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PPC marketing is a central service offering for our marketing agency. With nearly two decades of growth in the digital pay-per-click advertising space, we’ve seen hundreds of changes that occur on a quarterly, if not monthly, basis.
This month, our theme is “how do we measure marketing?” which begins with measuring the leading indicators of performance, not the lagging symptoms. To us, staying strategic allows us to stay aloft in times of change.
And, certainly, 2020 is going to bring a lot of change.
Most of our clients hire a marketing agency to manage their Google Ads, not only to stay up-to-date on changing PPC trends, but also to unearth and execute on game-changing insights.
To us, at its core, PPC advertising is part of a greater marketing picture. By providing data on actual user searches, we gain insight into the mind of your customers.
As we go into 2020, insights will be the name of the game as advances in technology and customer expectations will force businesses to adapt to an audience that expects customized, relevant messaging at every touchpoint.
What will those touchpoints be, and where are we headed? Our marketing agency describes the top 5 PPC marketing trends, based on existing trends in data and customer behaviour:
1) Video Advertising – There’s More To Come In 2020
We’ve been talking about video marketing for quite some time – from Facebook’s talk of video advertising in 2018, to social media marketing trends in 2019. Video has taken a crucial role in many advertising strategies, exceeding photos in terms of importance on social media platforms.
There are no surprises that video will be an important trend in 2020. But here’s a statistic that may surprise you:
According to Cisco, the world’s IP traffic will grow to 3.3 zettabytes of traffic annually by 2021, of which 82% of all traffic will be video.
Just how much is 3.3 zettabytes of data?
A single zettabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes.
A trillion is “one million million”
Just let that sink in for a second.
It might not be surprising that video is a growing trend (this definitely doesn’t come as a surprise to our marketing agency), but the sheer amount of data is a staggering number.
Within a year, the human population will be going through an immense amount of data – for which videos consist of the large majority of content.
Thanks to streaming services like YouTube and Facebook, video is accessible to most of the modern world. This affects marketing in two ways:
- Your customers will be spending their share of time primarily on video content, which means your advertisements need to be shown in a tasteful, contextually acceptable manner.
- Your customers will be more open to video-based advertising strategies, since they use their devices to watch other videos for educational or entertainment purposes.
2) Machine Learning Will Change The Marketing Landscape
Have you heard about the South Korean Go champion, Lee Se-dol?
Lee Se-dol is a champion of Go, the oldest strategic game still played to date, with over 2,500 years of history. It has been a long goal of AI to be able to best professional players at the game, with the AI “AlphaGo” first recording a win against a human professional player in 2015.
Since 2015, AIphaGo has evolved with every year to be able to beat more and more renowned players – most recently, Lee Se-dol, who announced his retirement from competitive Go in November 2019.
Lee’s comment was “Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated.”
Let’s take a moment here to recognize how frightening that statement is.
AI has become a power with immense capabilities – and we only expect to see this technology advance further in 2020. AI and machine learning is more accessible than ever, with the advent of tools provided by digital giants such as Google and Amazon.
When it comes to marketing, we expect to be using AI-led tools heavily in 2020, as their performance begins to outstrip human abilities.
What AI is still unable to do, however, is conduct new strategies and creative ideas on the basis of human interaction. Marketers will be using machine learning for micro optimizations, but will still rely on macro optimizations via Strategy.
3) Strategy Will Still Be King
With the ever-changing digital landscape and jumps in technology, we expect to see the marketing landscape change many times over in the new year.
For this reason, it’s more important than ever to have a clear, consistent strategy that drives all your marketing endeavours, so your brand messaging stays consistent in a sea of shifting variables.
Especially as micro-executions become more complex, we expect the most successful businesses to double down on user-focused strategies.
While platforms become mature, we get increasing abilities to target audiences on a micro basis. This allows for more savvy, creative strategies to take place, which is what we expect to see from the most successful businesses in 2020.
4) Competition Will Be Fierce
On the topic of maturing platforms – all industries around the world, no matter their age, are starting to catch up to the use of technology by consumers.
This means that with limited ad space on the top platforms, competition will become more fierce than ever.
Even in 2019, we’ve noticed increasing costs of promotion across all platforms and ad campaigns. This trend will likely increase at a greater rate in 2020, as entire industries begin to compete for ad space on traditionally unpopular platforms via social media and digital search spaces.
The transition away from “traditional” media seems to be reaching its endgame.
5) Customer-Facing Optimizations Will Be Key
We know that as the digital marketing landscape evolves, user expectations become more complex and the cost of promotion increases in light of platform maturity.
With all of these factors in place, we expect Conversion Rate Optimization to be the focus of many marketers in 2020.
If it becomes more expensive to get a visitor to visit a page, it only makes sense to invest a lot of effort to ensure that said visitor converts! Conversion Rate Optimization, also known as CRO, is an iterative process that tracks the successes and failures of different factors on your website conversion pages in order to slowly improve the conversion rate of your website visitors.
All Changes Require Iteration
Generally, you can tell trends coming ahead of time.
While changes can happen quickly, generally they are predicted by changes in the market and user behaviour. Where your industry is heading, can be foretold by what’s happening in similar service areas. Where the next area of innovation is happening, is often driven by customer needs and behaviour.
This means that you need to be reviewing your own data, within your sales and your industry, on a monthly basis. This is what we do at our digital marketing agency – we partner with our clients, to help guide them through these changes.
Our marketing agency shines by introducing game-changing, unintrusive processes that will help you consolidate all your marketing needs in one place, we can work together to strategically grow your business.
We execute a monthly action plan to ensure that your optimal strategy is backed by action and that everything is recorded and reported properly.
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