Now is the time to consider 2020's key digital marketing trends and how you can apply them to your marketing strategy
Whatever marketing results you achieved in 2019, you want to improve on them in 2020. To do this, you need to create a digital marketing strategy that will guide your marketing efforts this year.
As you already know, marketing trends get outdated fast. Effective marketing strategies five years ago might be recipes for failure today.
Therefore, you need to consider the key trends in 2020 and apply them to your digital marketing strategy. This way, you can stay ahead of your competitors and capture more leads and customers.
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Without further ado, here are six key trends in 2020 and how you can apply them…
Artificial Intelligence is transforming content production for marketing, which can help deliver improved ROI and business growth
AI is putting content marketers on the verge of becoming AI-first! AI is all set to revolutionize content. Is your business AI-ready?
Talk to any smart marketer today and they will tell you how artificial intelligence is being adopted across the customer lifecycle. Whether it is AI-generated content or predictive analytics, AI is being applied in some form or the other to reach, convert, and engage customers.
Owing to the competitive edge and improved marketing ROI it offers, more and more content marketing organizations are investing in AI-based content solutions. This chart shows us how content marketing organizations are applying AI to improve content effectiveness.
AI…
A marketing operations model integrates people, process and technology across the ecosystem, enabling the marketing organization to deliver the right message.
I’ve been working in the Marketing Operations field for almost 15 years now, helping CMOs build operating models to allow their teams, agencies, and martech vendors to work in a coordinated way, leveraging technology and data, complying with policies, and operating within efficient and effective standards.
The motivation for implementing these marketing operating models is simple and best stated by Michael Porter: “While Strategy is the differentiator for creating competitive advantage, operational efficiency is a prerequisite”.
Indeed, such a model integrates people, process and technology across the ecosystem, enabling the marketing organization to deliver the right message to the intended audience in a multi-channel world. It provides a common framework to deliver the marketing vision and strategy, by breaking down the silos – across departments, functions, business units and geographies.
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Heed this advice to avoid typical pitfalls
I think Danish physicist Niels Bohr said it best: “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Having planned, analyzed and reported on over 700 user test sessions, and made lots of mistakes in the process, I certainly meet this definition.
But, by reading and heeding my advice here, you won’t have to repeat the same mistakes I made - and you’ll hop a few steps up the user test (UT) learning curve.
1. Write a rock-solid test script
Ever watched a movie that had lots of great actors in but turned out to be terrible? (I certainly have!) Then you know the importance of a well-written and edited script. That’s especially true for user tests and doubly true for unmoderated user tests, which comprise…
Choosing a new (or right) content management system and digital commerce platform sits at the forefront of a company’s digital transformation strategy and, ultimately, success
The term "re-platforming" typically is not a simple process of migration from one type of vendor to another – it is typically a chance for a brand to re-imagine their entire digital experience and take a critical look at long-term goals.
Some industry experts say a CMS only lasts a company five years, which should line up perfectly with the ebb and flow of your organization’s changing mission objectives and directional shifts. Such a large organizational undertaking as moving to a new platform will come with a cost (in time, money and effort) and focus – why not take complete advantage and have a critical look at what the present goals of your company are?
As an organization, Episerver ends up facilitating many of these future-setting conversations with…
LinkedIn has been quietly building a strong presence and reputation within the professional community making it a great social media opportunity
When we think of social media, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are probably the first platforms that come to mind. After all, these are the major platforms leading the way and generating headlines (although not always for the right reasons).
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However, LinkedIn has been quietly building a strong presence and reputation within the professional community. Over the last 15 years, LinkedIn has grown rapidly to create a network of over 560 million professionals worldwide, with 23 million in the UK.
LinkedIn’s stated mission is to "connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful". This clear and relentless focus on the professional sector has enabled them to develop a powerful B2B proposition. Whilst personal social networks are about spending time, professional networks are geared around investing time:
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It’s not always easy to tell at a glance which social media platform will offer the most opportunities for your brand
The past decade’s explosion in social media marketing has made it more important than ever to know how to effectively deploy a limited paid social budget. With so many social media platforms around, many small- and medium-sized businesses are focusing on cultivating a strong presence on one platform. It’s a good way for a business to avoid spreading its social budget too thin - but it does require choosing the right platform.
The truth is that it’s not always easy to tell at a glance which social media platform will offer the most opportunities for your brand. It takes some research, vision, data-crunching and possibly a little soul searching about what your business is here to accomplish. If that sounds like a tall order, don’t worry. We’ll help you break it…
There is a big opportunity to gather valuable data, but having data sitting in a database isn’t enough.
The future of customer marketing is data. Brands say they want to “be more data-driven” and level up their marketing. There is a big opportunity to gather valuable data, but having data sitting in a database isn’t enough. Only by refining the process of data activation can brands improve conversions, promote loyalty and increase repeat purchases.
Data activation is a part of our new business reality, and with advances in marketing intelligence and AI, all the steps in what we call the data value chain are built on top of technology.
This means that your Martech stack can push you forward or hold you back.
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In a world where your marketing results are directly…
... and what they might mean for 2020
Seasoned visitors to the Smart Insights blog will no doubt agree that there’s an abundance of, well, smart insights to take in on a daily basis. With digital and marketing constantly evolving, marketers have to work hard to keep up with the rapid pace of change and Smart Insights plays this role perfectly, providing up-to-date guidance, tips and advice on a huge range of topics.
There’s a handy function on the Smart Insights blog that lets visitors sort posts by both recency and popularity. But rather than talk about what others have found most interesting in 2019, I thought I’d outline some of the insights that have educated and inspired me this year and how they’re likely to influence my thinking further in 2020.
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Stories and stats that stood out in 2019
Looking back over the last twelve months, I was surprised by the breadth of…
As AI continues to advance, so will the ability to use it to improve digital marketing strategies and provide valuable customer insights for companies
With the ability to collect data, analyze it, apply it and then learn from it, AI is transforming digital strategies. As it continues to advance, so will the ability to use it to improve digital marketing strategies and provide valuable customer insights for companies.
It is indicated that artificial intelligence is indispensable in future digital products, especially in the digital marketing field. From the movie "The Matrix" to the Google AI, from the humorous and smart Siri to Tesla's self-driving car, there are more and more enterprises that are implementing AI in digital marketing for their businesses. Artificial intelligence is changing the future of digital marketing.
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