How Digital Marketing will Change in 2020

How will digital marketing change in 2020? The art of digital marketing is unique. There’s no precise recipe for success, that’s true for all art forms and all businesses, but with digital marketing, the ingredients are always changing.

 Take a look through the years and you’ll see plenty of innovations, cutting edge techniques and marketing methods that took the world by storm, but use them in the present day and you’ll be labeled old-fashioned or outdated. To really keep up to speed, marketers need to know what’s fresh, but more importantly, what direction we’re heading.

If you’re up to speed with the current trends of SEO and the numbers surrounding search, it’ll come as little surprise that voice search is taking over.

With over 25% of the adults in the US owning a smart speaker (Amazon Echo) alongside 31% of worldwide smartphone users using voice search (Siri etc.), we’re seeing huge numbers of voice searches in 2019, but that number’s only going to get bigger with time. It’s estimated that in 2020, 50% of all searches will be completed with nothing more than the vocal cords, so its time to optimize for voice.

With such huge numbers and digital marketing relying so heavily on search, marketers will be mad to avoid the stats and ignore voice search in 2020.

Humans are very visual creatures. So much so that the visual-side of digital marketing could have the biggest change in 2020 with a variety of new ways to see on the web.

One of these ‘new ways’ comes in the form of shoppable posts and with the attention of shoppers scattered all over Instagram, it’s hard for the companies to ignore the attention – that’s where shoppable posts come in. Thanks to the shoppable posts available on Instagram, alongside Pinterest and Facebook, we’re seeing products able to be tagged directly in posts – a great way to showcase and advertise products.

We’re seeing the tech used in conjunction with influencer marketing and with so much power between the two – we’re expecting it to be one of the biggest digital marketing changes of 2020.

It wouldn’t be a future post without at least mentioning the sci-fi feeling AR and VR, but with ever-increasing accessibility, it’s hard to avoid the topic.

AR is already being used by furniture giants IKEA with the use of their smartphone app that allows users to place furniture in their homes (on the screen) and make a judgment as to sizes, appearance, fits etc. It’s a great bit of kit and we’re expecting more of the same with digital marketing in 2020.

It’s predicted that AR will quickly outpace VR, in part due to the sheer number of app development opportunities and that VR will struggle to keep up after 2021. With bulky headsets and limited natural tech, it’s not much of a surprise – but it’s something to consider before wading through the waters in the coming years.

To cut a long story short, we’re expecting digital marketing will change for the better in 2020 with the development of voice search, shoppable posts and AR and some VR tech taking the reins.

For the majority of digital marketers, it pays to keep on top of the new trends and by optimizing for voice and increasing brand awareness of products via the shoppable posts – they can do just that. AR may be a little way off for the masses, but with the tech coming in thick and fast, never say never, nothing’s impossible.