It’s that most wonderful time of the year… when we look back on 2019 and think ‘Wow! How far have we come with all the social media updates over the last twelve months’. But, what we really want to know is, what’s next! What will be the social media and digital marketing trends in 2020?

Obviously, it’s our job to try and stay ahead of the trends and second guess what might be coming around the corner. The reality is anything could happen in 2020, but based on what we know and what we’ve seen, this is what we’re expecting!

Stories

These will continue to grow in popularity across all platforms – especially amongst advertisers. I’m expecting to see a case develop for posting less often on social channels outside of stories. Pages will become where your 20% content lives, 80% content will live in Stories.

121 Dialogue

In a world where everyone is more aware of fake news, and trust is at an all-time low in terms of privacy, I really do think that as businesses we need to be embracing strategies that allow us to create more 121 conversations.

Personal Branding 

This has been big in 2019 and will continue to have importance, but given the predictions of an impending recession, I think as individuals there will be more focus on how personal brands contribute to the success of a business and create conversions that lead to £££s.

True Personalisation

This is not something that is new, but I think the understanding of the personalised market has increased in line with the popularity of inbound marketing. I’m anticipating designing more workflows for automated campaigns that are truly personalised and not just an email that says ‘Hi Christina, How are things at Green Umbrella Marketing…’.

Less is More

We’ll still be using multiple channels to reach our target audience, but we’re going to be more choosey about where we spend our time and money.

2020 will be the year of Human

I already feel like I’m explaining what Human SEO is every time I present, it isn’t a new term, but it is being used by more and more people outside of my professional marketing connections. Not only we will be writing how we speak, and optimising for how we speak, we’ll also be taking our video, audio and visual content back to basics to prove how human we all are.

Cross-Channel Social Advertising Spends will increase

The investment required in Social advertising is without doubt increasing, so to make more conversions, more businesses will be considering their sales funnels and touchpoints and splitting their spends across relevant channels (e.g. Gain web traffic from Facebook, and then retarget those visitors on LinkedIn.

Local Influencers Will Rise

This kind of ties into the Personal Branding piece. We will see more importance assigned to the engagements we receive from micro-influencers, whether they are local in a geographical, sector or online community sense. In a world where we trust the people we meet in the pub more than what brands are telling us online, having micro-influencers supporting your brand is going to be essential for success.

Trust 

As I said, it’s at an all-time low. Your audience won’t believe everything they read so you will need to ensure everything you publish, especially when it comes to testimonials, can be tracked back to source. Personal recommendations on LinkedIn, Facebook reviews and anything else where we can literally click back to an individual will be gold dust. 

Increased Content Choices

Blogs are still a staple, and we should all be writing content for our sites, but our choices are escalating in terms of video and podcast options; both in terms of what is available to subscribe to and how or where we consume that content. Remember when the Amazon Echo first appeared and Google and Apple followed their lead? We now have display options too. More and more content is being produced with these devices in mind. More and more people are multi-tasking, so whether they’re tuning in on a mobile device during their commute or asking Alexa to play the latest podcast episode while they cook dinner, we must ensure the content we produce is accessible across multiple devices.

So there you have it – that’s what I’m seeing when I gaze into my crystal ball! If this topic is of interest, there are a plethora of articles about to be published from a ton of sources. So do your searches, keep reading and pick two or three of the trends you think will be most relevant to your business in 2020 and start implementing strategies to support them!

(If the last bit leaves you feeling at a loss, I know a digital marketing agency that would be happy to help you!)