5 digital marketing trends in 2020!

The entire digital marketing industry, whether it is brand owners or advertisers, all feel that “It’s too hard for me!”.

For brand owners, faced with drastically reduced budgets and a brutal marketing environment, it is difficult to navigate and take every step forward.

For advertisers, as Internet technology continues to iterate and update, marketing forms are also being reconstructed. With the emergence of many concepts such as "private domain traffic", "down-market", "product and effect integration", "consumption upgrade", "from KOL to KOC", etc., advertisers are caught in wave after wave of marketing craze.

As we face the coming year 2020, what changes and new trends will emerge in digital marketing? How should we respond?

1. Overall Marketing Environment in 2020

First, let’s take a look at how the overall marketing environment will change in 2020:

1. 5G changes the direction of marketing

Speaking of 5G, I believe everyone is familiar with it. The hottest word at the moment is probably 5G. But 5G cannot be simply understood as faster Internet speed. Its more profound meaning lies in bringing us into a new era of "everything is connected and everything is media."

Generally speaking, the development of information and communication technology is closely related to brand marketing. With the official commercialization and popularization of 5G, there will inevitably be a big explosion in marketing changes, which are specifically manifested in three aspects:

(1) Changes in content presentation

The biggest impact of 5G on digital marketing is the presentation of content marketing.

① Video communication becomes mainstream

The widespread application of 5G technology will reconstruct communication relationships and effectively improve user experience. In the future, the production and dissemination of 4K and 8K ultra-high-definition video content will become mainstream, and videos and live broadcasts will be everywhere and everyone will broadcast them.

② VR and AR usher in their highlight moments

The latency of 5G is very low, and there will be no dizziness caused by previous VR and AR devices. Therefore, with the commercialization of 5G, VR and AR are once again ushering in their highlight moments.

The content characteristics of VR and AR are rich perspectives, which can make product advertisements more three-dimensional and vivid, and display them in front of users or audiences in a 365° all-round way, making them feel as if they are in the scene. Before this, advertisements were basically in two-dimensional form and were limited by display space.

(2) Innovation in interactive experience

The biggest difference between 5G and previous mobile Internet technologies is that, in addition to supporting voice and visual interaction, it also adds scenario-based interaction, adding a new and tangible dimension to people's information access. For example, when shopping on Taobao, you can not only try on clothes virtually and sense the wearing effect, but also sense the texture of the clothes through the Internet of Things.

(3) Upgrading precision marketing

In the past technical background, marketing could only do one-to-many promotion and marketing communication. The empowerment of 5G technology will bring more massive data, and help upgrade precision marketing through big data judgment. In the marketing process, real-time adjustments can be made based on feedback, and continuous optimization and correction can be made to achieve truly precise delivery and realize the native nature of advertising content.

2. Post-95s become the main force of consumption

With the changes in consumer structure, consumer groups and consumer demands are also changing, and the consumer market is being updated at an increasingly rapid pace. According to statistics from Zebra IQ, there are currently 2.4 billion people born after 1995 worldwide, accounting for 32% of the world's population. The number of people born after 1995 in China has reached 150 million, accounting for about 10% of China's total population.

The new generation of young people represented by those born after 1995 are taking over as the main consumer force with their large population size, astonishing growth rate and strong social influence. However, as Internet natives, the social environment they face and the resulting consumption habits, preferences and concepts are very different from those of those born in the 1970s and 1980s. Compared with price, they pursue individuality more and seek recognition of brand value proposition.

Therefore, how to grasp the consumption pain points of post-95s and create marketing activities to attract them have become issues that many brands need to consider.

2. Prediction of digital marketing trends in 2020

Now that we have a preliminary understanding of the marketing environment in 2020, let’s make a bold prediction about the digital marketing trends in 2020:

Trend 1: Full-chain marketing, product-effect synergy

In the past, brands in the field of digital marketing have always been accustomed to discussing performance advertising and brand advertising separately, and have focused more on performance. This has led to a large number of lead loss, low conversion rates and other problems, resulting in losses in digital marketing investments aimed at performance. In view of this, in the second half of the mobile Internet, digital marketing increasingly requires "brand and effect synergy." Data-driven “brand-effect synergy” has become an important trend in advertising.

However, it is not easy to achieve true "brand-effect synergy", especially within a limited time and limited number of times. It is very difficult to make the audience recognize the brand value and convert potential demanders into direct consumers and realize product purchases.

If brands want marketing communications to drive actual growth, they need to adopt a full-link marketing approach. What is a “link”? "Link" is derived from "integration". The difference between the two is:

• “Integration” focuses on: whether all marketing resources maintain a unified voice and image;
• The focus of “link” is to connect the various touchpoints where consumers come into contact with advertisements, influence consumers through each touchpoint, and ultimately form purchase conversions.

Occupy the user's mind at the information level, focus on circles to improve conversion at the media level, and deeply cultivate content to enrich user experience at the product level, and effectively assist in the upgrade of "brand and effect synergy" through precise delivery.

Trend 2: High-quality content drives marketing

Consumers are willing to pay for high-quality content, which can not only shape and convey the brand’s value proposition, but also help improve brand marketing growth and efficiency. Therefore, in 2020, brands will continue to delve deeper into content, transform brand information into valuable information for consumers, and provide brands with multiple marketing touchpoints and conversion spaces.

(1) High-quality content leverages advertising to gain customers

Acquire new users through high-quality content, and finally monetize by serving users. The core here lies in: the generation of high-quality content; high-quality and multiple distribution channels; and the conversion of private domain traffic.

(2) High-quality content reaches existing users

Existing users can be reached through SMS/email, but the open rate/conversion rate is very low. In 2020, you can also use high-quality content for fission marketing to encourage users to share fission posters. After completing the task of attracting fans, guide them to register and download, thereby guiding existing customers to convert into fans and improving the conversion rate of potential customers.

Trend 3: KOL marketing continues to be popular

• During this year’s Double Eleven, advertisers’ KOL investment hit a record high. Data from WEIQ, a new media marketing cloud platform under IMS World Show, showed that the transaction volume of KOL advertising by advertisers increased by 16%, and the number of advertising accounts increased by 57% year-on-year;
• The market size of KOL marketing is between 600 billion and 1 trillion yuan , accounting for about 2% to 3% of e-commerce transaction volume, and is growing at a rate of more than 100% per year;
• Xu Zhe, general manager of Unilever North Asia Media, also publicly stated: In the Chinese market, KOL marketing accounts for about 20% of Unilever's online spending in the fast-moving consumer goods and personal care industry. For this industry, this is a considerable amount. The proportion of KOL investment by small and medium-sized brands has exceeded 50%;
• The Financial Times once reported: "In China, KOL marketing is gradually replacing traditional marketing methods such as television and print media advertising."

Why has the KOL market achieved such great success in Chinese brand marketing? There are two reasons:

(1) People born after 1995 and 2000 have become the main force of consumption. Tired of the “carpet bombing” of traditional advertising, they are more willing to make consumption decisions independently or by referring to opinions on the Internet;

(2) Social media such as WeChat, Weibo, Douyin, and Kuaishou occupy a large amount of consumers’ time. With the high-frequency reach of KOLs in various vertical fields to consumers, brand communication is advancing by leaps and bounds.

Faced with the pressure of economic downturn, personalized solutions with fast monetization speed and low investment cost will become one of the important development directions of digital marketing in 2020. Therefore, KOL marketing that can bring value to brands in terms of traffic, content, and delivery of brand value propositions will continue to be popular in 2020.

According to the "2020 China Digital Marketing Trends" report jointly released by AdMaster, Miaozhen Systems, and GDMS, among the many social marketing channels, KOL promotion is the most valued, accounting for 63%. This also shows that advertisers attach great importance to KOLs' ability to gain big returns on their brand exposure and strong sales capabilities.

Data source: "China Digital Marketing Trends 2020"

However, there is a lot of water in the KOL world, and there are good and bad ones. When brand owners choose KOLs, how to dig out a list of potential and suitable KOLs is a question that companies should think about next year.

Trend 4: Data Center

CCID Consulting, a well-known Chinese market research organization, released the "2019 China Digital Marketing Solution Market White Paper". The white paper predicts that with the in-depth application of digital marketing in enterprises, the digital middle platform will become the dominant model in the digital marketing market. Facts also confirm this prediction. According to the Baidu Index, the popularity of data middle platforms began to increase in 2019 and continued to rise.

Image source: Baidu Index

Looking back at the past data lakes and data platforms, none of them were as popular as this year's data middle platform. It seems not an exaggeration to call 2019 the "first year of the middle platform."

Why is the data center so popular?

It is actually an inevitable product of the in-depth development of the digital economy, and at the same time it adapts to the inevitable trend of enterprise digital transformation. All of our companies have gone through digital transformation today and have found that with the diversified development of business, various departments of the company have established their own business systems, resulting in the failure to connect the massive amount of data generated every day in a timely manner, forming "data islands", which is not conducive to the full-link management of enterprise data assets.

The data center can solve the problems in digital transformation, including:

(1) The data center is a combination of data products and implementation plans created based on the actual situation of the enterprise. It can integrate data inside and outside the enterprise, break the data fragmentation, and solve the problems faced by the enterprise, such as data silos and inconsistent data standards;

(2) The data middle platform is also a strategic choice and operational solution, and a set of effective data operation mechanisms. Through the data middle platform, we can fully understand every action of the user, have a deeper understanding of the user, reach the desired users more accurately, and make marketing more refined.

According to a Forrester study, the average annual growth rate of the data middle platform can reach 27% for more mature, listed large enterprises, and 40% for more agile start-ups, far ahead of the global average GDP growth rate.

The picture comes from the Internet

Therefore, in the new marketing era, companies must embrace the data middle platform to form data insights to help them maintain their competitive advantage.

Trend 5: Marketing Automation

From Accenture Interactive’s $475 million acquisition of Droga5, to Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau, to Publicis Groupe’s $4.4 billion acquisition of Martech company Epsilon, to Deloitte’s $182 million acquisition of Dutch digital marketing company Pervorm…

In recent years, driven by the marketing environment, the demand and use of marketing automation has been on the rise in almost all industries. A new report released by CleverTouch, “Expectations and Reality – Marketing Automation,” points out that 8 out of 10 marketers worldwide have already implemented marketing automation, and the remaining respondents are interested in introducing marketing automation into their businesses.

The reason is that more and more advertisers are beginning to realize the importance of marketing automation. With the help of marketing automation, companies can achieve the following goals:

(1) Comprehensive and rapid data collection

Through marketing automation, operations personnel can integrate data from different channels into one, centralize all leads into one user pool in the form of One-ID for one-stop management, and break down data silos.

Not only can it build user data assets in a more comprehensive, timely, accurate, simple and fast manner, but it can also achieve precise operations in subsequent marketing work.

Image source: Yingyu MA

(2) Multi-dimensional user portrait drawing

Marketing automation tracks user information and behavior data in real time, connects the user information and behavior data to the activity management system, divides the user groups into dimensions, and draws different user portraits.

At the same time , based on the scores brought by the user's basic identity information and the scores brought by the subsequent interactive behaviors, the user's value can be divided and a 360 user portrait can be established to help marketers achieve personalized marketing reach for thousands of people.

Image source: Yingyu MA

(3) Intelligent reach for each individual

Regarding smart reach, you can understand it this way: for a certain type of user, if they do not complete the next event within a certain period of time after completing a certain event, we can use smart reach to guide the user to complete the next event.

Take financial products as an example: for users who registered within 7 days but did not place an order, we can set up a group called "Registered within 7 days and did not place an order" and push a coupon via SMS at a specified time to guide users to click.

From the above scenarios, we can see that using smart reach requires considering four dimensions: accurate users, appropriate timing, appropriate channels, and appropriate content.

(4) Data monitoring and effect analysis

Marketing automation can monitor marketing activities in real time, gain insights into marketing effectiveness from data, and help with optimization, such as which content is more attractive to users, which channels have more traffic, and the ROI of the channels.

Image source: Yingyu MA

The value brought by marketing automation is not limited to this. I believe that in 2020, brands’ attention to marketing automation will remain unabated.

3. Conclusion

The above are Hezijun’s five predictions for digital marketing in 2020. However, all predictions are just guesses. We still need to experience it to know what digital marketing will be like in 2020.

But one thing is certain: as cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence and 5G continue to mature, digital marketing will usher in new development space and opportunities and continue to transform towards intelligence.

Author: Box Fungus

Source: Activity Box Operation Society (huodongheziyys)