4 Marketing Trends that will Impact your Business in 2020

2020 is only around the corner, and with so much noise to cut through in the marketing realm it can be hard to know what to focus on. Below are 4 key marketing trends that are likely to impact most businesses next year.

Voice Search

With 2 in 5 adults using voice search daily, it is changing the way consumers search for goods and services.

Old marketing strategies that were designed around visual and video connections with consumers will need to be adapted in 2020 to include accurate terms and keywords that maximise ROI for voice queries too.

After all, appealing to individuals who ask their smart device a query hands-free requires a different marketing approach than one aimed at those who type their question after several minutes of research.

For example, you might type “hairdresser in Soho, London with good reviews” but when voice-searching it’s likely you’ll merely ask “best hairdresser near me” — so businesses need to be actively pursuing long tail keywords that ensure they pop up during both types of search.

Given that the next step in the smart device realm is to introduce ads into their responses, it’s increasingly important that Voice Search is part of your organisations marketing strategy for 2020.

Employer Brand

For most businesses the primary focus of their marketing department is to grow a customer base through lead generation, trust building content and awareness. However, the remit of the average marketing department is likely to be twofold in 2020: they will need to expand their sights to target both customers and jobseekers.

With the economy booming 2019 saw the global recruitment sphere shift from an employers market to a jobseekers market; many organisations were vying for the same candidates. Applicants therefore had the luxury of choosing their preferred working environment and employer from a range of potential opportunities.

2020 will bring the realisation that just because an organisation has an open vacancy does not mean it can attract the talent needed.

No longer do jobseekers accept a role merely for convenience. Now, they assess a wide combination of factors including salary, bonus potential, benefits, leave allowance, remote working capabilities, health and wellness schemes, diversity and inclusion initiatives and many more.

If organisations looking to grow in 2020 ignore the importance of developing their employer brand, they risk losing out on much-needed talent to competitors.

Position Zero

For those of us in the marketing game for a while, we’ll all fondly (or perhaps, not) recall the endless strategising and planning that went into vying for “Position One” on search engines. It didn’t happen easily and became a hard-fought battle once we all added AdWords budget to the mix too.

Those days, it seems, are ending, and 2020 is likely to see “Position Zero” as the new holy grail of SEO.

Also known as P0, or a Featured Snippet, this spot pops up as the first response to a query and displays a snippet of text that SERPs think answer your question.

An added bonus here is that the link to the remainder of the relevant article/page is also linked below the snippet, usually alongside an image too - almost guaranteeing that the audience is not going to need to go further down the page of results to get their answer.

Further, attaining “Position Zero” will also help with Voice Search commands as mentioned above.

Personalisation

Let’s face it — consumers are savvy to marketing, and don’t pay attention to generic ads. They pay attention to what interests them and sometimes that happens to be an ad. This is where personalisation comes in.

According to Salesforce, 63% percent of Millennial consumers and 58% of GenX consumers are willing to share data with companies in exchange for personalised offers and discounts. These statistics are too important to be ignored and can offer a much-improved customer experience for those seeking a human-touch in online interactions.

The easiest way to initiate personalisation in your organisation in 2020 is via segmentation.

Whether it’s online audiences retargeted based on their specific interactions with you, or email subscribers getting different CTA’s and subject lines, all personalisation efforts should segment consumers into brackets of content/actions that appeals to them or have proven to work within their personas previously.

It helps for easier analysis of data and trends, but also allows you to understand your audience better — always a plus.

Paula Morris is an Employer Branding Specialist at Version 1.