What trends can we expect in the 2020s? Competition in the digital space is fiercer than ever, but you will be able to stay ahead of the curve by investing in these strategies.
Start off the decade with our TOP 6 trends to follow, for your most profitable ROI on your online presence yet.
Influencer Marketing Will Keep Growing
First thing’s first, influencer marketing isn’t a trend. It isn’t going anywhere. This is evident in the increase in the number of influencers on social media, and the amount of money brands are investing in influencer marketing. Instead of spending marketing budgets on a few celebrity-like macro-influencers, brands are opting for larger groups of nano and micro-influencers who generally elicit relatable content that engages audiences. Working with nano and micro influencers produces higher ROI, higher engagement, and generates more branded content for your brand.
Ephemeral Content
Think Instagram and Snapchat stories. Ephemeral content is only visible for 24 hours, before disappearing. With shrinking attention spans, this trend is consistent with the competitive marketing environment. When used effectively, story content can be much more valuable in establishing a brand’s authenticity than one-off, static posts; Story content allows brands to demonstrate the real life integration and daily use of products, educate on the benefits of product use, and best of all, goof-off a little, with fun, unstaged commentary in real-time. Although static posts are good for returning prospective customers and maintaining followers, consistently utilizing ephemeral content keeps brands top-of-mind.
Increased Emphasis on Video Content
Video content is becoming the most engaging form of content. In fact, Cisco conducted a study that showed 82% of all online content will be video by 2022. If you aren’t already, start finding ways to implement video into your content strategy. Whether they are short form Stories, or longform Youtube videos, video content is the future.
Local Targeting
With brands’ increased use of nano-influencer marketing, local targeting is building steam. Because nano-influencers naturally have more followers in a specific region, using nanos make it easier to hypertarget local audiences. In other words, the more nano the influencer, the more local their reach. Like SEO is to local brands searching for more organic traffic, local targeting is the parallel for social media. Geo-tagging posts and Stories is a great way to gain visibility and loyalty from target audiences in specific geographic locations. Geo-tagging assists in garnering attendance and driving engagement at local conferences, guerilla marketing executions, and other branded influencer events.
Challenging ‘Vanity Metrics’ AKA Likes
With the upcoming potential permanent change of Instagram hiding likes, 2020 will be a pivotal opportunity for marketers to move away from “look at me” stats and put an emphasis on other metrics that will bolster quality content and authentic marketing like never before.
Likes are just one metric amidst a smorgasbord of measurements for success. While marketing agencies are now charged with determining a new industry standard for measuring campaign success, hopefully the result will be authentic and creative engagement that drives better ROI.
Micro-Influencers in Commercials
As consumer engagement with influencers continues to rise, marketers are beginning to integrate influencer content into other ad buys, rather than rely on models and studio produced advertisements. As we make more comparisons between micro-influencer generated ads with traditional, studio ads throughout 2020, we are confident that micro-influencers’ content will outperform the studio content because of the relatability. Additionally, ROI will increase with higher engagement, and lower production cost!
Social Media Groups & Communities
Over a decade later, social media is fulfilling the promise it made at its birth: community. Similar to Facebook Groups, 2020 will see other platforms develop, offering brands a more curated experience by forming private groups of existing and prospective customers to discuss, share, and ask questions regarding shared interests, knowledge, and topics. This trend will become more prevalent throughout the 2020s as the industry catches on to the valuable insights garnered by providing a networking space for customers/influencers to spread their wings.
Get on board with trends early because they come and go! We predict these TOP 6 social media trends are sustainable strategies to start integrating into your content NOW. Create the content you wish to see.