Digital Marketing in 2020_ Where Will Digital Marketing Go in the Next Year?.mp3
Digital Marketing in 2020_ Where Will Digital Marketing Go in the Next Year?.mp3
Speaker 1 Hey, everyone, welcome to our star studded roundtable discussion here today. My name is Trevon Shirey and we are looking forward to chatting with you about 2019, the year that was, and also looking ahead to 2020 and joined here by John and Jackie. And we are going to dove into some upcoming digital marketing trends for twenty twenty. But first, I, I think, you know, we’ve got our sweaters on and busted out the long sleeves. We’re reaching the end of twenty nineteen. So before we look ahead to 20, 20, I thought would be interesting to chat a little bit about some digital marketing trends over this past year. So, John, we’ll start with you. What was it favorite digital marketing trend, an article that you read, maybe something that really stuck out over this past year? Sure.
Speaker 2 So one of the things I think is most exciting is the rollout of Google’s most recent large update, Birte, because it’s giving the algorithm a wealth of new tools to process language more naturally. And so that’s giving users a more customized experience, something that is direct for them, something that’s going to give them results which are more relevant and actionable than ever before. And it’s also a challenge for us as marketers to provide content and information and resources which respond to a more natural, linear, kind of more natural progression for the user. And so that’s certainly a challenge supposed to impact about one in 10 of all searches out there. But I think it’s all for the good because it’s going to help us connect resources, services and companies with the people who need them faster than ever before. So I’m excited for that.
Speaker 1 Yeah, certainly one that will impact 2020 as well as we look back and also look ahead. Jacqui, what stood out to you for twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3 Yeah, so I’m going to be a little different. I actually think the entire year of 2019 has been a huge shift in online marketing. I feel like the just the entire strategy behind the online marketing has really shifted this year from away from a lot of the keywords in just like one off campaigns kind of thing into shaping the entire user journey. And online marketers just in general have started to have to pivot their strategies to think more about how the user actually interacts across multiple different channels. So that’s been really exciting. I feel like that’s been a huge step shift this year. So I’m really excited to see where that takes us into twenty
Speaker 2 twenty
Speaker 1 as we look ahead to twenty twenty. Certainly the backbone of anything related to digital marketing is technology. Without technology, we are powerless, as they say. That’s going to inform a lot of new changes and stuff in the digital marketing space. So what do the two of you see in John? We’ll start with you for this one. What is the future holding in terms of technology related to digital marketing?
Speaker 2 OK, so one of the technologies I’m most excited to see growing twenty twenty is voice search. So voice search is already all around us and a lot of us are using it. We just see boy search taking off in a big way as users gain more confidence in the ability of search engines and other tools to give them the answers that they need to help them make decisions. And so you’re going to see the adoption rates of people using voice search and using voice or to even conduct their business to go up higher and higher. It’s going to be particularly important for businesses that do a lot of regional or local work where people are looking for products and services that they’re going to follow up on and take action on. So very important to do two things. First, to learn and how to or work with a consultant. Get your content optimized and ready for voice search, get the information on your website ready to be useful for the users that are using voice search technology. And then the second thing is that a lot of voice search users, they’re going to be running their search on a mobile device as versus a desktop. And we know that that’s increasingly important anyway to be getting ready for mobile users. But when you’ve got a mobile user, the fact is they’re far more likely to actually make their conversion or reach out to your company using a phone. They’re likely to call you as versus what a lot of us may be more familiar with. And we’re comfortable with form submissions and other types of conversion actions on the website. So if you don’t have a good process for receiving, qualifying and taking advantage of leads, that comes through a phone on your website, even tracking them and understanding their impact of your campaigns, the advent of voice search and more and more users, depending on their mobile devices to get things done is a good time for us to reevaluate how we receive process and qualify those leads.
Speaker 1 Oh, very cool. Jacqui, what do you think in terms of technology is ahead here for this next year?
Speaker 3 Yeah, so I think sort of along the same lines is artificial intelligence and really using that in your online marketing strategies. So like artificial intelligence, really keen to Google about five years ago, we’ve seen a huge shift just in the last five years from keyword stuffing Owais all the way to today. You really need to understand your user a lot better and what they’re looking for and what they’re looking for it. So I think it’s really interesting just how much it has evolved in the past five years, where it’s going tomorrow. Web marketers are going to have to use all of that good artificial intelligence data to really understand user intent and deliver messaging on their websites in a new sort of way.
Speaker 2 So, yeah, we’re seeing with all of that additional information that Google and other search engines are getting on their users, we’re seeing an increasingly customized search experience. So any given to different people may search for the same thing and get a different combination of search results, images, video resources, quick answers, voice search responses, what have you. And so no two people are going to be getting exactly the same results, which also means that digital marketing strategies, we’ve got to understand that our users have different ways of learning about us, different ways of making decisions. They’re going to be served, different materials. And if we don’t have a diversified marketing strategy, that is going to include elements of rich media, great images, infographics, video, what have you, as well as optimized content for voice search. And some of those quick answer positions are search engine strategy is going to fall behind. We’re going to lose performance and lose out on traffic. And a lot of those really rich engagements that come from when users interact with the media. And then similarly, users are just expecting the Web to respond to them. They’re expecting websites to know that they’ve been there before. They’re expecting us to do some fundamental things like welcome them back to the website, maybe recognize the location and offer them something particular, a particular promotion, a particular offer. Remind them if something has been left in their cart and isn’t done or if they’ve been midway through some type of process. And now we can we can remember them and invite them to finish it. Those types of experiences help users to feel comfortable on our websites, to feel that the website is alive, is responsive, and it sets up the expectation that the company I’m going to deal with is likewise going to remember me, work with my information and help me take the next action that I need to do to get where I’m going. So those types of customizations, both in search and on websites, are just a reality. And we’ve got to we’ve got to to respond to them and give users what they need.
Speaker 1 Yeah, you had a good point, Jacki, how quickly things change. You’ve been looking at five years ago, which is not that long of a time period. So it’s been amazing the advances in I an understanding user intent and using technology to kind of combine all of those things and create ultimately different and improved user experiences across the Web. So as we look into the future here, talk about twenty twenty, we’ve hit on technology and I think no conversation about twenty twenty digital marketing would be complete without touching on an old friend and that old friend would be Google. So as Google continues to innovate, it’s rapidly changing digital marketing, as you both know. But Jacki, what in particular is Google working on that is going to change the digital marketing landscape here next year?
Speaker 3 Yes. So, I mean, Google has been always releasing just really crazy algorithm updates and just really messing with us. But this year, they actually released a update called Birte, which John mentioned earlier. And Bird is really just their natural language processing update. So over the last five years, Google’s been really like gathering a lot of information from their eye. Update happened five years ago. And think of it as like they are putting that in action. So they’ve been understanding how the users are interacting and the search results pages. When somebody does a search, what do they click on in the search result? And Google just has been gathering that sort of information as well as when somebody goes to a page, are they finding it useful? How are they refining their search after they’ve already searched to get better answers? So Google has just been like sitting there and watching what people have been doing for the past five years. And Berte is now this natural language processing algorithm update that is really just putting that all in action. So what I’m most excited about with Berte is that it’s really forcing us as online marketers to deliver better content. So. In the last five years, we’ve been able to just kind of like copy what’s already out there and just like kind of change it in a different way. And what you’re seeing now when you do almost any surge is you’re seeing 10 different results, basically saying the same thing, optimized in a different way. And I think what Burt is really doing for us is it’s really making us as marketers have to think more creatively and deliver a little bit more unique content. So I think what it’s what’s going to happen in twenty twenty is the search results are just in general going to get more interesting, not only with what’s showing up there, but what the content on the Web pages are.
Speaker 1 John, what stands out to you in terms of what Google’s been working on and how that’s going to impact us here heading into next year?
Speaker 2 So I think what Google is is pushing what they what they’d like to see from us, what they’re because it’s what their users are asking them for is greater and greater production of video content. We want to almost a conceptual shift. We’ve always kind of seen video as maybe a nice to have. But its problems now and also the ease with which we can make video really make it a time in twenty twenty when we’ve got to make video a core part of our strategy. We’ve got to be thinking about it as this is a main channel to reach our users. Certainly video’s been used for many years, but maybe it’s always felt that it is for these large brands. It’s big national brands, large production budgets to do something big and fancy and we don’t really see it that way at all. Video is just a way to communicate. It’s a way to get across a message. And actually, the simpler your video is in some ways, even the more stripped down it is, the easier it is to produce. The more natural it’s going to feel for your users, the more useful you can make it. And so you actually don’t need big production values or a huge budget to start taking advantage of video. But what we can’t do, what we shouldn’t do anymore is kind of ignore video or say it’s something that somebody else is doing. It’s something that we do once in a while or we’ll try it, really recommending that that that folks and companies make video a core part of their strategy. Take it seriously. Look at it in terms of how how is this a part of my work? How am I going to reach these users? I’m going to define success. What part of my journey are they are and reaching them and and then produce these things and produce them regularly and produce them on a small scale to begin with. But plan to scale your video strategy so that you’re really a part of the conversation in a way that is useful and relevant and so that Google and others can find you and serve you. They want to serve up new and useful video content all the time. And well, if they can’t find it for most of this finding from a competing site and give it to them, then. So that’s all I can say about that. I think that’s what we should be.
Speaker 1 Great points on Google, everybody’s favorite tech giant out there. So I want to now transition to my in our collective personal favorite technology company website that. Yes. So certainly we’ve got a lot of great things in the works heading into twenty twenty. You guys touched on some of the new things that we’ll be working on for clients in terms of digital marketing. So anything else stand out to you. That web effect has up our collective sleeves here as we head into twenty twenty. Jacki, let’s start with you.
Speaker 3 Yeah, so we have a lot of really exciting things coming just as a company. One of my one of the things I’m most excited about is our marketing cloud effect. Software is actually going to be completely relaunching the marketing cloud effects platform and we’re going to cloud it is a proprietary software that we developed internally to just kind of help give us some extra insights beyond what’s available with some of the tools out there. So I’m really excited because we’re going to be completely revamping the software, updating some of the core tools like competitor’s Firefox and manage graphics to just help deliver for clients. There’s also going to be a couple of new tools that use artificial intelligence to kind of help guide content marketing strategies for our clients. I’m really excited to kind of dig into those a little bit further. We’re also going to be releasing a brand new tool that really helps some of the smaller to midsize businesses that we have here. Really understand the user journey a lot better, which we’ve talked about, is going to be so important here for twenty twenty. So it’s really going to help us help the businesses understand the user journey from the second the user enters their website all the way until they become a sale. They’re really excited for us.
Speaker 1 Yeah, I love hearing the stories from different clients and people on the team here about how marketing cloud affects is being used. The tools are certainly the same across the entire platform, but the different ways that people are tracking campaigns both online and offline using the platform, the different ways that people are diving into A.I. and a lot of the other trends that were discussed today. Well, that wraps up our discussion here today. And thanks again, John. Thanks again, Jacki, for joining us. Is very insightful. I was already very eager to head into twenty twenty. But aside from opening my gifts now, something else to look forward to here in the coming months as we get closer and closer to next year. So thanks again for joining us here today. If you’re looking for a digital marketing partner and want to work with amazing smart people like these, feel free to reach out to us on our Web site, the web effects dot com, or give us a call and we’d be happy to go over some of these new trends and anything else out there that can help your business grow using the web here in twenty twenty.