If there’s one thing you can say with confidence about marketing and marketing trends, they’re always on the move. Professionals and industry experts the world over simply don’t have the time to sift through article after article trying to make sense of what the newest marketing updates may be. In this article I’ll address that problem by suggesting a few of the most important upcoming marketing trends and working to provide a pipeline for all of your marketing information.

To begin, let’s discuss a few of the more notable marketing trends to look forward to in 2020:

Marketing Automation

Without a doubt one of the most exciting pieces of new technology across a variety of industries is AI-based automation. Through machine learning and high-powered code, engineers and software developers are developing new ways for AI to adapt to our needs each and every day. In marketing, this means the program may detect or even predict consumer trends, or simply predict where and when to target your audience. Customer touch points, funnel navigation and messaging is a great trend to look at in the coming year with a lot of potential. Automated campaigns, personalization, content marketing, SEO and attribution management is possible seemlesly with effective marketing automation technology. Either way, keep an eye on AI in the year to come.

Voice Search

Many of the same engineers and developers working day and night on the latest and greatest AI technology are applying that same drive and determination to the development of advanced voice search. I cannot overstate how much this will change marketing in the years to come. Every marketer knows they need to reach their customers where they spend their time and money. Voice search expected to grow by 40% in recent times with the mobile sales hitting sky high, will allow customers to interface with much of their technology without leaving a digital footprint, so how can we be sure we are accurately targeting them? These will be some of the most interesting and important questions in marketing in the next few years.

Personalization

While personalization may sound lower tech than marketing automation or voice search, it is still going to play a huge role in marketing in the next decade. More and more customers are beginning to expect a high level of customization and personalization in every aspect of their lives. Predictive personalization, deep segmentation basis data (demographics, location, date/time, behavior…) and patterns will define the success of marketing campaigns add a recommendation engine to it and you are at level 2. What does this mean for marketers? Keep up or risk being tossed to the wayside.

Customer Retention and Privacy

Gone are the days when an email list was a hard asset like gold or oil. It used to be that a successful marketer could always price out their marketing assets for others to use and, in many cases, abuse. That’s all changing now. Customers in the 2020’s will be highly sensitive to what companies are doing to retain their business, and to how well they consider their customer’s privacy specially in US and UK for GDPR concerns. Start paying attention to how you address these issues in your day to day business or wind up left behind.

We’ve only hit four marketing trends in this article and each one of them is more important than the last. For the modern marketing professional, don’t rely on consuming immense amounts of information in the hopes of keeping up with the latest and greatest trends. We recommend MarketingWood, an app available for free on the Google Play store today that collects and sorts all of your relevant marketing information and displays it in an easy to read format right at your fingertips. If nothing else, give MarketingWood a try and stay up to date with the latest marketing trends and developments.