What Will Marketing Look Like In 2020?

Marketing is important for businesses to gain leads and increase sales. But just as businesses need to be flexible to keep up with market changes, so too does marketing. The general strategies can remain the same, but they need to be flexible to adapt to changes in the market and consumer spending, and changes with consumer trends and tastes. As the internet and social media became increasing popular, marketing efforts had to change accordingly, and so marketing strategies were developed to incorporate using the internet and social media.

Because marketing is changing all the time to keep up with consumers, what will marketing look like in a few years? We’re coming up on 2020. What will marketing look like then? Let’s look at a few predictions:

🌟 Mobile 📲

The growing popularity of mobile devices will continue to grow and play a continuing factor in marketing, continuing to enable interaction between people and brands. Successful brands will find ways to reach out to people on their mobile devices and create more personalised experiences for their consumers.

🌟 Consumer Content 👯 

Consumers are creating more and more branded content. This is expected to continue on a greater scale, and brands need to be accepting of it. They can do like Taco Bell and “create, co-create, and curate” content, whereby co-create is content being created in partnership with consumers and curate is taking consumer-created content that the business likes and showing it to other people.

🌟 Video 🎥

Video and video sharing has been growing in popularity the last few years, and is expected to continue growing. The rise in mobile device use has had an impact on this, as people love visual storytelling and so video has become in high demand. Marketers will be wise to take note of this and use video more in their marketing.

🌟 Conversation 🗣

People in general, don’t like to be marketed to. They prefer being able to have a conversation, and so there has been a slow change from throwing sales pitches at people to engaging with them, and this is expected to continue. Brands should try to engage with their consumers and hold conversations with them.

🌟 Omni-Channel Marketing ✍️

Content marketing is expected to take on a more omnichannel approach, where a single customer’s journey is optimised for engagement across all potential channels rather than piecemeal at channel-specific opportunities. Content is also expected to become more adaptive than the “one size fits all” approach that seems to be the accepted form right now. Adaptive content will be more customisable/personalisable to consumers.

🌟 VR 🕶

Virtual reality is becoming more and more technologically prevalent, and it’s being forecast that social media will be able to enable VR experiences for its users by 2020, and that will be the medium by which customers will be able to interact with brands.

🌟 Contextual Marketing 🎟

There’s an expected push by 2020 to move from social and content marketing to more contextual marketing.

🌟 Values 👫

Generation Z people are expected to push brands to focus more on values and belief systems in their marketing. Generation Z may not be religious per se, but they are spiritual and principled, so there will likely be a shift in marketing from focusing on lifestyle messaging to appealing to values and belief-based messaging to reach Generation Z members.