2020 has been an exciting and challenging year for the marketing sector. It is the year that has pushed the field to be more creative and innovative in order to connect with its audience. It has also led to the emergence of various new trends and given marketers in-depth insights into what their audience really wants from each brand. Below are five trends we see emerging in 2020 that will shape the industry over the coming years.
Humanised approach
Audiences are increasingly wanting their brands to be humanised. They want the brand to have a unique personality and characteristics that set the brand apart. They want their brands to be relatable and authentic.
Companies that do want to use a humanised approach need to start by studying their target audience and identifying what traits they relate to best. These should be incorporated in all kinds of marketing communication being promoted by the brand. The team leading the marketing and communications should be briefed on the same so that these qualities are reflected by the team while interacting with the target audience.
Fusion and beyond
Collaborations and fusions with brands sharing similar values is another trend on the rise in 2020. A great example of this fusion concerns Selfridges, a premium departmental store in the UK. They recently built an in-store experience to cater to a wider range of their audience’s needs. The department store on Oxford Street introduced a space dedicated to fitness and health and partnered with BXR to offer boxing classes in store as an extension to it.
Such collaborations are great for all the brands involved as these introduce the brands to a targeted clientele that is already interested in similar products and services.
Build trust – Trust is the message, transparency the messenger
Brands that build trust through their communications end up with a loyal following who not only believe in the brand but also share their message. They end up becoming loyal customers and recommend your brand to friends and family with similar interests. Every brand wants such loyal customers, and building trust is one of the best ways of doing this.
Brands that want to build trust need to understand that transparency is key to achieving this. They need to be clear and upfront with their customers and give them their honest views on values they believe in as a company.
Get your customers involved
Engaged customers are more likely to buy from your brand than disengaged customers. Hence, creating engagement is one of the top emerging trends in 2020. Brands have been competing to gain the attention of their audiences and to keep them hooked.
The best ways for companies to increase engagement is by taking their customers along their journey and devising various fun and creative ways to interact with their target audience. This can be achieved through fun contents, entertaining quizzes and unique challenges.
Agile marketing
Agile marketing is another new concept we’ve seen emerging in 2020. The idea is to use a framework that can enable organisations to move closer to their target customers by helping them embrace adaptive thinking and structure cross-functional teams so as to increase their speed, quality, flexibility and effectiveness in reacting to moments in the market. This concept draws its key principles from the agile software development concept.
Agile marketing can be used in conjunction with artificial intelligence to predict and generate meaningful engagements with customers in near real time. It helps push content creation a step or two beyond by offering an organisational model by which businesses can quickly design, create and launch marketing campaigns.
