Marketing Predictions 2020 Part One

With the dawn of a new year and decade, we asked marketing professionals from a range of backgrounds to see what they predict for marketing in 2020. Some of their predictions include a global beer company updating their 70-year-old marketing strategy to the rise of Reddit and Quora, read them all here!

Let us know your thoughts and get in touch if you’d like to contribute or join in on social media with #marketing2020

Steph Hoy has over a decade of marketing experience looks at how 2020 will update marketing to come into line with modern culture and values.

With many different businesses going under or into administration in 2019, there has never been a better time for businesses to firmly set out what makes them different or better to their competitor; which is where I think we’ll see marketing heading in 2020. Interestingly, in Brexit times, consumers are also looking to ‘safer’ times so I think we’ll see a bigger play on nostalgia too. 2019 seen a beer company (Budweiser) update their marketing campaigns from the 50s to reflect the modern woman and we expect to see others come into line. In recent years we’ve seen an influx of LGBTQ+ friendly marketing but the next stage will be to push the ‘angel’ credentials; that’s everything from green credentials and sustainability to how they’re serving their workers. Again, hitting that ‘different or better’ than competitor benchmark. A good example of somebody trying to meet this despite reputation is Amazon who are trying to dispel the reputation of being a slave driver with new factory tours. It’s also worth noting that gen Z are now coming into position as key buyers and make up 25% of the buying public - a bigger consideration than either baby boomers or millennials.

David Edmundson Bird Associate Director of Digital Transformation at MMU foresees a shift in social media advertising.

We'll start to see large-scale defection from Facebook in 2020. Bad PR and increasing disenchantment will see its numbers start to fall. It's a platform that has little or no use by anyone aged under 21 currently, and so advertisers will, for certain markets, completely abandon it - my bet is that it becomes irrelevant by 2025.

We'll see the rise of 2 communities -

1- is Reddit which will grow as a platform for organic engagement and advertising. Look to see its paid platform mature.

2- Quora. As we see the increase of growth of natural language search queries in Google, then platforms like Quora begin to be really interesting places for Q&A style dialogue - and the opportunity to engage and communicate directly with those question-driven communities will really take off.

Next we hear from James Crawford Managing Director at PR Agency One tells us his predictions for 2020.

This year's prediction is that after a number of large global agencies have acquired measurement and analytics tools providers, we will now in 2020 see an offering that is available to the small and medium sized companies. Rather than tools, these PR analytics systems will be more of a quality process, led by AMEC and their framework, rather than a one size fits all piece of software.

Tim Hyde, Social Media Marketer tells us his predictions on businesses' social media budgets and how they will focus on their customers.

1) I think a big part of 2020 is that we are going to see a huge shift in performance marketing spend. This spend is going to become more distributed so for example only 70% of budgets will go on Facebook and Instagram and we will start to see channels such as Snapchat and Pinterest taking up the remaining 30%. Snapchat and Pinterest have amazing conversion rates compared to other channels so I think businesses will invest more on quality rather than quantity.

2) I think brands will focus more on middle funnel communications. This means that less focus will be on their new customer acquisition strategy and more on customers who are already engaged. Encouraging these consumers to buy and interact more will improve customer lifetime value and increase loyalty.

Thanks to all our contributors, we can now sit back and watch what 2020 and the new decade will bring for marketing.

Check out part two of the marketing predictions series here!

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