It’s probably too early to wish you a Merry Christmas, but it’s high time you start thinking about your New Year’s resolutions. Who said they aren’t meant for business? Careful planning and the ability to keep up with innovations are essential to staying afloat in the fierce market competition. That’s why today, we’ll embark on new marketing trends for 2020. They will help you upgrade your current marketing strategy and plan for the marketing technologies & approaches that will be the most effective in 2020. Dreaming is great, but the resolutions based on reliable expert data are much more likely to come true.

New marketing trends always depend on the living environment and habits of consumers. This means that businesses must understand what marketing channels are the most effective during a certain period of time. It’s also necessary to know how users behave and what they like. In this respect, 2020 can be called the year of micro-influencers, voice search, social media platforms, omni-channel marketing, and mail campaigns. Consumers fancy advanced digital marketing technology and, at the same time, adore snail mail. Well, the truth is that colorful birthday postcards still melt our hearts.

Generally, marketing trends 2020 keep a fine balance between offline and online marketing. This allows trendsetters to provide equally seamless customer service across all channels. Want to know how they do this? Keep reading to learn more about:

• Why is it necessary to keep a finger on the pulse of new marketing trends?
• New Marketing Trends 2020: digital marketing, social media, content marketing, email marketing, and direct mail marketing trends

Why Are New Marketing Trends Important? How Do They Help to Grow Your Business?

The modern business environment resembles a never-ending race in which every contestant tries to outperform the others. If one company launches an SEO or content marketing strategy, you don’t necessarily have to do the same. Yet when a certain marketing approach is used by leading companies, it already becomes one of the new marketing trends and shouldn’t be neglected. Why? If your most successful rivals do something and get excellent results, a similar strategy is very likely to be also effective in your case.

But there is one more thing…The moment consumers see that another company offers them a customer service you don’t, you start lagging. For example, a competitor may use direct mail automation to send personalized discount vouchers or stream live YouTube videos that users are crazy about. In case you keep selling the same product in a traditional way, it will be extremely hard to attract the attention of customers.

Besides, if you’re flexible and proactive enough, you can become a trendsetter yourself. This will give you a huge competitive advantage and the chance to find a free niche. Such expansion will bring new customers and leads interested in your product. To do this, make sure to analyze all emerging tendencies and technological advances. Since new marketing trends 2020 heavily depend on marketing technology, this will help you understand in what direction to move. Don’t forget to regularly read the blogs on marketing technology and automation as these trends are the foundation of modern marketing.

New Marketing Trends 2020: Digital Marketing, Social Media, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, and Direct Mail Marketing Trends

The New Year comes to everyone. Adults, kids, business owners, and…marketing channels, of course. Although automation and personalization trends are common for all marketing approaches, there are significant discrepancies in marketing trends 2020 among the most popular marketing channels. So let’s talk about each of them separately.

Digital Marketing Trends 2020

User-Focused Chatbots

Chatbots can significantly improve your customer service and cut the expenditures on customer support. Such online assistants answer the most common questions and make the user experience more enjoyable. In addition, they provide help 24/7, which is appreciated by 66% of millennials and 58% of baby boomers. Depending on your needs, you can use chatbots for advanced shopping assistance, lead qualification, knowledge base research, accessibility, and more.

Voice Search Marketing

It’s predicted that by 2025, 75% of households will own a smart speaker. This will revolutionize digital marketing and limit your capabilities at the same time. Users don’t want to hear what you think, they want a solution. Since voice searches are usually location-based, make sure to target your potential customers more precisely. The sooner you start, the better.

Marketing Trends 2020 for Social Media Platforms

Live Video Streams

According to Cisco, by 2022, live streaming will comprise around 17% of all video traffic, growing by 15 times since 2017. Live videos are preferred over recorded by all leading social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. The real-time shooting provides unique experience appreciated by most modern customers.

Influencer Marketing

Your social media marketing strategy for the next year could benefit from the cooperation with micro-influencers. Influencer marketing is an effective tool to put your products or services in the real-life context and show how other people enjoy them. It allows users to connect with their favorite bloggers by making a purchase. Note that in 2020, micro-influencers with 1-100k subscribers should be preferred over world-renowned bloggers, for two simple reasons: they are cheaper and closer to the average consumer.

Content Marketing Trends 2020

Content Personalization Trends

Users prefer brands and companies that can predict their needs and offer the most suitable content. In 2020, make sure to use AI capabilities to customize your offers, messages, recommendations, and call-to-action based on the customer data collected in real-time. Your content must also be always reliable, well-referenced, and updated.

Advanced Optimization for Search Engines

Despite the striking growth of voice search volume, optimization for search engines still matters. Top positions were a marketers’ dream for many years, but not so long ago, everything changed again. Today, position zero (or search snippets) is what you should aim for. Position zero means that your content is displayed above all other search results since Google bot finds it the most useful to answer a specific query. You may want to cooperate with SEO professionals or experiment with innovative SEO strategies to get there.

Email Marketing Trends 2020

Mobile-First to Be Continued

The focus on mobile devices isn’t a novelty. The number of mobile users has steadily been growing for the last decade, skyrocketing from 4.15 billion in 2015 to 6.95 billion in 2020. The next year, you will need to make sure your marketing emails look great on all screen resolutions. They should be shorter, more concise, and include a call-to-action closer to the beginning. If you plan to run email marketing campaigns in 2020, test your email newsletter on mobile devices before hitting the Send button.

AI Email Marketing

Artificial Intelligence will help you keep up with predictive personalization trends in email marketing. There is no way to achieve the same level of customization manually or with outdated email marketing tools in 2020. If you haven’t done this yet, find an email service with a broad AI functionality for trigger-based email marketing, automatically tailored content, multivariate or A/B testing, email analytics, and more.

Direct Mail Marketing Trends 2020

Direct Mail Automation

Mail campaigns, which have always been perceived as brick-and-mortar marketing, now can be powered with automation. As you see, 2020’s automation and personalization trends don’t pass by direct mail. 64% of marketers believe that mail automation is very important. Customers expect 1:1 communication and seamless experience at every step of their journey, including mail pieces they receive.

With Inkit’s mail automation, you can use variable data printing to cast customer data from a database and automatically include it on mail pieces. Most importantly, direct mail automation allows running triggered-based mail campaigns, which means that customers will receive the mail when they are the most likely to convert. The best thing about such direct mail marketing trends is that many companies still don’t use them. Thus, it’s an excellent chance to outperform your competitors.

Mail Campaigns In Omni-Channel Marketings

From 2015 to 2020, the volume of direct mail increased by 0.4%, and it will continue to grow. Yet, despite not losing its popularity, direct mail marketing changes. The thing is that modern consumers want to be able to interact with businesses across all channels. To achieve higher response rates, companies connect mail with digital marketing channels, launching well-orchestrated omni-channel campaigns. The benefits are obvious. Omni-channel customer services ensure an 89% customer retention rate compared to a 33% retention rate of traditional customer support. QR codes, PURLs, and augmented reality are just a few ways to align direct mail with other channels. Click here to see how businesses use direct mail in omni-channel marketing.

We hope our list of new marketing trends will help you find your way in 2020. You don’t need to use all of them, just choose a few that can boost your current marketing strategy. A step-by-step approach is the most effective to introduce innovations.