing trend next year.

5. Smart Bidding in Google Ads: Also known as auction-time bidding, smart bidding refers to the use of machine learning by Google Ads to optimize bids for conversion. The improvements to smart bidding announced at Google Marketing Live 2019 are going to be a game-changer in digital marketing. You would now have the ability to choose conversion actions at campaign level and according to specific time periods. PPC account managers can now rejoice as we expect automation and smart bidding to become a digital marketing norm in 2020.

The digital marketing throne isn’t an easy one to conquer but keeping up with ongoing trends is sure to take you closer to it. Whether you’re creating a new digital marketing strategy or tweaking an existing one, these top 5 trends will certainly help you with digital readiness. In 2020, may the force of digital marketing be with you!

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