More than 60% of your customers begin their shopping instances online.

To say that digital marketing is now critical for your survival is an understatement. You need to be present to influence your customer purchase moments. Digital marketing is a useful tool in helping you talk to the right leads at the right time. However, ever-changing, trends in the horizon threaten to affect your strategy.

Here’s a look at the future of digital marketing to help you uncover impactful trends you need to watch out for.

What’s Digital Marketing?

For many, digital marketing is about social media and search engine optimization (SEO). The reality is that at this point, digital marketing has dug deep to span over various aspects.

It’s through digital marketing that you promote your brand. Additionally, you can rely on digital marketing to relay your customer experience.

Digital media helps brands manage various types of media to grow their value. These are earned, owned, and paid media.

With earned media, third parties get to share your product or service and, in the process, compliment your brand. You can intercept this organic moment using digital marketing to leverage the goodwill displayed for more brand equity.

On the other side of the street, paid media is you paying to leverage a third-party channel and reach customers. Through digital marketing, you can craft the right strategies that make the most out of your investment.

Owned media refers to the assets your brand takes ownership of, and you can rely on digital marketing to help drum up brand growth using these assets.

The Future of Digital Marketing

To maximize your digital marketing strategy, you need to not only know where it’s been but where it’s going. Let’s examine some exciting trends poised to shape the field in 2020.

1. Experience over Product

Today’s customer is very fluid, and to add to the pain, has a lot more options to substitute you. Therefore, you can’t live focusing your digital marketing on only acquiring customers.

Your approach to digital marketing must now place customer retention at the heart of things. In this pursuit, expect to see a heavier emphasis on customer experience over the direct promotion of products.

As you think through your strategy, you should intentionally focus on developing hands-on customer experiences. These touchpoints will help differentiate your product from the pack, but only if the experiences remain relevant to your customer’s core needs.

2. Micro-Moments

A micro-moment is an instance where a customer shows a lot of intent and uses a device to seek to fulfill a need. These needs typically revolve around knowing, going, doing or buying.

Such moments are increasingly becoming common as customers default to the internet to begin their buying journey. A customer will want what they want when they want it, and only the brand that’s delivering on that need will make a sale.

Therefore, more brands will seek to invest in uncovering relevant micro-moments for their customers.

Such investment will be coupled with a higher demand for content that speaks to the customer insights during identifiable micro-moments to make the most of every lead.

3. The Rise of Voice Search

Smart speakers are an already fairly popular device in American homes, and the numbers seem to bear this out.

Statistics show that by 2022, voice shopping will hit a whopping $40 billion from the $2 billion it generates today.

With such an imminent jump in customer expenditure, your digital marketing strategy will need to address voice search.

The key, though, is to understand that you won’t be deploying voice search tactics only to remain relevant but also to bolster your brand experience.

4. Visual Search

Along with voice search is visual search that enables customers to upload an image of an item they are looking for and receive specific results.

Such a tool taps into the entrenched power of mobile to turn a customer’s smartphone into a search bar.

The appeal to point and shoot if you want to purchase an item is the convenience, and this will only drive the adoption of visual search up.

Consequently, you will need to optimize your digital marketing strategy to position your products right where customers relying on visual search can discover them.

5. Chat Bots

Chatbots are artificial intelligence-driven tools that utilize instant messaging to interact with your clients day or night. Their popularity has shot up so rapidly that by the end of 2020, 85% of customer service will be powered by chatbots.

As more customers come to expect round-the-clock availability of brands to resolve issues, companies will be under pressure to step up their chatbot strategy.

6. Conversational Marketing

As chatbots become more entrenched, clients have begun to realize the value of conversational marketing.

With conversational marketing, you are nurturing a two-way interaction with customers. As they pose queries, you can offer immediate responses in a conversational-style approach to meet your clients on their terms.

Brands should prepare to utilize more conversational marketing as a feedback-driven model that enhances their user experience.

For example, your copy and other marketing material will increasingly have to revolve around fostering a conversational tone.

7. Personalization

Customer data continues to be highly valuable for brands in helping them discern and anticipate their clients’ needs. However, such data can only be of use if you know how to monetize the insights you receive from it.

Personalization is where you use insights gleaned from customer data to offer unique value propositions that speak to a customer’s particular needs.

Your digital marketing will have to factor in all areas that personalization can help the brand stand out.

Additionally, you should expect to find it more critical to deploy personalization across your entire universe of digital marketing and not just the regular channels.

Stay Ahead of the Curve

Digital marketing is a mission-critical tool helping you speak to your customers’ purchase decisions. However, technology keeps changing rapidly, which leads to new trends that can rock your strategy. Endeavor always to keep an eye on the future of digital marketing to identify useful ways to pivot your approach.

Sales Data Pro is your go-to- source for high-quality marketing-related data. Talk to us for information backed by constant and consistent monitoring that can enhance your marketing.