The main objective of the digital marketing world is to give importance to companies. To distinguish itself from the countless competitors on the web, a company must know its Customers, analyse their behaviour and needs and base its strategy on them.
It is therefore essential to follow the latest digital marketing trends, update the tools used, create a content marketing strategy and constantly perform social media marketing activities.
LATEST TRENDS: SOCIAL NETWORKS
Technology follows and supports users’ needs. In the last decade, technology has made great strides, adapting itself to the latest socio-cultural changes. Long gone are the days when television affected a company’s sales.
Today, if a company wants to sell its products or services, it is forced to follow its audience where this is most present: social networks.
Facebook and Instagram are the most used social networks and for this reason, in recent years, companies have increased their presence on these channels.
VIDEO MARKETING AND INFLUENCER MARKETING
As it is known, users’ online activity takes place mainly within their smartphones and their level of attention has dropped considerably.
For this reason, companies need to find new ways to attract the spotlight.
In this sense, it may be useful to base a social media marketing strategy on the use of images and videos. Users surf on social networks during spare time and scroll the news distractedly. A colourful image and a short but engaging video are therefore more effective.
In 2020, having a Youtube channel and an Instagram page will be a must also for small companies. With reference to Instagram, an increasingly common activity among companies is connected to influencer marketing. The collaboration with social influencers allows companies to reach a wider audience more easily. In this case, it is essential to develop more and more their video marketing skills, to share the short videos in the Instagram Stories.
THE DIGITAL TRENDS WITH GREATER IMPACT ON COMPANIES
For some years now, we hear about artificial intelligence, machine learning and virtual reality and it seems that 2020 represents the decisive year for achieving surprising results in terms of web marketing and marketing technology.
Visual Search
Compared to Instagram, Facebook loses some ground. In recent years, users have shown a greater need to see images rather than words. Precisely for this reason, in 2020 it will be easier for the user to do a search by images.
Visual Search, integrated with an artificial intelligence (AI) system, will allow to frame an unknown object and wait for the search engine to identify it and describe it for the user.
Google has been using this search system for some time, and other platforms, such as Instagram and Pinterest, are also taking action in this direction. To exploit this type of digital marketing technology, companies will have to improve the images in their websites and be careful to assign them clear titles, which will allow search engines to identify images more easily.
Voice Search
The percentage of voice searches carried out through mobile devices grows immeasurably and it is expected that in 2020 it will be around 20% of the total searches carried out by online users.
What will companies have to do to seize this big opportunity?
- Do not ignore semantics: users' voice searches often follow colloquial language. Therefore, it would be advisable to write in a simple way, following users' way of thinking, with short sentences and including the most used keywords.
- Optimise your site via snippet, i.e. the 3 preview lines of a site returned by Google's SERP. There are three elements that make up the snippet: first, the Tag Title, in blue and clickable, which refers to the reference site; the URL, in green, indicating the address of the page; and finally the Meta Description, in black, which briefly describes the content of the page. Google's interest is to present the best answer to its users' questions and ensure consistency between the snippet and the actual content of the page. Only if there is consistency the users will be satisfied with the results of the SERP and will not leave the clicked page.
VR, Virtual Reality
Virtual reality, already implemented in movies and videogames, becomes an additional opportunity for companies to advertise themselves. The user, tired of the classic and passive advertisements, requires a greater emotional and sensorial involvement. The purchase of virtual reality amplification devices tends to increase more and more. Many companies are starting to create an immersive and real advertising environment, which improves users’ experience and leads them to feel like protagonists and not mere passive spectators.
There are already examples of virtual and augmented reality in the e-commerce world. Think of Place, the IKEA application, which allows you to scan a home environment, using the phone’s camera, and try to furnish it virtually with IKEA furniture. Through this application, consumers can therefore see three-dimensional models of each product in the desired context of use.
AI, Artificial Intelligence
As you have already noticed, ads and online advertisements are increasingly targeted at the needs of individual users. The reason is simple: the banner and popup advertisement is based on a data analysis service on different users.
However, this analysis is very often inaccurate. In 2020, thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning, an improvement in the accuracy of this analysis is expected. For example, the AI will be able to analyse the data coming from a newsletter, based on the clicks to the various topics or on the opening times of the e-mails.
Chatbox
Another trend for 2020 is the Chatbox, a chat between a user and a robot (artificial intelligence). The chatbox is already used by many companies, both on their websites and on their social channels.
This instant messaging system meets the needs of both companies and users.
The chatbox accompanies the users in navigating a site, offering results designed to answer their questions. Users will not have to wait for days to receive a reply and the company will not have to use additional resources to give continuous assistance to its customers.
The use of chatboxes allows also collecting valuable data on the most common searches of the users. From the analysis of this information, it will be possible to optimise both the chatbox (refining the answers) and the company website (making it more intuitive and improving user experience).
Rely on a team of professionals
The digital sector is evolving at full speed and it is understandable that companies are confused by all these technologies.
The choice of the most suitable strategy must be based on the knowledge of the specific reference market. Requesting advice from a web agency is the first step to avoid investing money in technologies that will then be ineffective for your target audience.
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