As we enter 2020 it’s worth reminding ourselves of what was predicted 20 years ago. Although we’ve seen plenty of impressive and rapid advances, such as ultrafast broadband and 4G video streaming, phones that unlock by scanning our faces, it’s not quite the world of flying cars that was predicted!
Over the past decade however we’ve seen a huge shift in what marketing actually is. When I started my career in marketing it was one-way channel of communication, and to a degree the customer had no voice apart from to write in to the CEO and make a complaint if they wanted to be heard. Placing an ad was something you booked and waited to see 2 months later. We should remind ourselves this was less than 15 years ago!
A lot has changed fairly rapidly and now we live in a world where adverts are instant and responses are expected immediately. On the positive side, customers have become sales execs and advertising has become cheaper – and more targeted.
In a world where we are now constantly bombarded with information, it’s more and more vital that your business doesn’t become lost in the crowd.
So where do we think your business should be focusing its marketing efforts this year?
Visualisation: less is more!
Research has shown that people prefer visual content to plain text. You just have to look at the growth of image-focused platforms Pinterest and Instagram to see the proof of this. Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and visual content is estimated to account for 82% of all internet traffic by 2021.
We would look to produce quality content over quantity, not content for contents sake! You can overload people with too many social media posts, and in the end that switches them off!
We will be working with clients to bring brands to life this year and simplify your key messages to target audiences.
Live video: bring it to life!
People like video because it offers a glimpse behind the scenes of a company. Think about how a video could work for your business, be shared on social media, but also what you could share behind the scenes of your business to create authenticity, whether that be people or products.
Should you still rely on Email campaigns?
100% yes. Don’t doubt the golden oldies. Email is still the go-to number 1 business communication tool. Email is here to stay and will be here for a very long time. But what companies will have to do in 2020 is to leverage more communication channels – even the basic the ones like picking up the phone!
Does anyone ever look past page 1 of Google?
Search is still King. You may see now that some companies don’t even advertise a web site domain, they simply state search and the name of the business or product. Google is still the number one go-to search directory for all industries. Every day, about 3.5 billion searches are done on Google. What is new however, is that 1/3 of them are now performed by voice command, such as Alexa, with this number expected to increase to 50% by the end of the year 2020. So is your site optimised for voice search?
Customer Experience: the sale never ends!
A huge part of providing a great customer experience is making sure that customer experience is ongoing and focused on keeping your existing customers, rather than just attracting new ones. Do you really know your customers? Is there more you could sell them? Are you communicating with them throughout the year? If you’re not – someone else is!
Food for thought and this is by no means extensive, but it goes without saying that simplified content marketing will continue to dominate the marketing landscape this year, whether that be video, blogs or infographics.
So it’s much more of the same, nothing revolutionarily new. Whatever you do, keep it relevant!
Get your business ‘marketing fit’ in 2020.
We believe that working closely together with businesses is what creates the most progress.
If we can be of any assistance to you – however large or small your business, please contact us on 020 3675 2424 or visit www.brandbrown.co.uk to see how we’ve helped others.
We look forward to working with our existing clients throughout 2020.
Robert Brown is founder of Brand Brown. You can connect with Robert on LinkedIn.