With the boom of digital technology, marketing strategies have vastly changed over time. Everything starting from business to consumers has become digitalized. When so much of marketing is done digitally, there need to be new and innovative ways to outshine your competitors. And from the analysis of past trends in digital marketing, we understand that some innovative trends are going to reign in the industry while some will go out-of-date. 

Now, why should we know more about future trends in digital marketing? That is because it helps your business stay alive and thrive. For example, Colgate that mainly sells oral hygiene products was established in 1806 and sold candles, starch, and soap. It is still alive, thriving and giving tough competition to new sanitary-hygiene based companies worldwide. So, what made them survive and thrive in the industry is their will to adapt to the latest trends from organic marketing to digital marketing. Hence, every company needs to know about future marketing trends so that they can plan their next marketing strategies.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the promotion of brands and products using digital platforms ranging from texts, videos, podcasts, applications, radio channels, television, and electronic billboards. It helps companies analyze campaigns and strategize their content to understand which strategies are more effective and which are simply draining money.

Bad news in 2020 Digital Marketing Predictions 

1. Lesser ‘shares’ on social media: The simple reason is that the same content a company has posted, is found on different platforms. When a company has necessarily to do this in order to get maximum traffic and engagement, the content becomes repetitive and boring for the audience who are following the company on almost all platforms. So, basically, social media marketing will experience a major drop in conversion.
2. Excessive Content Supply and Less Content Buyers: There is too much content on the internet, already. Every company is blogging at the moment because a blog gives one the opportunity for more attraction and conversions. As the competition grows stronger in the content market, there will be too much content for too little buyers. And when too much information is offered, the content buyers will stop buying the content. So, it is expected that Content Marketing will face some bad luck in 2020.
3. More Expensive Google and Facebook Ads: At present, it is mandatory for digital marketers to invest in paid ads by Google or Facebook. This is because the attraction, engagement, and conversions are guaranteed when a company’s product, brand or services gets advertised on any of these platforms. Seeing the opportunity that paid ads are providing good revenue, Google and Facebook will raise the price bar making it a bit difficult for low investors to invest in paid ads. Those companies depending entirely on ads should look for other alternatives that will be trendy in the future.

What can we Hope from the digital market in 2020?

A lot of things seem hopeful in 2020 Digital Market Predictions. So, let’s discuss them.

1. More Investments on Videos: The importance of videos is increasing as more people are getting engaged with audio-visuals. This is primarily because a lot of web users start engaging with the brand or company when they see a video from that company. It’s a great tool for social media marketing and advertising, so marketers are going to invest more in videos, live streaming, and 360° video content.
2. Voice Search: In the future, most searches will be spoken by smartphone assistants and AI speakers like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. It has been predicted that by 2020, almost half of the searches will be made through voice search. Thus, digital marketers are looking for strategies to optimize their SEO rankings using voice search recognition tools. Voice search will affect SEO largely because Voice Searches made, will give only one result. Since everyone will want to land as the search result for voice search, the market is going to be very competitive.
3. A/B Testing: A/B Testing lets you compare and contrast different versions of web pages, and other marketing assets. It also lets you know about the keywords, phrases, and images that are fit for your content. This is going to be a big marketing tool in the future as more marketers will start necessarily employing them in the content marketing process.
4. Digital Marketing Live Events and Live Conferences: Attending conferences has been the best possible way to remain intact with the ever-changing digital market. With Digital Marketing these same conferences are becoming live and can be viewed directly from home or office. The live events also generate a huge number of traffics to all the companies and brands involved in the event. It has more potential in the future because of its promotional factor.
5. Digital Marketing Coaches on Podcasts: In the near future, we will get a huge number of coaches from the digital marketing background who will speak about their tips, ideas, strategies and their stories on podcasts. So, it is evident that radio marketing is going to boom but in a totally different way. Digital Marketing coaches are already present in Soundcloud, Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, and Stitcher and are making podcasts more professional.
6. Omni-Channel Marketing: Omni-Channel Marketing is a multi-channel sale approach which makes it a priority to give the customer an integrated customer experience, irrespective of how the customer came to the brand or company. This is going to be applied in all companies to give the customer the maximum user experience and retain their loyalty even online. Omni-Channel will be a big slogan for digital marketers.
7. Translation of Content: Useful and relevant content is always engaging. But providing your content in your local language and making them available in international languages will soon become a priority of digital content marketers. Users will prefer more language-specific content and digital marketers will get busier in providing the users translated versions of the same content. This will be a big victory for globalization, market expansion, and market diversification.
8. Chatbots: Machine-learning based Chatbots can leverage your customer interaction and even learn from their previous interaction on how to deal with new questions. Since it automates the task by streamlining the initial procedure, it saves a lot of additional workload of the digital marketing team. Chatbots will become an integral part of the functionality of the entire team of digital marketers in most brands and companies.
9. Influencer Marketing: When most users purchase something online, they depend entirely on online reviews. In this case, Influencers and Instagram Socialites can be a big revenue earner if they are being employed in digital marketing. This is actually happening. Digital marketers are employing influencers to provide reviews on products and services because these influencers, with their immense number of followers on various social networking sites, have the ability to affect your sales. So, in the future, more influencers are going to be responsible for promoting various brands online.
10. Visual Search: Since machines are becoming more sensitive to visuals like humans, now pictures and images can be tracked down to their original site within seconds. There are so many search engines these days, where image search is working as effectively as text search and voice search. Digital marketers will need to invest more in how to make their content visually appealing because image search is going to evolve more in the future.

Digital marketing is sure to gain an impetus as internet use becomes more globalized with the upcoming year. More companies ranging from small stores, local markets, start-ups to malls, reputed brands and big companies will become accessible at a single search. So, digital marketing is here for eternity as long as we use digital platforms, and sooner or later, we must get accustomed to what the future holds in store for us.