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The roaring 20s were a revolutionary time for marketing; bringing us science and technology that transformed the golden era and beyond. We predict 2020 is set for a similar fate. With new business opportunities generated by advancing technology, it’s important to stay on top of progress in the industry. Failure to do so could cause your business to lose audience relevancy and revenue. Here are our top five trending technologies that will revive your marketing strategy in 2020:
Chatbots automate the customer-brand communication process by fulfilling customer requests without human input. While this technology has been around for years, recent advances have created opportunities for your business. Studies show that 53% of customers are more likely to engage with a company offering a chatbot to improve customer service. Chatbots have a deeper understanding of the user journey and deliver services efficiently. The rich consumer data directs consumers precisely; increasing your lead generation and customer retention.
Messaging a chatbot provides a similar experience to interacting with a human assistant. Chatbots ask users questions to determine their issues and complete tasks. The technology is available 24/7 rather than relying on the free time of an employee. Chatbots utilising AI are growing in popularity. Advanced machine learning enables chatbots to understand the nature of language and respond to users with human-like behaviours. The use of AI provides smarter responses and improved customer experience.
Creating content is the key to improving your search engine optimisation (SEO). While new ideas help you stay relevant to your audience, don’t be afraid to use your existing content if it’s still valuable. Identify your top-performing content by looking in your archive at posts that are over a year old. Choose the content that has received the most engagement and views as this will be well-received by your audience.
Old content might need some tweaks to bring it into the present day. Find posts with outdated statistics and update them with this year’s figures. If you’ve identified a valuable post, make format changes to improve your SEO. Update broken or outdated links, use H tags, meta-tags, related resources and call to actions. One piece of content can be reworked to serve many purposes. If you created a blog post, try turning it into a video. This makes the content distributable for different channels and audiences.
Personalising marketing messages to increase consumer engagement isn’t a new concept. Research shows that in 2020, marketers will use personalisation tactics at a more intelligent level. In the past, personalisation has been a name in an email subject line or a recommended product at checkout. Now, marketers use in-depth data and performance insights to gain an understanding of consumer behaviours.
Knowledge can be implemented across channels to identify a consumer’s user journey. You can then deliver relevant, personalised content at the right time. Personalisation helps your business take control of the full user experience from end-to-end. By understanding previous actions, you can begin to predict where the customer will go next. Placing your content in these positions you can increase lead generation, customer retention and sales.
Position “Zero” is the term used to describe the featured snippet at the top of Google’s search engine results page. Through SEO tactics, you can surpass paid ads and ranking websites to be the first result that users click. Being featured in Position “Zero” shows your audience that your website has authority and is valuable. Content that is optimised for search engines is more likely to rank as a featured snippet.
Simple format changes are a good way to do this. Google is likely to pick up numbered lists or subheadings as it makes content digestible and concise. Having clear definitions and keywords will enable Google’s algorithm to detect relevant answers to search terms. Position “Zero” notably receives the most clicks on a search page. This will increase your website traffic resulting in more leads, conversions and revenue.
Google includes page speed as a ranking factor for mobile searches. Pages that deliver the slowest speed are largely affected by this update and are unlikely to rank at all. Improving the speed of your webpage on mobile and desktop will help your user experience. Users are more likely to stay on your website if it navigates quickly and easily. This will reduce your bounce rate and increase potential conversions.
With mobile taking over desktop, you must prioritise speed to ensure users don’t leave your site. According to Unbounce, 85% of user’s landing pages were slower than Google’s benchmark of five seconds or less. It’s important to work with your web developers to understand the elements that are falling short of the page speed recommendation.
You must be aware of new technologies emerging in 2020 and implement them in your long-term marketing strategy. By doing so, you can increase your audience relevancy, website traffic, user engagement and conversions.
