Marketing Trends That Are Coming At You Like A Bullet Train In 2020

2020 isn’t quite shaping up how many people expected. There’s no doubt that it’s an epic year, but it is also a grim one. Even so, things will improve, and the world will return to normal. And when it does, we can expect digital marketing to resume its habitual march of progress. 

Here are some of the trends that are coming at us like a bullet-train this year. 

Shoppable Posts

With COVID-19 rampaging around the planet and everyone on lockdown, online shopping has suddenly gone into overdrive. Amazon announced that it would be hiring 100,000 new colleagues to man its supply chain. And major retailers across the world are beefing up their delivery services, vending essential goods to customers so that they don’t have to leave their homes. 

We’re likely, therefore, to see an acceleration in the trend towards shoppable posts. The idea here is to allow customers to buy the products that they see on Pinterest and Instagram posts. Already, we see platforms moving in this direction. And with machine image recognition, it is likely to accelerate. 

Experiential Marketing

Experiential marketing has been with us for a very long time. But it won’t be long before it goes fully mainstream. And when that happens, it will change the way that customers view the companies from which they buy. 

Right now, there’s something of an antagonistic relationship between consumers and large firms. There’s a lack of trust between them. Customers can’t get the measure of firms and inevitably slip into believing that they’re a giant corporation, hell-bent on profit – even if they’re not. 

Experiential marketing changes the dynamic. It makes relationships more personal and intimate. It helps to strip away the antagonism and replaces it with distinctly human, one-on-one relationships. 

Personalized Marketing

Internet users are becoming adept at sniffing out generic marketing. Most already have “banner blinders” on, and some can spot so-called “native advertising” a mile off. 

It’s not that people don’t want to advertise – they just don’t want stuff that doesn’t appeal to them directly. 

For years, marketers have indulged in a scattergun approach, spamming every prospect with the home of converting a percentage of them. The strategy is useful for the five per cent of people who wind up buying, but it just irritates the remaining 95 per cent. And that’s enough to damage a brand. 

Personalized marketing side-steps these issues by using user data to generate advertisements that seek to meet an immediate need. It’s not going to be perfect in 2020, but it’s undoubtedly going to be a significant improvement over what we have right now. 

Interactive Content

When customers go to a webpage, they want something more than a set of static menus. They want something dynamic that bobs and weaves according to their user input. 

Big tech is listening and already is it rolling out the deep infrastructure that will make all this possible. 
Data suggest that this is something that customers want. According to Forbes, 91 per cent of users want websites to give them more visual feedback than they do right now.