Fast Forward 2020: Top Digital Marketing Trends to Watch Out

Increasing competition in the digital landscape has played a vital role in revolutionizing the industry. Let’s rewind several years and compare the digital landscape of that time with the present landscape. We will notice that there have been many significant changes. 

Today the digital marketing has become much more streamlined, organized and focused. The innovative factor can never be taken out of the digital marketing but today the increasing use of technology and analytics have helped in enhancing the overall impact of digital marketing exercises. 

Another thing that we can observe is that the huge increase in the changing rate of digital marketing landscape. We don’t have to wait for an entire year or more to study the development or changes. Within a few months, the hot trends start fading away, sophisticated tools and techniques are introduced and new trends emerge- some of which stay for long. In such case, it would be interesting to know the possible growth rate and major trends that can redefine the digital marketing industry in 2020.

Let us fast forward and peep into the future to see how the digital landscape of 2020 would look like:


Connection with reality

If we closely study the recent trends in the content scenario we can find a huge shift in the working style of the content creators and marketers. A significant part of the content is presented in form of the quotes by the authority figures of the industry. 

Besides, today the real-life events, conferences, and seminars are acting as the fertile ground from where the content creators and marketers are harvesting the fresh, crisp ideas with a subtle viral factor.

• By the time 2020 will knock, we would see that the content creation and marketing experts would base a huge part of their strategy around real-life events, case studies, excerpts by authority figures and interaction with the clients as well as professionals.

• It would be a leap from providing the writer’s thoughts or tips to presenting the excerpts of the authority figures, interviews, speaker notes etc. that will help the reader to make a quick connect with the content. Besides, it will also require the content creator or marketer to change the direction of research.

• They might need to make some real life industry connections, attend the seminars and conferences, watch the relevant videos and carry out other similar exercises. How deftly a digital content marketer or writer does that would define their success in 2020.

B2B will spend more on digital marketing technology

While B2C businesses form the prime layer of clients for the digital marketers, the last year i.e., 2017 experienced some pleasantly surprising shift in the trends. The B2B clients significantly increased the budget of digital marketing technology that underlines the growing awareness in B2B sector with regards to the digital marketing.

• However, the major part of the increased budget is spent on the marketing technology rather than campaigns or social media activities. As per one of the studies more than half of the businesses- 43.2% to be precise- spent above $50,000 on digital marketing technology.

• Another important figure revealed by the study is 28% of the businesses incurred <$100K only for marketing technology. SO there are 2 major things to note here.

• The B2B sector that is generally don't take the digital marketing exercises as serious as the B2C sector- is now showing an increased interest in the same and going by the various past trends in the digital landscape it would not be unrealistic to expect that by 2020 the interest, expenditure, and activities are related to digital marketing would significantly rise in B2B sector.

•  The second important thing to note here is the blend of marketing and technology. The clients of today are more interested in the concrete data. The marketing technologies allow them to get the data that is really useful and can offer the tangible business profits if used strategically.

• Besides, it also offers them the valuable insights that can further help the businesses to use the data more effectively. Hence we can certainly expect that it will redefine the digital marketing strategies as people would have the real data promising tangible benefits and also the insights.

(Hopefully) Harmonious correlation between the talent and tools

The increasing use of tools in the digital marketing exercises can redefine the role of experts in this particular field. Much of the data can be fetched by the sophisticated technical tools and a number of related activities are automated like customer data segmentation and integration as well as the campaign management.

• In other words, the marketing technologies tools are not limited to providing the passive reports but can play a direct and more interactive role in the digital marketing ecosystem.

• However, it needs the human creativity to work on the data fetched by the technology and decide the character the digital campaign that can later managed by the digital technology tools.

• Hence it would not be a surprise if we see the interdependent coexistence between digital marketers of 2020 and digital marketing tools.

• It would be interesting to see how it will affect the employment, expertise, and demand for digital marketers in 2020. More importantly, it can also impact the competition in the digital arena.

More focus on customer retention

Widening the customer base is one of the primary objectives of digital marketing. However, the increasing number of players in the digital ecosystem makes it difficult to acquire the new customers. Besides, there is an element of uncertainty as you cannot predict the success of such attempts. That is why much of the exercises are directed towards exploring the ways to enhance the business coming from existing clients.

•  It has also impacted the post sales activities and we can see that the companies are now offering much better services to their existing clients and a hike in client relationship and support management can be observed.

• By 2020 the growth rate of overall expenditure on retention might be equal to even more than the expenditure on new custom re-acquisition. It will also affect the quality of the customer services.

Reasonable use of well-researched strategies

While there is kind of huge revolution in the digital marketing arena today, it is clearly perceptible that the volume of efforts is rising significantly. However, the major point is that the quality should match the quantity. Today, we can see that the serious digital marketing experts are now focused on enhancing the quality of their campaigns.

• By 2020, it is expected that the unnecessary high volume of digital marketing strategies would be replaced by the judicious use of well-focused strategies.

• It will also change the marketing process where the experts would pay more attention to the homework before executing the final task.

•  That can also result in filtering the real talent from the general dabblers.