As we head into the new year and indeed a new decade, the way we approach marketing and lead generation in particular is going to change significantly, says Jessica Packer
Thanks to advancements in technology, the way people search for answers to questions or buy things online is drastically different to what it was five years ago. Nowadays, there is no guarantee what you did to market your business in 2019 will work in 2020.
In the digital era, consumer behaviour changes far too regularly to just repeat what worked before. To continue growing, you need to understand where your potential customers are now, where they’ll be in the future and how they want to be engaged with.
Below I discuss the marketing technology trends to watch out for in 2020, focusing on key digital marketing tactics including Conversational Marketing, Video and Behavioural Intelligence.
1 Conversational Marketing
According to Drift, responding to a new lead within five minutes is critical, after which your odds of qualifying that lead decrease by 10 times. But if you’re tied up with other tasks, how are you going to respond to enquiries?
This is where chatbots come in.
With chatbots, you can provide your leads with answers to their burning questions almost immediately, keeping them on your website and ensuring they don’t click off to look for answers elsewhere.
This is part of what’s called ‘Conversational Marketing’.
Conversational Marketing is all about talking to your audience naturally and engaging them in a here-and-now discussion. This enables you to provide them with answers at the point of asking, rather than making them trawl your website for them.
According to the 2018 State of Chatbots Report, 41% of people starting online chat conversations with businesses are executives. This means real decision makers that could become legitimate leads are out there with questions to ask but nobody to answer them.
2020, and indeed the entire next decade, could see the rise of the Chatbot!
2 Video
Every year we’re told video is the “next big thing”, but this year we really mean it.
There’s a tonne of content being churned out online, but the most easily digestible is usually video. A concise and informative video can give your audience all they need to know in less than a few minutes as well as giving them something much more engaging than reading a page of text.
We’re not saying to neglect text-based content, rather that it could be a good idea to engrain video within it.
A warm smiley face or a snazzy animation can really add to your marketing strategy. These videos can range in format from webinars and demos to live streams or even short pieces to camera.
Having a moving visual element with audio is significantly more engaging. In fact, video marketers generate 66% more qualified leads per year according to Aberdeen Group.
Video is already a mainstream trend in marketing; a report by HubSpot shows 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, up from 63% in 2017. And it’s only going to carry on growing in importance, especially on social channels.
If you’re finding yourself stuck for ideas, try creating one long, catch-all video and chop it up into shorter, shareable snippets.
Hosting these on your website and social channels will give you a stream of engaging, informative and varied content to help with your marketing and lead generation strategy.
3 Behavioural Intelligence
Marketers now have the technology to tell where prospects have clicked on a website, on what pages they’ve spent most of their time, the content they like and dislike as well as the device they browse with. So why are we not use this information?
Leveraging behavioural intelligence on your website is the perfect way to help convert interested visitors into leads.
It’s one thing to rely on web analytics to understand your site visitors, but imagine if we delved just a bit deeper into the numbers.
We could analyse things like a visitor’s ‘digital body language’ on each page – how they reacted to what they saw and what they engaged with – and uncover unique behavioural insights that allow us to optimise websites and content in general to provide a better user experience.
More and more marketers will begin using behavioural intelligence to optimise their strategies. For example, observing things such as heat mapping to understand which things caught the user’s attention or click mapping to see how the user experience can be improved.
4 Voice search
Search behaviour has changed. According to ComScore, 50% of searches will be voice searches by 2020. Voice assistants like Alexa and Siri have made it possible for anyone, anywhere to execute a search from their mobile phone.
Not only are these searches far more conversational, they’re also distinctly different from the keyword-based search terms we use to find out information through search engines.
As a result, marketers will have to rethink the way websites and content are currently structured. We need to consider what mediums our prospects use to search and the key questions they might ask to create content that resonates.
Remote working will continue to thrive in the coming years, so as decision makers spend more time at home, the more in touch with their smart home system they will become. So instead of typing ‘B2B marketing trends 2020’ into google they’ll instead say, ‘Hey Alexa, what are the key marketing trends to watch out for in 2020?’
The more we think of those key decision makers as humans and less as part of a business, the more we start to understand how to connect with them on a human level.
Start 2020 the right way
Those are my marketing technology trends to watch out for in 2020.
The overriding themes? Make the most of the technology that’s already available to you in chatbots, video, behavioural intelligence and voice search. You don’t always have to search for the next big thing, sometimes success can be found in what’s already available.
Keep up with all these trends and you’re sure to kick start your campaigns and begin the new year toasty warm with an abundance of growth.
I’ll leave you one last thought, however – research by Accenture revealed that 73% of business decision makers want a more tailored, retail-like experience.
Despite all of the robots and automation engraining themselves into marketing tactics, delivering a personalised experience will remain a top priority for the foreseeable future.
Jessica Packer is Managing Director of The B2B Marketing Lab
