How Much will Marketing Trends Really Evolve from 2019 to 2020?

Marketing and advertising is a never ending pursuit of understanding consumers well enough to be predictive and stay ahead of the game when it comes to strategies, spending and creative moving forward. What is going to capture the consumers attention, hold it and convince them to buy from us? By being predictive you can start to move ahead of your competitors and feel secure that your marketing efforts are being spent in the right place. But where do we go moving into 2020?

2019’s being marketing focus was inevitably a continuation of content marketing, influencer social media leveraging, continued focus on search and heavily targeted social media advertising with an emphasis on video creative. Sure, the big time brands with huge research and development budgets are pushing the next generation of predictive and personalised advertising through connecting huge pools of consumer data, which while it sounds exciting has already come under huge scrutiny for being a risk via consumer data misuse and even playing with ethics in general human rights.So, what is it that we’re really going to be focussing on in reality for 2020? Voice Search The data would suggest that with the growth in voice search and the uprising of voice activated home devices like the smart speaker etc, that we are heading into a future more and more dominated by voice search. We have covered this topic before and in essence it’s going to mean that search strategies need to evolve to include spoken search queries in both paid and organic search campaigns in order to stay ahead.There is data out there to suggest that emerging markets will see all search queries split 50/50 between voice and search as early as 2021 but there are doubters out there and we’d throw some caution to the wind on that one. What is inevitable though is that whether it reaches 50% of all searches or not, voice search queries will continue to rise steadily, and they should be a factor in your search approach. Content Marketing Content marketing is going anywhere, it’s a cost-effective investment into your brand as well as effective marketing collateral which builds depth many brands and businesses lack. Blogging, video creative, website functionality investment and third-party content placement including advertorials and paid for reviews etc will continue to be a focus point for all business types and there is no sign of this slowing.As such content marketing agencies with specialisms in content creation and even old school PR techniques will continue to be in high demand. Social Media Targeting We’re not likely to see a change here either, though as a major trend for last year with even small brands jumping heavily on the social media advertising train, brands with limited budgets are going to have to play it smart in 2020 with their targeting pools becoming more and more defined and niche. Alongside this in order to be truly effective the creative used will need to be tailored closely to the targeting as well to ensure the highest possible relevancy and engagement to keep the channel truly cost effective.