Tips & Advices
digital marketing trends
27 Digital Marketing Trends to Watch in 2020
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
You sit down for a meeting to discuss big goals for the year with your boss — revenue, marketing KPIs, growth, and so on.
Before you walked in, you felt good about the initial plans and recommendations you had put together. “I might have to make a few tweaks,” you think to yourself. “Overall, though, what I’ve got is rock solid.”
Flash forward to walking out of that very same meeting. You’re feeling confused… maybe even a little overwhelmed by some of the “out of left-field” challenges your boss threw your way.
It’s not that what they were looking for was unreasonable. But, clearly, you need to rethink your strategy from top to bottom.
That means it’s time to buckle down and figure out how your marketing team is going to deliver big for your company in the new year. Because, you’re going to need to evolve your strategies to embrace new ways of achieving your goals.
But where should you spend your time and effort? What are the digital marketing trends worth capitalizing on?
When it comes to digital marketing, this scenario is a common one. The landscape is always evolving — and sometimes spinning wildly off into new directions.
For example, what most marketers ignored as a smartphone gimmick only a few years ago has now evolved into voice search, which is growing rapidly.
This happens a lot in our space. What starts out as a seemingly inconsequential shift, suddenly transforms into an outright disruption in how buyers search, evaluate, and make purchasing decisions online.
Here at IMPACT, we’re obsessed with teaching our clients how to successfully navigate the often choppy waters of digital sales and marketing.
My goal with this article is to help you learn and understand the digital marketing trends that will change how you work.
Digital Sales Trends:
1- Assignment Selling
Does your sales team use any of the content being produced by the marketing team? Do you, as marketers, work with your sales team to create content that could help the sales team close deals?
If so, assignment selling is for you.
Assignment selling is simply the process of intentionally using educational content you have created about your products and services to resolve the major concerns and answer the burning questions of prospects during the sales process so they are much more prepared for a sales appointment.
The direct result of your sales team using created content in the sales process is a more well-informed prospect who is more likely to close — and close faster.
As an added benefit, your sales team will also spend less time answering the same questions over and over again through assignment selling. Sales conversations become more efficient and exist only with prospects that understand your offering.
2- Predictive lead scoring
How are you currently prioritizing the leads to focus on those that will most likely result in a sale? If you have a manual process built around lifecycle stages and traffic source, you’re wasting time when technology has created the solution.
AI and machine learning has improved so much in the past couple of years and one use of this functionality is predictive lead scoring.
HubSpot and other CRM software options now usually have the ability to help you filter through your contacts and understand trends and behaviors.
Predictive lead scoring rates your contacts based on the likelihood to close. This score is based on factors like email engagement, social engagement, spam, demographic information, behavior, and company information.
Finding a CRM or contact management software with predictive lead scoring is essential to digital sales.
3- Personalized video in the sales process
The concept of using video to communicate with prospects is becoming more popular as video tools become easier to use. With the number of emails that your prospects receive on a daily basis, it’s hard to be heard among the noise.
Emails with personalized videos have seen an 8x increase in click-through rate when compared to a standard outbound email.
Free tools like Vidyard’s GoVideo allow anyone to make quick and personal videos easily using your laptop’s webcam. In most cases, it’s much quicker to make a video than type an email
In addition to increased click rates, higher open-rates, and greater engagement, video allows prospects to see your face.
Humanizing an email conversation with a friendly face helps your prospect get to know you. This deeper level of connection allows your sales team to break through the noise and build trust.
4- Product-focused videos
Fifty-two percent of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions.
You cannot assume that your buyers understand the products that you’re selling online. Product videos can further explain what written specifications details and pricing cannot. Videos for products should explain:
- What is it?
- Who's it a good/not good fit for?
- Why do I need it?
- How much does it cost?
- When should I buy it?
- How do I buy it?
5- Long-form videos
In 2017, a vast majority of videos (80%) were under five minutes or shorter. These short videos tend to make up less than a third of total engagement of all video content.
Conversely, videos that were 15 minutes or longer resulted in 50% of audience engagement.
With the rise in video as a content medium, focusing on engagement needs to be at the core of your video strategy. Vanity metrics such as likes and views aren’t going to move the needle.
Short-form video is proven to be most effective on social media sites, whereas long form video is expected and desired on your website and video channels.
Creating a video series with long-form videos aligns to the content consumption habits of an on demand streaming services like Netflix.
Moreover, often the length a viewer is willing to watch on video correlates directly with the value being provided. For example, someone might be less likely to watch a social video that’s more than five minutes long.
However, they might be more willing to watch an eight-minute video that’s on a services page because, in that case, they are wanting as much information as possible, as they are in a sales-motivated scenario.
In other cases, it simply may take longer to thoroughly and honestly answer a buyer’s question via video, so let the content and context of what you’re covering dictate the length of your video.
Think of longer videos as a great way to teach your potential buyers what they need to know without making them read a lengthy blog post.
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