2020 Marketing Trends

It’s prediction season. That time when everyone provides their thoughts on what the upcoming year will bring. While we don’t pretend to have a marketing crystal ball, here are just a few of the things that we are keeping on our radar as 2020 approaches.

Digital Advertising:

While digital advertising channels and tactics continue to increase, so do the challenges of figuring out which ones to use and which vendors to go through. In speaking with multiple marketing professionals as part of our Informed Emotion podcast, these two challenges surface repeatedly as some of the biggest marketers are facing.

We expect those challenges to continue into 2020 as more and more vendors offer more and more digital advertising tactics. Marketers are going to need to develop efficient ways to digest, assess and choose the best options.

Reporting & Analytics:

Unless there is a dramatic shift in the way businesses decide to run in 2020, marketers are still going to be asked ‘to do more with less’ and tie all advertising efforts as closely as possible to results. And with all of the data that is available to us, you would think that task would be getting easier. Ask any marketer, and I doubt you will find many that give a resounding reply of yes, particularly when it comes to integrating different data points to give truly meaningful insights into the return on ad spend (ROAS).

In the coming year, having data accompanied by the proper context and comparison points is imperative. It allows a more accurate way to evaluate success and drives better business decision going forward. We have seen our clients requesting this more frequently and it is an area that we are investing heavily in. We expect to see this trend of asking for deeper levels of reporting and analysis to grow in the coming year.

Traditional Advertising:

Print’s not dead yet. Especially with Boomers who are still a sizable part of the market and represent a big chunk of wealth in the U.S. (source).

Used correctly, either on its own or as part of the media mix, print mediums can be quite effective with any demographic. Even Amazon and Google are using it. (Amazon employed old school, direct mailed toy catalogues for the 2019 Christmas season and Google sent direct mail to encourage advertising).

Voice Search and Digital Assistants:

I’ve been saying it for years (and everyone at my office rolls their eyes), but Terminators or the Matrix are just an eventuality at this point. My sci-fi fantasies aside, according to Juniper Research, by 2023, the number of voice assistants is projected to hit 8 billion accompanied by a total of $80 billion in annual voice-driven commerce (source).

That’s a lot of devices listening to us and helping us buy the stuff we want. If businesses do not stay on top on how voice assistants and voice search are used by people to find and buy from them, it could have a very real negative impact on their revenue.

Strategy & Messaging Are Still Key:

No matter what the new year brings, the fundamentals of marketing and advertising remain the same:

• Identify a problem, need or want,
• Develop a solution that meets that need better than others, and
• Create and execute a marketing strategy that tells people about it using the right message, through the right channel, at the right time.