What does the future of marketing look like, and are marketers equipped to excel as the landscape continues to evolve with the technology and various social media platforms rise (TikTok) or fall (Snapchat)?
To get prepared for the coming year, Socialbakers reached out to marketing professionals to find out what’s on the forefront of their priorities in 2020. Whether it’s emerging industries, continued trends like influencer marketing and ecommerce, or determining the exact role of AI and machine learning, there’s a lot for marketers to grapple with and consider as they try to optimize their performance.We collected insights from Socialbakers clients and also gathered thoughts from other CMOs and marketing leaders who are talking about what’s coming in 2020. Read through and get the insights you need to dominate the next year:
Head of Social, Influencer and Media Buy at ASUS
Head of Regional Marketing at Shopee
People are demanding more social engagement and content will evolve to meet this trend. In 2019, we saw an explosion of real-time content as businesses aimed to forge authentic and immediate connections with consumers. For instance, we see that live-streaming is starting to transform online shopping in Southeast Asia by enabling closer interaction and information sharing among brands, sellers and buyers.
Real-time content will continue to be key in 2020, but I also foresee marketers investing more resources into interactive and personalized content that encourages social sharing among consumers. At Shopee, we design a wide range of fun and interactive content, including in-app games for special occasions such as Mothers Day and Labour Day.
We also regularly produce creative data-driven content that offer users personalized insights on their own shopping habits. Interactive and personalized content allows us to stay top-of-mind amongst users and will be an essential tool in every marketer’s arsenal in 2020.
Toyota Brand Management Department | Marketing Planning Division, at Toyota Motor Asia Pacific Pte Ltd. (TMAP-MS)
In terms of the trends in 2020, I see huge potential/growth that is going to grow and ‘explode’ exponentially in 2020 in the world of esports.
This arena will change the way marketers deal with their consumers, particularly the younger generation, and it highlights the opportunity that’s laid out there for collaborations and even to change the way we market digitally.
Let me explain why. For the first time this year, esports was registered as a medal sport for the Southeast Asian Games. Likewise, we saw one of the highest prize money checks – $3 million – being won in a Fortnite tournament by a young teenager. The gaming industry is booming, and with Google’s Stadia coming out, Nintendo Switch releasing a lite version and game developers continuing to come out with mobile versions of their staple games, it is hard for marketers to ignore this phenomenon.
So as marketers, we need to acknowledge this booming industry, how it can affect other industries and how consumers, particularly the target audience of the gaming industry, plays out and how we can tap into opportunities there to reach them.
CMO at Pega
CMO at SAP Customer Experience
CMO at inRiver
Just because you can do something with a machine doesn’t mean you should. There are plenty of examples of that in the world. I think what’s key for any CMO to be successful with artificial intelligence is, to start with the intelligence angle. We say in marketing that you can’t automate a process that doesn’t exist, and with artificial intelligence, you can’t expect a program or a machine to do what your human beings don’t already know how to do.
Focus on the intelligence, focus on accumulating best practices so that when it’s time to implement artificial intelligence, you’ve already got the intelligence part worked out and then a machine can augment what you already do well.
In a world that’s increasingly dominated by Amazon, where we have expectations for a personalized experience that anticipates our needs and is responsive over time, we must prepare for the future of customer experience.
Marketing Director of EMEA at Impact
Influencer marketing has seen incredible continued growth in 2019. For marketers this has been a huge opportunity, as when managed correctly influencers deliver both impact and results. The reality is, time spent on social media platforms is only going to grow, albeit at a slower pace than in the last few years, and influencer marketing will be more popular than ever next year.
In fact, brands are now ready to make an even greater investment in their influencer campaigns and programmes – so expect to see spending on influencers surpassing $9b annually in 2020. Influencer marketing will lead the way in producing authentic engagements, trustworthy quality, and endless scale but marketers will demand actionable performance measurement in return for this increased spend.
Taylor has been with Socialbakers since 2019. As a content marketing specialist, he helps create reports, blogs, and he also hosts webinars and other live events.