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Entrepreneurs, business owners, and executives everywhere are trying for a firmer grasp on digital marketing tactics. It’s difficult to stay competitive in any market, but when you can’t keep up with the trends, it’s even harder.
The best thing you can do is learn digital marketing strategies that are making a difference for other companies. For 2020 and beyond, try to anticipate the trends before they occur.
Here are five digital marketing trends worth watching.
Table of Contents
Micro-Influencers
Influencer marketing has been a hit among digital marketers for some time, but this year, micro-influencers will take the stage. These are smaller “celebrities” on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and other social platforms that typically have around 10k-50k followers. After entering into a marketing agreement with your company, they’ll endorse your product on their pages. These page owners do not have a huge reach, but they have dedicated followers that view them as authorities in a niche.
The biggest benefit of using these influencers is that their audience is more narrowly targeted in a niche. Furthermore, it’s significantly cheaper to use a micro-influencer instead of a mega influencer, like real-life celebrities with millions of followers.
AdWeek recently examined the effectiveness of various types of influencers and found micro-influencers to be the best. Among accounts with a higher number of followers, micro-influencers had 60 percent higher rates of engagement and were 6.7 times cheaper.
Direct Messaging
Customer individuality and acknowledgment is one important trend in successful digital marketing, and professionals are turning to direct messaging through email or social media platforms to start the conversation and potentially drive more conversions.
Direct messaging has carried significant leverage in the multi-level marketing realm. It became apparent that consumers respond better to a direct message from someone they knew rather than a blanket social media post or advertisement for certain products.
The same tactic is being carried over in small and midsize businesses. Sales are being directed through direct messages where consumers can ask questions directly, see the best products, and feel a closer connection with the company.
Programmatic Advertising
With programmatic advertising, marketers can target more specific audiences for their advertisements with AI automation. It’s faster, more efficient, and easier to keep up with, which naturally yields to higher conversions and lower costs for customer acquisitions.
This is a different way to look at automated advertising, according to Irina Kovalenko of SmartyAds. With a broader scope in targeting signals, you’ll be able to reach more people for more efficient advertising at a lower cost.
Visual Search
Visual Search is supposed to be one of the most in-demand trends of the new year. Social Media Today reports that almost two-thirds of millennials want visual search capabilities over other technology. As an example, Pinterest gets more than 600 million visual searches each month.
There are many companies currently employing the use of visual search for the convenience of their customers. For example, Home Depot allows you to take a photo of any product, and their app will automatically try to match it in their store.
Bing search also lets you search for elements within an image. For example, if you’re looking at a picture of entryway decor, and you see a vase you love, you may be able to find that exact product through the “Detail View” tab.
The demand for visual search is there, and marketers can use that to their advantage when marketing their products and company. If you can be among the first businesses offering visual search, that will go a long way for your business!
Social Stories
Snapchat was the first social media platform to use My Story, a way to record videos that were only on social media for 24 hours before disappearing. Soon after, Instagram and Facebook implemented a Stories feature into their platforms, followed by YouTube’s Reels, and it simply took off!
It’s been around for a few years, but 2020 will be another big year for the Stories feature, especially where marketers are concerned. If you haven’t already, make Stories part of your daily marketing efforts. It can lead to increased brand awareness, more traffic on your website, engagement with followers, and connection with younger audiences all at an affordable price.
This year, take advantage of all the elements Stories has to offer like polls, swipe up links, location tags, live video, and geofilters. The proof of its effectiveness will be in your increased profits and greater customer engagement.
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