Changes in technology have changed the way our audience consumes media, interacts with friends and family and even for entertainment. Marketers have no option but to be where the consumers spend most of their time to inform, educate and offer their products and services. Marketers go a step ahead and use the technology to understand and predict the consumer’s needs with the help of user data and machine learning. The change in marketing will continue in the coming year as well. Here are a few changes in marketing that you can expect in 2020. 

Change #1: Companies will optimise for voice search

It is estimated that over 50% of the searches in 2020 will be voice search. So, optimising for voice search is a great way to get your brand out more. However, there are hardly any solutions to capitalise on voice search traffic and convert them in sales. This is one space where we can see lots happening in the coming year.

Change #2: Look for alternative communication channels

The email open rate and click rates are decreasing by every passing month, this does not mean that email marketing is dead but organisations will have to leverage more communications channels. Chatbots will take off drastically and solutions like ManyChat and MobileMonkey will lead the way as they leverage Facebook Messenger and as they connect it with Instagram and WhatsApp it will get even more popular.

Change #3: Shift from analytics to business intelligence

Marketing has been changing and new channels are being constantly introduced, such as voice search. Transactions no longer are as simple as someone coming and buying from you and that’s it. These days there are things like upsells, down sells, repeat purchases, and even checkout bumps. On top of that, there are so many different ways you can generate revenue for your online business, such as partnerships, affiliate marketing, and even webinars. This has caused companies to start using analytics solutions that tie into their database better, such as Amplitude.  Or better yet, you are seeing a big push into business intelligence. A central place where you can tie in all of your data and make better-informed decisions so you can optimize for your lifetime value instead of your short-term income. In 2020, we can expect companies adopting business intelligence solutions… from paid ones to free ones like Google Data Studio.

Change #4: Personalization is the new marketing

About 95% of your visitors will never convert into a customer. It’s that your message doesn’t fit every single one of your visitors. But through personalization, you can convert more of your visitors into customers. With machine learning and available user data, it is easier to predict the user’s behaviour based on their buying patterns. With improvements in tools like Google dynamic ads and Youtube Directors mix,  we can expect more personalised offerings in 2020, resulting in better conversion

Change #5: We will all have to optimize for marginal gains

Many organisations were built on a single marketing channel. Dropbox grew through referral marketing, Facebook was built off your email address book and companies like Quora and Yelp were built off of SEO. But building an organisation on a single marketing channel in coming years will be difficult as good channels now get saturated extremely fast. Even if they work, it will only last for a short while as your competitors will join you soon, making it difficult for you to fight with that single channel of marketing. Marketing is now heading towards being about “marginal gains.”

There’s a British cycling coach named Dave Brailsford. He believed that if you improved every area related to cycling by just 1%, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvement. The same will be with your marketing. There will be a big shift from people focusing on one channel and trying to find the “Holy Grail of marketing” to working on slightly improving each area of your marketing. From split testing your title tags to get a few ranking improvements to adding checkout bumps to your order page so you can spend a little bit more on your paid ads to using Google Data Studio so you can better optimize for your lifetime value…

It’s all about the little things. That’s what is going to add up to winning.

That’s what you’ll have to shift your mindset to win in 2020 and beyond.