09/01/2020
1. Influencer Marketing Will Continue to Grow-Research shows that 59% of marketers plan on increasing their influencer budget in 2020. Social media has always been great for SMBs and startups, because it allows small brands with little to no budget to compete with larger brands on the same stage. Many SMBs don’t have the budgets to go after the “named” influencers, so we see a larger opportunity for the growth of micro-influencers in the new year.
2. Shopping on Social Media-This is a trend that began this year and we predict will continue to grow. Increasingly, you no longer need to leave a certain site or platform in order to make a purchase or a product you've found.
3. Stories Will Become Marketers Darlings-For a while, Stories were exclusive to Snapchat, but then Instagram and Facebook Stories came out, and now even YouTube has its own stories format.
Since Stories content disappears rather quickly, this is the perfect time for marketers to capitalize on fear of missing out (FOMO) and to offer flash sales and deals that only loyal users will learn to look for.
4. Augmented Reality (AR) Will Become Mainstream-AR technology is gradually evolving, with increased application for eCommerce, product discovery, special offers, and more.For example, IKEA now gives consumers the chance to see how its items will look in buyers' own homes via its AR app.
5. Chatbots-When chatbots first came into our consciousness, customers were only answered with prewritten answers to questions brands thought were common, using keywords to trigger the bot.As 2019 comes to a close, algorithms are improving chatbots’ effectiveness by “understanding” what users are writing to them. Chatbot intelligence will only continue to grow in 2020, which will likely see more consumers taking them up, and more brands following that trend.
6. Improved Customer Service-This is really a second part for chatbots. Of course, bots can't answer every single question, nor do they allow the personalization of talking to an actual human - but a lot of time can be saved for the customer service workers by handing over the common questions, changes to addresses and passwords to the chatbots.