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Advertising gets more competitive with each passing year. This year ad spend in Australia is expected to reach $23 billion.
You’ll find plenty of guides and resources promising their own set of best practices for lead generation and that staying current with digital marketing takes a little more than experience and instinct—it takes nuance.
The world is evolving, and consumer preferences are evolving along with it. For instance, people used to visit shopping centres for their needs, many now find themselves shopping online. In light of this, the most successful companies can keep up with changing times: they stay adaptive, knowing there’s simply no time to cling to outdated ways of doing things.
In order to give you an advantage over the set of marketers who are still stuck in the past, we’ve prepared a set of lead generation tips designed around the top consumer trends and expectations for 2020.
Read on for nuanced tips on keeping your lead generation efforts relevant and powerful during this new decade.
“Private Personalisation” is Euromonitor’s term for the growing interest in customised products and services that come without the cost of a consumer’s data privacy. Analysis suggests that
People are growing increasingly cautious of where their personal information winds up, which puts marketers in a tricky position: they have to strike a balance between adopting personalised marketing experiences and appearing generally less invested in acquiring data from their customers and leads.
If you’ve ever tried to personalise a marketing campaign, then you know this balance is much easier said than won. Lead forms are a core part of digital marketing, but they can also deter people with strong feelings about their own privacy.
To work around this dynamic, it helps to remember what personalised marketing sets out to do in the first place: provide value and create memorable experiences. Brands that fail to prove the value of their efforts will probably earn more scrutiny. Conversely, people may be more likely to volunteer information when presented with more compelling value propositions
We recommend you look into lead magnets that use the information you gather to generate something that’s useful and custom-built. A good example of this is the quote calculator, which returns price estimates based on user input.
The bottom line is that marketers in 2020 need to do better at demonstrating value, and get creative with the ways that volunteered information can be used to enhance the user experience.
Euromonitor’s analysis also suggests a rising preference for goods and services made and sold locally. It’s expounded upon in this report by Research World, which recommends that businesses adjust to cater to local tastes and interests while continuing to provide access to diverse options.
People are starting to turn to local providers when looking for answers to their problems, with many opting to visit neighbourhood shops rather than spend on faceless corporations. Customers will continue to chase after variety and the global experience, but with an added focus on helping nearby businesses succeed.
This presents an interesting opportunity for today’s digital marketers: context-specific content marketing. Brands can explore articles and videos that address problems native to leads from different geographic areas. Invest in a little research and get creative—you’re bound to find at least a handful of angles you could take.
Playing along to this trend offers you the chance to lead the pack when it comes to solving local problems. In doing so, you demonstrate both your value as a solution and your investment in the local scene.
If you’re a local business, this can be a good boost to your reputation and visibility. If you’re not, it can position your brand as one that’s invested in the success of your areas of operations—adding a much friendlier face to your public relations.
Today’s social media makes it possible to reduce the distance from strangers to paying customers to the span of a single click. This macrospective from Forbes explains the trend of “Shoppable Posts”: social media posts that double as e-commerce listings.
This development changes the game for B2C products. It introduces a whole new revenue stream and raises the bar for social media profiles from brand visibility tools to lead generation platforms.
Marketers now have an incentive to curate feeds that (1) capture attention, (2) spark interest, AND (3) compel purchases. It’s a hefty task to be sure, but one that may prove lucrative—just consider the 130 million Instagram users who engaged with shoppable posts in 2019.
Learn what you can about social media best practices and plan around the fact that your potential audiences are evolving from passive observers to potential leads. This is where social media content marketing needs to step up and become a part of your strategy.
Chatbots are the third item in Single Grain’s rundown of the top digital marketing trends for 2020, and for a good reason. Their reported data suggests that an increasing number of customers and leads prefer the option of being able to interface with a chatbot as they seek answers and support.
The growing demand for chatbots is driven mainly by the fact that they offer 24-hour customer support and lead processing. This matters greatly in an age where more people choose to message businesses on social media rather than submit contact forms or pick up the phone.
AI tools like chatbots are more accessible than ever to businesses of any size. In terms of implementation, however, it pays to build chatbots around the insights and data that you’ve collected over the years. It’s one thing to build a bot that can pacify people as they wait for a real person to respond, and another thing entirely to build conversation flows around your typical lead’s behavioural patterns.
There are plenty of bot development experts you can contact, so brush up on your analytics skills and get ready to communicate your marketing needs and findings.
The tricky thing about SEO is that every time you think you’ve done all you can, Google launches an update that gives you more to do. The most recent example of this is the rise of voice search, which Search Engine Watch reports to be a powerful trend leading into the new decade.
Customers are steadily taking advantage of the convenience that comes with smarter phones and electronics, and one popular statistic suggests that half of all searches will be done on voice.
For practitioners, this means restructuring web pages to feature longer-tail keywords and compete for a place among the top 3 search results, where most voice search programs pull their recommendations.
It goes without saying that these new developments are a lot of work to pile on top of an already busy checklist for businesses looking to compete through SEO—but that’s par for the course where this aspect of digital marketing is concerned.
It’s been said that the only constant thing in life is change. This is especially true for lead generation and digital marketing, where every new year forces a shift in strategy.
The five heavy-hitters above should give you some direction when it comes to adapting your lead generation efforts. It isn’t an exhaustive list by far, as the citations we’ve made go to show; you’ll find that there are plenty more trends than those we’ve mentioned.
If the work of staying competitive proves too much for your marketing wing to bear, our experts are ready and waiting to help.
Contact us today to learn how you can reap the rewards of the latest marketing styles
without breaking a sweat or breaking the bank.
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