How Technologies Will Change Digital Marketing in 2020

What is more important, it does not seem that the situation is going to noticeably change in 2020 – if anything, the rate of change is likely to get even greater, as some trends will probably reach a pivotal point that means the change of the entire marketing paradigm. So how exactly will technologies change marketing over the next year? Let us take a closer look!

Rise of Chatbots

Companies that already experimented with chatbots are likely to continue using them and expand this practice, and more businesses overall will adopt this solution. Although it will be a long while before a chatbot can completely replace a human customer support member, they are already quite good at answering typical questions and providing basic information. Unlike human employees, chatbots do not need salary or rest, and a single chatbot can service numerous customers simultaneously. Of course, until a true AI is created, it is better to state outright that you are using a chatbot – this way your clients will not mistake it for a human and avoid frustration if it cannot solve a non-standard problem.

Renewed Interest in Guest Posting Service use Due to Ultra-Targeted Advertising

People have been hating advertising for decades, and few types of it are as annoying as ubiquitous online ads. Even when an ad is relevant, the manner in which it appears is likely to cause enough exasperation for a potential client to ignore the brand out of sheer spite (according to a Forbes’ study, 49 percent of consumers claim that they tune out a brand if they feel it bombards them with too many ads).

However, people do like high-quality content – if your brand becomes known for offering it, it increases your relevance and authority in the industry, provides exposure, builds long-standing relationships with customers and serves as a basis of trust. One of the fastest ways to spread huge amounts of high-quality content far and wide is guest posting – it allows you to not just post valuable information, but also bring it to new and highly individualized audiences (if you carefully choose blogs to work with). New ways of analyzing audiences (based on machine learning and cloud computing) allow for perfect matching between the target customers of your brand and blog readerships.

However, running your own guest posting campaign can be a bit too much for most entrepreneurs who are already busy with the core activities of their business (this guide created by Luckyposting can give you an idea of how much work it takes to land even a single guest post). Therefore, businesses will more often use the services of professional guest posting agencies that have already streamlined their interactions with niche blogs.

Expansion of Voice Search

Voice search is likely to change SEO, digital marketing and the Internet in general as much (if not more) as the mobile revolution did. Voice search is expected to grow to take at least 50 percent of all the searches carried out online over the course of 2020, and if you want your brand to get a piece of this pie, you have to react now. It means optimizing content for featured snippets (as the vast majority of voice search results is limited to them), making it more conversational, using simpler language, making use of local SEO and directly answering questions consumers are likely to ask.

Spread of VR and AR

Both VR and AR are far from being new technologies – in this or that form they existed for quite a while. However, they became vastly more affordable over the last few years, and more innovative companies already experiment with using them in their marketing campaigns. As the technology grows ever more accessible, many more companies will jump on the bandwagon, potentially ushering a new era of marketing, built around interactive shopping channels and providing an unprecedented level of customization. In the long run, these technologies will further move businesses from selling a product or service to selling an experience.

Starlink Giving Access to Previously Untouched Markets

Starlink is SpaceX’s insanely ambitious project aimed at providing stable and fast Internet connections across the surface of the Earth, irrespectively of where you live and what infrastructure you have in your location. The first 60 satellites out of 12,000 projected ones have already been launched into orbit in 2019, and the process will go on in 2020. 

If the project moves on according to plan, it can completely change the Internet landscape, creating billions of new users and giving companies access to previously untapped markets. In addition to new potential consumers, it creates the need to consider multiple new cultural, political and economic situations across the globe.

Greater use of AI

Of course, what we call AI is far from AI out of sci-fi media, but the applications of this technology today were completely unthinkable just a decade ago. For example, marketers can use AI-based solutions to analyze their consumers’ emotions, which is especially easy if they use text. When we speak about something, we usually use at least one keyword defining our emotional state, particularly if we speak about our impression about using a product or service. There will almost certainly be something like “awful” or “terrific”. The next step is to teach AI how to analyze emotions – by learning the intricacies of human interactions it will be able to recognize irony or sarcasm and treat them accordingly, thus making the job of social listening and reacting to clients’ input all that much easier.

2020 is likely to be a big year for digital marketing. The earlier you start preparing to the changes, the greater is your chance of leveraging them.