What are biggest digital marketing trends for 2020? More—as in more influencer marketing, more content, more web video and more of what will get digital consumers engaged with your brand online.

Here are seven key digital marketing trends that you should consider investing your time and resources in to succeed in 2020.

1- The Ascent of Social Influencer Marketing

Influencers used to be huge celebrities or “internet celebs” with millions or hundreds of thousands of followers. But now, companies are turning to people with a much smaller social media following to leverage as influencers and reach a targeted audience with a voice they trust.

Influencer marketing has evolved into to become more personalized. As it becomes more authentic, 92 percent of people trust other consumer recommendations over corporate advertising. For this reason, marketers from a leading gaming company launched their highly successful influencer marketing campaign #Superlord on the social video app TikTok, which took Germany by storm:

Further, a mediakix study predicts that the ad spend for influencer marketing could reach $10 billion by next year. It’s clear that influencer marketing is here to stay.

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2-Streaming Video Ad Engagement

Video was a digital marketing must in 2019 and it will continue to be one in 2020, according to IAB’s 2019 Video Advertising Spend Report. Marketers report digital budgets increased 25 percent year over year. Consumer viewing habits explain this budget increase—advertisers go where their customers are spending their time. Per the IAB:

• 74 percent of U.S. consumers 13 years and older watch streaming or online video at least weekly and 41 percent watch daily.
• 78 percent of digital video viewers will watch advertising in exchange for free content.
• Online video viewers pay closer attention to both content and ads when watching educational videos.

And, in addition to adding videos to your social networks and on your site, live videos on Facebook Live and Instagram Live get watched 3x longer than videos that aren’t live. It’s time to take streaming and live video ads seriously in 2020.

3-Emerging Tech Rising

From 5G technology on mobile devices to advancements in AI, voice and connected TVs, how consumers engage with ads will truly transform in the coming year:

• 5G technology will transform how consumers access and use content, meaning mobile usage will dramatically increase among global audiences.
• AI tech advancements for content will enable greater personalization in digital video.
• Voice search for smart speakers will continue to expand as homes continue adopting Alexa, Siri and Google Home, and while developers continue to make improvements to accuracy.
• Advancements in connected TVs and OTT (over the top media) will enable users to interact with ads from their TV and mobile devices that lead to increased product placement within streaming video.

4-Interactive Content Takes Off

Ninety-one percent of buyers are looking for more interactive content online. In 2020, content marketing will shift its focus to give audiences more of what they want: shoppable posts, AR/VR, 360-degree video, quizzes and polls are just a few examples of interactive content.

Rome: A Guided City Tour is a great example of a 360-degree video:

The reason interactive content will be one of 2020’s top marketing trends is because this level of interactivity in retail is new and original—take for instance, a shoppable Free People ad on Instagram. When a user taps the photo, the dress name and price appear. When tapping the price, the user is taken to a screen with more information and the option to view the item on the Free People website. This type of ad cuts through the noise, and gives visitors a reason to stay and engage. _And it’s extremely shareable, expanding an ad’s reach even further.

5-Micro-Moments Go Mainstream

Micro-moments are moments when we turn to a device—often a smartphone—to take action on whatever we need or want now. People generally make instant decisions on what to eat, which restaurant to choose, what to purchase or where to go. This tactic looks to take advantage of showing a relevant ad at the right place at the right time to the right audience.

To take advantage of micro-moments in 2020, you need to be where consumers are searching for information in the moment—as Google puts it, marketers have to “be there, be useful, be quick.”

The rise of micro-moments means that marketers must rethink the linear buyer’s journey that follows a set path: awareness, consideration and decision. Today, the customer journey is becoming more of a whirling funnel wherein people think, see or talk about something and then want to learn about it, watch it or buy it, all at an instant. Expectations are high, and patience is low.

Identify your customer’s potential “have to buy” moments, and be ready to deliver quality content in those moments of need for mobile devices, and make it easy for them to then purchase.

6-Social Media Stories Become a Marketing Mainstay

First Snapchat came out with the concept of “My Story,” then Instagram and Facebook stories were introduced, and then YouTube unveiled their own story format: Reels. Now we have the emergence of TikTok, where users create videos on the spot and behind the scenes for a less polished and more authentic look.

Since these types of stories disappear after a set period of time, this is a great opportunity for marketers to make good use of FOMO (fear of missing out).

There are several benefits to using social media stories including:

• Increased brand awareness
• Constant engagement with followers
• Cost-effective ad solution
• Increased traffic to your web page
• Opportunity to reach younger audiences

A simple way to engage users is to add Polls to your Stories. For instance, the National Basketball Association used Polls to ask their followers who they thought would win the upcoming matchups. Additionally, it was a useful tool to build anticipation around the event itself.

Consumers often use Stories to search for local businesses. For instance, on Instagram Stories, some location searches have a story icon that allows users to view recent stories that have used the particular location sticker. Additionally, the use of hashtags for places or events have a similar effect of driving user traffic to that destination to learn more. This is a great way to help your brand get discovered locally.

7-Content Experiences Will be the Face of Content Marketing

“Content experiences” are the amalgamation of content and context. This matters because every piece of content conveys an experience—both good or bad—through elements like design, placement, environment and more.

Consider Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign, started in 2011 and still going strong today. Coca-Cola lovers can personalize bottles with their name or friend’s name from the Coca-Cola website or look for a name on a bottle at in a real-world store. The campaign went viral as consumers began posting pictures online with their personalized drinks.

Consumers naturally loved the ability to personalize bottles, and it became a great way for Coke to engage their audience—and get them to make a purchase.

Content experience is about addressing the whole user experience when engaging with the content. It puts control back in the hands of the marketer, while also focusing on the brand experience. It’s about thinking holistically as a marketer, an important part of considering your 2020 strategy.

Sven Lubek is managing director of WeQ.

The post 7 Digital Marketing Trends to Consider for 2020 appeared first on Chief Marketer.

AI is ultimately here to improve people’s lives both at work and at home, yet many organizations are still timid about investing in the technology. Here are some strong cases for investing in AI for advertising today:

Achieving True Scale and Engagement

Marketers are investing in AI to deliver advertising that is relevant, contextual and hyper-personalized to individual consumer preferences. Automation is an important component of driving this capability.

Adam Powers, CEO at Tribal Worldwide, shared at Mobile World Congress 2019 how they use AI in advertising to create contextual experiences for users: “Offer an experience where the application of AI is an invisible factor—emotional engagement and conversion focus. Magic can happen in the details, the small things and looking at the practical application of AI. For example, a client in Indonesia uses machine learning to forecast fashion trends by feeding in various data points, and image uploading to forecast in which part of the region certain products will sell.”

“Brands need to try to keep up with changing consumer behavior,” added Neil Stubbings, CRO at IV.AI. “It’s the age of availability. A brand should be available on any platform that the customer is, and that’s the challenge and the opportunity for brands to transact with consumers…people are looking for things that feel more native.”

Customer Journeys: In Real Time

The linear sales funnel is a thing of the past, and marketers are turning to AI to optimize ad campaigns mid-cycle at scale. James Hilton, Global CEO of M&C Saatchi Performance, said: “We acquire retained customers for world leading brands. We are a performance agency, so we use ML and AI to get the right customers at the right price, and get the right yield for clients.” Having seen first-hand the tremendous impact of ML and AI technology on clients’ campaigns, I can vouch for that.

Finding Ad Fraud Warning Signs

From our experience, one of the most important use cases  in the digital advertising space is the potential to fight ad fraud. Marketers are already exploring how to use user data and ML to solve challenges around attribution, like finding patterns early, that can lead to fraudulent sales.

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Jay Benach, Strategy Lead at White Ops, a cybersecurity company specializing in bots for advertising, ecommerce, social and more, said that when they started their business in 2013, they were detecting malware with minimal data, and then telling advertisers when they discovered bots. Advertisers were rightfully frustrated and asked the firm to stop the bots before they hit the platform, not after it has already occurred.

In response, many adtech companies fighting fraud have developed ML-based solutions to identify and stop fraud before it happens. To illustrate the extent of this persisting issue, only a few months ago, the FBI shut down ad fraud “botnet” that was running through the entire ecosystem and defrauding advertisers for years.

Given the pervasiveness and the aggressive nature of how new types of fraud attacks emerge and infest the ecosystem, ad fraud will continue to be an area where technology development is focused and moving quickly. Advertisers will want to look at the potential of AI and ML for mitigating this fraud going forward.

AI and machine learning bring a lot of possibilities for the advertising industry, and ultimately, for the consumer experience. Advertisers should already be thinking about how they build the right teams to leverage this technology effectively—whether it’s investing in data scientists, or training creative teams to interpret and analyze data. Ultimately, collaboration across cross-functional teams from creative to IT will be crucial in driving AI adoption effectively in advertising.

Sven Lubek is managing director of WeQ.

The post The Case for Investing in AI for Advertising appeared first on Chief Marketer.

For instance, the popularity of shopping on smartphones affecting the purchasing funnel from ad to cart, and the rise of digital assistants that have made voice search SEO a new part of digital strategies. Along similar lines, smartphones are also giving rise to voice search. The point is that digital marketing trends are constantly coming and going.

To illustrate, the following are some of the top up-and-coming 2019 digital marketing trends, and how these trends will affect marketer’s strategies through the coming year.

1. Actual Intelligence with AI
Salesforce recently reported that artificial intelligence use among marketers will grow more than 50 percent in the next two years for the purpose of better ad targeting.

In 2019, we’ll also start to see AI used to optimize ad creative images. AI will eventually be used to not only understand contextual data, but also images. Further, AI for “intent advertising” will emerge, and platforms will be able to recognize what the shopper is trying to achieve and cater the creative messaging and imagery to the user’s experience.

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2. Influencer Marketing Goes Mainstream
This year, brands will allocate more budget than ever to influencer marketing because campaign results have been exceedingly effective for advertisers this past year. Influencer marketing is fast-becoming a more time- and cost-effective way to reach new potential customers.

Additionally, influencer marketing has reached a new niche with gamers: E-sports got a major uplift in 2018 and the live-streaming video platform Twitch became a greater focus of attention in the influencer marketing sphere. Marketers will finally tap into the full potential of Twitch’s reach in 2019.

3. Video Ads Will Grow
As consumers spend more time on their smartphones watching videos, advertisers are expected to spend $20 billion on mobile video in 2019 (up from $2 billion in 2015), and video is expected to account for 85 percent of total Internet traffic by 2019 (both live video and video ads).

This past year, 65 percent of ad impressions on Instagram were the result of video content, and this is expected to grow even further. With this type of growth and consumption of video ads by consumers, video ads should be part of every marketer’s strategy in 2019. Marketers can accelerate their video ad content by running video ads on YouTube and Instagram, as well as by creating video content in-house or working with third-party creative agencies.

4. Voice Activated Search Matures
By 2020, it’s expected that 50 percent of all searches will be voice searches, and by 2022, voice commerce sales will reach $40 billion. Next year, consumers will be able to do more in search with their voice, and mobile marketers should be prepared for voice activated search advertising. User interface platforms will become the new battleground for marketers (Alexa v Google Home, Siri, Bigsby).

As search engines grow more and more sensitive to user intent, it becomes increasingly vital that advertisers tag every image, video and piece of content appropriately with meta descriptions and alt-text. Search engines use these bits of information to promptly categorize and serve up content to users. Without them, marketers will lose traffic—more so in 2019.

5. Messenger Ads and In-App Ads are on the Rise
According to Statista, 2.01 billion mobile phone users accessed over-the-top messaging apps to communicate in 2018, a number that is projected to grow to 2.48 billion users by 2021.

The top APAC chat apps are already ahead of western developers in using messenger ads to reach audiences. In South Korea, a country of 50 million, KakaoTalk counts 32 million local users who spend an average of 850 minutes on KakaoTalk per month. In August 2018, Whatsapp Messenger was the most downloaded app for Android users globally and is being used by 450 million people daily on both iOS and Android. Whatsapp is followed by Facebook Messenger; which now engages 1.3 billion people globally and is the leading app in the U.S. with 126.3 million users.

Additionally, a new report by AppAnnie predicts that in 2019 the number of apps using in-app advertising will grow by 60 percent as advertisers increase conversion rates with these captive users.

This year will be the year for advertisers to start experimenting in using messenger apps to target and engage with this massive audience as well as increase in-app advertising spending.

6. Finding New Ways to Fight Ad Fraud and Ensure Brand Safety
RetailDive reports that fraud rates have almost doubled since 2017, and Juniper Research estimates that ad fraud will cost advertisers $19 billion in 2018. Next year will further challenge brands and platforms to stay on top of emerging fraud trends from click flooding and click injection to SDK spoofing.

Technologies that were exploratory in 2018 will take centerstage in 2019, including blockchain, which is helping to create a new model that uses a cryptography-encrypted pipeline to ensure that target audiences actually get the ads that are delivered. Blockchain is expected to address transparency, reduce fraudulent attacks and address flaws in the OpenRTB system.

Development of more advanced AI- and machine learning-based ad fraud detection systems is expected in 2019 as well.

Brand safety is becoming a key concern, and there is a rising need for advertisers to get better information regarding the quality of the inventory. At the same time, there is an increase in recognizing this safety issue as the publisher’s responsibility. More focus on technology solutions to identify fraudulent patterns will be key in 2019.

7. Macro Trends: APAC App Ecosystem Expands into Europe and U.S.
In the global mobile ecosystem, Chinese and other APAC-based apps from chat to mCommerce began to soar through the ranks of the U.S. and EU app stores in 2018. Discounts, seamless payments and customer service were driving factors in APAC apps gaining traction in global markets.

Traction will continue to grow, and with it, new concepts being introduced by APAC to western markets like social commerce are expected to rise with social media and campaigns in 2019.

8. Parallel Bidding is the Next Big Thing for In-App Advertising
The days of monetizing apps through advertising in a waterfall system is over. This year, apps will instead sell their ad inventory through header bidding, or parallel bidding. Unlike the waterfall where requests are sent consecutively to ad demand sources, one by one, parallel bidding sends the ad requests to the ad demand sources simultaneously, and an OpenRTB auction then takes place on the ad mediator’s server side. This enables ad networks to not only choose to fill or not fill a certain price floor, but also to report the estimated value of the impression.

This new model creates a fair and competitive environment where ad networks can be more aggressive in winning an impression, but without overbidding, hence it will be the method of choice for in-app advertisers in 2019.
Sven Lubek is managing director at WeQ. He can be reached at sven.lubek@weq.com.  

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