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How can businesses accurately identify and assess the biggest digital marketing trends for 2020 that they need to know about, and how these trends need to influence their digital marketing strategy? Expert counsel is needed if businesses want to maximise the effectiveness of digital channels and new emerging technologies, writes Stephen Murphy (pictured) of Dept Agency.

What’s happening in the market?

From a Dept perspective there are three key trends in B2B digital marketing that are having a significant impact in converting digital leads for our customers. These are:

• Personalisation of content
• Video marketing
• Chatbots and messaging apps

Personalised content is content based on an individual’s preferences, such as the emails you receive from Ryanair on car hire when it is getting close to your holiday.

This type of targeted communications is highly effective for creating leads and converting them to customers. It can also be used on your website, where ads on Facebook or Twitter can bring users to a campaign page that is tailored for that particular product or service. These pages can be creative and describe more about the product or service with a specific call to action.

The second most popular trend for companies in 2020 is video-based marketing. Just as with B2C marketing, video offers great engagement for B2B companies and can help with social media marketing efforts, as well as engage people more on websites and via emails.

There has been a huge rise in short video production, where a snippet of your service or product can be served in the ad. This makes the process more dynamic and interesting, which leads to more clicks and higher click-through rates.

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Thirdly, the rise of chatbots continues and this feature is becoming a must-have for B2B companies. Facebook Messenger pioneered the use of this and now has over 100,000 apps for businesses. The purpose is to remove barriers to conversion when a potential customer lands on your website. You need to add value to the customer journey and ensure that the questions asked are answered in a natural manner.

How to ‘tool up’ for successful digital marketing

As a digital agency, you need to be ‘tooled up’ either via an internal team or working with your digital agency. There are three key skill sets to set you on your way:

• Creativity
• Technology
• Data and media

In the era of bots and automation, ideas, solutions and content will always be needed. The world of technology, on the other hand, can be daunting to navigate. Understanding which solutions are best for your business, the level of investment you should make and how long the technology will remain relevant are all great questions that your agency can help with.

It’s important that you have a live and well-maintained digital ecosystem in place too. This allows your audience to find you, consider you, be driven to engage with you, convert to a customer and ultimately become an advocate.

This is where content plays a pivotal role. If you’re not being relevant or presenting yourself in the correct fashion, your target audience is less likely to engage. It requires trial and error and constant review, and it’s a very interesting, satisfying and rewarding space to play in.

Dept Agency
Tel: (01) 678 9992
www.deptagency.com