By Anurag Pal
Your marketing plan for 2020 is not likely to look like your marketing plan did in 2015 – or even your strategy from 2019. Technological advancements are happening so quickly that the marketing world has undergone significant shifts in the past year — and hopefully you’re prepared for them.
To ensure that you are including the most timely and relevant factors in your marketing plan for the new year, check out this roundup of some of the things you won’t want to miss in 2020.
Have You Instituted an Email Campaign?
This is one area that’s been around for a while, but many small- and medium-sized businesses aren’t using it yet. Perhaps you got tired of creating email campaigns, or maybe you weren’t seeing the return on investment (ROI) you’d hoped. But if that’s the case, you may want to reconsider.
Email campaigns may be a stronger marketing tool than you think. The median email marketing return on investment is 122 percent, according to an eMarketer report. And research from Constant Contact indicates that for every $1 spent on email marketing, companies can expect to earn $38 of revenue on average.
Take a look at the ROI on your existing campaigns and compare it to those averages. If you can afford to bypass email marketing based on the numbers, then that might be what works better for you. But if not, you may want to consider integrating email into your program.
Understand the Benefits of Geofencing
Geofencing is growing in popularity, but many marketers are still unsure of its potential or the best techniques for using it. What it essentially boils down to is targeting customers in a specific geographic area using location-based technology. For instance, if you own a retail store, you could push display ads to the people who are in the strip mall where your shop is, and that way they’d be more likely to visit you. The same goes for B2B companies – if you know a major conference is happening and many of your potential customers are going to be there, you can create ads targeted at the people who are in the building where the conference is taking place.
No matter how you use geofencing, the bottom line is that you’re offering potential customers your ads when they are in the places where they’re most likely to capitalize on them, in turn boosting your ROI.
Maximize Interactive Content
Visitors to your website will stay on the page longer if they’re engaged with the content. In addition, interactive content gets shared more, making it a marketing avenue that generates its own buzz. To ensure you’re maximizing your use of this genre, create more visual content and confirm that your users can interact with it. Perhaps you’ve created infographics that your users will want to pass along and share — you can make them even more interactive by asking users to click or scroll through them to see the content.
You can also have customers interact with your brand via polls, surveys, quizzes and assessments – or by prompting them to download white papers or eBooks from your site.
Look for More Use of Blockchain, AI
Artificial intelligence and blockchain are seeping into many aspects of marketing, from buying ads programmatically to using chatbots that speak with your customers. You can use AI to help customers envision how your products would look in their homes, or you can utilize AI-driven algorithms to show a B2B customer how much money they’d save by implementing your technology.
Automation will also be useful internally, by helping you make better use of your data and your user experiences, thus allowing you to get a higher return on investment for all of your efforts.
Voice Search Comes into the Mainstream
Voice searching isn’t just a fad – it’s now an integral way that people search online and even buy items. Saying “Hey Alexa, order socks” is faster and easier for busy people than searching for socks and going out to get them. Brands like Campbell Soup and PayPal have optimized their use of voice search tools, and your company can benefit from creating voice searches as well.
If you’re wondering what kind of data backs up the notion that voice searches are growing in popularity, the fact is that almost 33 percent of the 3.5 billion Google searches performed daily come in via voice search, and some 61 percent of people aged 25 to 64 say they plan to use voice search actively in the future. In addition, more than half of US households are expected to own smart speakers by 2022.
Once you’ve determined which elements to add to your marketing strategy, you should be better suited to boost your ROI and bring in more customers during the new year.
