AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been a hot topic as of late, especially since Google’s Alpha Go AI beat the world Go champion. Combining AI with content personalisation offers some incredible opportunities for digital marketers, but what else is going to be a big hit in the future? Believe it or not, 2020 is only 2 years away and whilst we may be a while away from flying cars we are definitely more advanced in our digital marketing techniques and tools… but what next? What will be the future of digital marketing?
Channels
The Economist Intelligence Unit asked 499 Chief Marketing Officers and Senior Marketing Execs about how they saw marketing evolving, and also conducted some in-depth interviews with CMOs from leading brands such as Unilever and JPMorgan Chase. They were looking to find out what key technologies and trends will drive change in the marketing industry over the next four years. Below is a graph of the results about what they think the key marketing channels will be in 2020…
New Technologies
1, AI
It’s clear that AI is currently all the rage and will continue to be popular as it evolves over time and becomes more reliable. However, we’re already seeing some pretty cool examples of this in 2018 – Self-driving cars are already being made and sold, for instance. And both Amazon and Netflix already have built-in AI features that help with recommendations and transactions. We think that it will continue to be used in a range of marketing applications, including content creation, voice and face recognition and chatbots, and we’ll definitely see it being used in marketing strategies. AI could well become the norm in terms of marketing strategy because of its increasingly accurate ability to analyse consumer behaviour and feed into a better, more interactive and personalised purchasing experience.
2, Personal Assistants
Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri – these are all big name AI assistants already being used to help people in their day to day communications. How will this grow? We may well see this technology grow further and help out on both a personal and business level by constantly being able to do more tasks, offer personalised services and track your behaviour to help you out even if you don’t ask for it… The personal digital assistant market is set to double in the next two years reaching 1.6 billion by 2020!
3, Influencer Marketing and Social Media
Not exactly ‘new technology’, but influencer marketing is sure to evolve and become a massive part of the way we use social media and how we market products. This will continue to grow and evolve in both B2B and B2C. So far it has mostly been used in light of specific campaigns to sell a few products, but we expect to see it grow into a continuous strategy rather than something that focuses on, for instance, a single product.
Social Media has been around for quite a few years now and is an essential tool in every digital marketing strategy and, for now, we don’t expect to see huge changes in social media innovation, rather just constant changes and updates. People are using Social Media more and more every year and, as we can see from above, its set to become the main marketing channel in the eyes of a lot of big CMO’s. The way we use social media is already changing – for example, we watch more video than actually ‘socialise’ with others. Keep an eye on Social Media in the coming years…
There are so many other ways that digital marketing will evolve in the future like more interactions and direct selling coming from VR and Chatbots taking over your first line of customer service. We may even see completely new digital marketing techniques and tools being used in the not too distant future… watch this space!
