In the online marketing business, the first month of the year often takes strategic planning, as Google has plenty of new features for PPC and SEO experts. In our post, we have collected 10 opportunities and challenges that will shape digital marketing decisively this year. Let’s see what the dominant trends will be in 2020.
Online Marketing Trends 2020
1. The proliferation of smart bidding strategies in Google Ads
The biggest comfort and one of the biggest curses for a PPC manager is the use of smart betting strategies or smart bidding. This saves you a lot of time, as a campaign structure that uses smart bidding can trigger a lot of tasks. Smart systems, on the other hand, take a significant part of the control out of PPC’s hands, so if something doesn’t work properly, it will be harder to identify the cause of the problem. For campaigns with big budgets and thus a lot of data, smart bidding is a fantastic time saving, which is a favorable marketing trend for campaign management colleagues.
Google wants to get professionals to plan strategically for the long term by minimizing optimization tasks. PPC ad management, therefore, needs to adapt to automation, but it’s a good idea to pay much more attention to the features that can still be adjusted.
2. Shopping advance in online marketing
We’ve waited many years for Google Shopping ads to appear in The United Kingdom and our region. In July 2019, the Shopping ad type began its conquest in Hungary with full functionality as a beta, but from the middle of the year. Shopping is no longer new to marketing trends, but its professional use is a legitimate expectation of customers.
In Hungary, the number of Ads accounts running Shopping campaigns is still below average compared to other similar countries, but its growing dominance is still being felt in domestic ad management.
If you have a webshop, you can’t wait much longer to launch Shopping campaigns, as you lose valuable impressions for every query.
And the e-commerce industry also needs to think about improving webshops: more quality product images, more accurate titles, and descriptions are needed for a product to rise out of a dozen competitors.
3. Deepening of technical settings
Google has been trying for years to make micro-management a smaller share of Google Ads. The introduction of Smart bidings and AI features and the overshadowing of manual solutions show this. In proportion to automated solutions, however, the need for unique coding, data management, and statistical analysis is increasing.
Google’s ever-evolving systems are appropriate for achieving industry average KPIs, but gaining a competitive edge will require a much higher level of knowledge from online marketing experts in 2020. Day-to-day work is becoming more specialized for marketing professionals: SEA and SEO tasks involve integrating IT, maths, and economics tools.
Surprising new marketing trends
4. Buying posts and organically spreading ads
In the list of marketing trends, you should also mention purchase posts.
Both Google and Facebook’s advertising systems are increasingly striving to make ads on their surfaces as similar as possible to organic products and content. The more natural an ad text or image is, the more it blends into user-generated content on the search engine or social media interfaces.
Among Facebook’s innovations, it’s worth mentioning Shoppable Posts, which are described as a product highlight for Instagram posts. One or more products are featured here and some important information (USP, price, technical parameter) is already displayed in the image, which may make the product desirable.
Because this ad variation is very similar to the shares that average users post, it’s the best way to get the best results in 2020.
5. BERT, the smarter SEO inspector
In Google’s search engine last year, it activated its algorithm BERT, which continues the direction it set a few years ago: to prioritize user-friendly content. Although the algorithm is far from perfect, content written and optimized for Google bots should be gradually deleted. In the case of BERT, we cannot talk about a huge change, but rather try to eliminate the techniques of influencing positions in smaller increments.
Since last December, the algorithm update has had its impact in Hungarian, so this year it is worth putting even more emphasis on quality content. And SEO copywriting will have even higher quality conditions and qualitative expectations at the journalistic level.
In a few years, the pages that pass useful information to their users will be at the top of the search queries. Thus, BERT can be seen as a reform process rather than a revolution compared to previous major Google updates.
6. CRO is not recommended but will be necessary
Conversion Rating Optimization (CRO) is a marketing trend that has been mentioned for many years. In the middle of the previous decade, its popularity will be compared to the king’s sentence.
In addition to the proliferation of multi-channel routes and the expected increase in CPC in 2020, this will be the point where we can improve all of our marketing tools at once with the lowest energy investment.
However, it is not enough to make an ad hoc A/B. Rather, CRO, integrated systematically, objectively, and strategically, will lead to success. Cro will certainly meet UI and UX design techniques more and more often. One thing’s for sure: you can’t let go of site traffic that’s getting harder and more expensive.
7. Branding is increasingly important in the sharpening competition
Branding is not new to marketing trends, but it needs to be highlighted year after year, as many people still tend to take it lightly.
The spread of online marketing has been unbroken for years. Today, micro-enterprises practically use a tool, and multinationals start campaign planning with huge budgets. Close competition in both PPC and SEO leads to increasing costs and CPA. The relative costs of retaining an already acquired consumer are thus gradually reduced.
Many companies have already embarked on a process of branding and brand-ability. The era of dozens of webshops and websites is over. If a potential buyer looks at two identical products on two different pages, they will order from the more sympathetic, safer side.
Brand building is also a longer-term process than SEO: an old and sure tool for success, but unfortunately, many people neglected it in the 10s in favor of new trends.
8. Strategic and long-term planning
If you want to make the most of our online marketing, you need to use the tools in coordination with each other. We’re going to need strategic planning, which includes a lot of things: target group segmentation, multi-channel marketing, data-oriented analysis, and decision-making, just to name a few.
Over the past decade, the advance and development of online marketing have been dominated by the acquisition and application of technical knowledge. In 2020, however, automated solutions will become more widespread and everyday manual settings will gradually disappear. At the same time, it will be necessary to plan more efficiently and to align the online and offline tools used.
9. Generation Z breaking into the solvent consumer segment
A new generation of young adults, the “Z”, is now entering the labor market and is increasing their share in the solvent consumer segment.
With its huge digital affinity for the former Y generation, it displayed consumption solutions in the 10s such as social services (Airbnb, Uber), smartphone proliferation (and use), and online content consumption itself.
Generation Z as a digital native can cause an even bigger cavalcade. Companies with a wide range of target groups should start developing products and services that are positioned for young people.
Anyone who successfully assesses this new fast-growing consumer group will be the most successful by the end of the decade.
10. Next-generation IT marketing trends: 5G, IoT, Big Data
For years, the next generation of information technology solutions has been hovering over us like the sword of Damocles, but it remains a matter of 1-2 years before we begin the transfer to 5G networks. The process will bring us the “Age of the Internet of Things” and we will work from huge “Big Data” databases. There are great questions and general curiosity about how they will change our daily lives. From a marketing point of view, however, the following things are most interesting:
Larger content size: music, video, website. Almost everything will be about 10 times larger in scope, or just as much faster due to 5G.
Perfect target group segmentation: IoT will create the recognition of amazingly well-defined consumer groups. Unbundling will also benefit niche products and service providers who need to solve the ad on a small budget or even super accurately.
Faster acceptable hypotheses: higher data volume offers greater opportunities to try assumptions, and it will also be useful for consumers to see ads they don’t like for less time.
Speech search will spread: this will fundamentally change how we index our pages. In addition to mobile-optimized websites, you may also see speech-optimized websites.
2020 marketing trends closing thought
2020 has a lot of excitement for online marketing. Specialized knowledge is increasingly pointing in the direction that the areas of expertise so far will be decomposed even further, as this is the only way to get the most out of a tool. This will also lead to a more decentralized approach for companies, as it will become increasingly difficult to maintain an all-in-one marketing team in-house.
