With almost 8 billion people on the planet, one might think that just putting any advertisement out there is good enough. Every year, some advertising tricks and trends come into play and seem to be at the forefront of all big company marketing campaigns. Others stand the test of time and appear over and over because they work. The advertising & marketing landscape is constantly changing. To help you stay ahead in 2020, there are a few trends you can count on and should learn well so you can apply them to your business.

Digital advertising spending is expected to grow to $517 billion by the end of 2023, so you can almost count on it being greater than offline spending. That number should only increase as more people buy smartphones and use them to connect to the internet. While offline advertising isn’t dead and never fully will be, there is definitely a place for more online advertising for greatest impact.

Let’s look at a few trends likely to stay and appear in 2020. We’ll see new trends, alongside some older, ongoing trends that are still effective. Study the patterns and figure out with strategies is the most relevant for your business or startups.

#1 “Minimalism” of Brands

The audience has evolved, and so have their expectations. These days the audience expect a clutter-free experience. Minimalist and bland logos are becoming the latest trendsetter. In the business industry, many companies have caught up with this trend. For example, big brands like Google, Spotify, Airbnb and Pinterest have recently opted for a minimalist re-branding by changing their logo to popular typefaces with fewer colors possible.

Examples Logo of Brands

Besides Minimalism, there is yet another reason for brands to go bland. They have a better chance of becoming iconic because with simpler fonts, and fewer colors, brand logos can be paired easily with any supporting graphics. This way, customers can easily recognize your brand’s logo. Nike and Levi’s have adopted the best example of this trend. Both brands have adopted minimalist and bland brands so that they are easily recognizable no matter the background you put them in.

This trend comes with its own warning, though. Too much blandification can result in making your brand logo dull. To prevent this, try different color schemes and font styles to stand out with a kind of simplicity that is interesting.

#2 Customer Experiences

More customers are stating that customer experience is a big part of how they make purchasing decisions. This means more of us are demanding better treatment and are willing to pay for it.

According to a large study by PWC, 73% of us say the customer experience is an important factor. 68% of business-to-business marketers agree that delivering consistent, high-quality customer experience is very important in today’s marketplace.

“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.

#3 Conversational Marketing

More and more business are realizing that the fastest way to move buyers through their marketing funnels is with one-on-one conversations. That’s why conversational marketing will be a notable trend in 2020. When you can have one-on-one, personal conversations with your audience, you not only create a more human buying experience, but you can learn a lot about your audience, which will help you create more relevant content and marketing messages in the future.

Conversational marketing is the best way to start real-time conversations with buyers and customers. We need to make business actually feel personal again. Conversational marketing is the use of live chat, chatbots, and social monitoring to foster genuine conversations and real relationships. It is the return to businesses communicating organically.

Conversational marketing comes in many forms including email marketing, live customer support, customer success programs, Facebook Messenger marketing, chatbots and more. And with advances in artificial intelligence, chatbots are only going to get better at having life-like conversations with users. So, if you want to keep up with the competition and learn more about your target customers faster, you need to step up your conversational marketing game in 2020.

# 4 Personalized Advertising

New research shows that people are 80% more likely to buy something when a brand makes the experience personal. As we move into 2020, personalization is the name of the game. Technology allows marketers to tap into not only the generalized preferences of buyers but also more specifically into the needs of the individual. Have you ever pulled up an app and been greeted by name and offered some new items you might like?

This trend will keep on going as the user becomes the king. In 2020, we will see more actions that convince customers and speak directly to their needs. Digital marketing, for example, has evolved quickly that most customers now have high expectations from brands. They want brands to understand them, know their needs, and give them what they want. Customers are looking for information online before buying a product or service. Businesses that provide the right information stand to benefit.

# 5 Micro-Influencers

Influencer marketing has been a digital marketing trend for a few years now. It’s been so successful, though, that big-time influencers are now calling the shots. It’s not enough to send them a free sample in hopes they’ll review it — there’s payment tables and pricing lists. Social media “influence’ is now a commodity and an expensive one at that.

Partnering with micro-influencers has become a popular component of marketing strategies. In fact, the marketing budget for this new model is expected to increase by 67%. A micro-influencer is someone who has anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 followers and is normally regarded as an expert in that niche. Developing a relationship with micro-influencers can be a cost-effective way to create awareness of your brand. In exchange for payment or free product, they’ll promote your brand to their followers. People tend to trust recommendations from people they know or like, so it’s an effective method to generate leads.

Rather than competing with global enterprises for the top-tier influencers, small- and medium-sized business are opting instead to work with smaller-sized influencers. Micro-influencers is a term that we’re seeing more and more lately. It refers to the medium-sized influencers with narrower niches — popular enough to be influential, still in touch with their followers and not overloaded with sponsorship offers.

In Addition to being more affordable, micro-influencers also often have a better engagement rate than the more popular influencers. Think about it; because they have fewer followers, they can dedicate more time to their follower. Moreover, it’s easier to specialize in a niche with micro-influencers, as they often represent a niche themselves.

A study from Adweek revealed just how effective micro-influencers are. Categorized as accounts with around 30,000 followers, micro-influencers had 60% higher engagement while being 6.7x more cost-effective than influencers with more followers.

#6 Sentiment Analysis

Most of human interaction is trying to figure out what the heck each other is thinking. And while hundreds of thousands of years of biological advancement haven’t aided us much in understanding each other, after just a few years of machine-learning technology — we’re making progress.

Have you ever noticed that when you’re chatting or searching for something on social media, the pops-up, promotions, and advertisements of the subject seem to appear out of nowhere? This is not a coincidence; it is a completely intentional and planned marketing strategy.

Sentiment analysis, or social listening, is the practice of analyzing the reactions of users and customers to a product or service, typically on social media or other places online. Online reviews and posts aren’t always a black and white “I like/dislike this.” There's a big grey area with varying degrees in between. Maybe a user likes the product on a whole but one particular feature gets in the way. Maybe the product is fine just now what they were expecting.

Sentiment analysis usually involves data-collecting tools and algorithms to scour online responses to your brand and evaluate them. Again, this isn’t a new digital marketing trend, but new technology is making it more popular than ever before. Advances in natural language processing let computers understand the meanings behind what humans say online, include slang and emoji.

Whether you are chatting on Twitter, Facebook, and even Instagram, your behaviour online will show up and trigger ads or specific information on your pages. Sentiment analysis tools like Critical Mention, Repustate or Lexalytics reveal what people really think about your brand. You can then use that data to fine-tune not just your products, but also your strategies for sales, marketing, social media, and content.

#7 Alternative and Niche Social Media Channels

Despite optimism over Facebook's most recent earnings, the continual declines of both user growth and public opinion have shaken confidence in the platform’s dominance. Likewise, Twitter is seeing a similar plateau in growth, leading to a shift in power. To be clear, both Twitter and Facebook will remain useful marketing tools throughout 2020 and beyond. But the exodus has already started.

Alternative social media channels are already seeing new interest and promising growth levels. If you can start developing your presence on these “secondary” sites now, it’s likely to pay off in a few years after they continue to rise.

In particular, Snapchat, Pinterest, Medium and Reddit are becoming new favourites for marketers lately. Facebook has been bleeding young users for years, and brands targeting. the under-30 market is flocking to youth-centric outlets.

New and smaller social media platforms may not have the reach of the giants, but that’s not a bad thing. If you're a niche brand, more specialized platforms are better at reaching your target users. Check out these Facebook alternatives, broken up by industry or interest, so you can find the social media platform that’s perfect for your niche.

#8 Ephemeral Content

Ephemeral content is an advertising method that shows videos and images that are only on display for a short period of time, like what you see in Instagram Stories or Snapchat.

Since the content is only available for a limited amount of time, it taps into people’s desire to know what is happening. They don’t want to be left out and they feel like they must access the information before it disappears.

This is commonly called FOMO — or the fear of missing out.

No one wants to miss the party or to be left out of a joke. The very nature of ephemeral content inspires people to constantly check their social media channels so they don’t miss out on the latest video from a friend or to check in on what a favourite celebrity/influencers are doing on vacation.

You can take advantage of this concept to grow visitation to your website. If you make it a habit to continually publish engaging ephemeral content, you will train your readers and followers to visit your social media channels on a regular basis. If they don’t, they’ll risk being left out of the fun — and no one wants that.

Besides the fear of missing out, the temporariness of ephemeral content helps users get more comfortable with it. Since the post disappears within a day, people don’t have to worry about creating a possibly embarrassing and in erasable digital footprint for the entire world to see for all of eternity.

Advertising trends will always change continuously, so even though we can study what is popular now, it’s impossible to predict every new type of marketing that comes along. Pay attention to what the bigger brands are doing in the way of their ad strategies and study your competitors.

The upcoming 2020 trends are, paradoxically, both more human and more mechanical. It seems the general pull of marketing goes in the direction of more personal relationships with more targeted niches, but the means of making those connections rely on automation and new technology. The heart of marketing remains the same — getting people what they want, when and where they want it — and 2020 technology is just opening new doors to get there.

8 Top Marketing Trends You can't Ignore for 2020