New Year – Infinity Hub

8 Digital Marketing Trends For 2020

IH Admin — Fri, 10 Jan 2020 09:56:00 +0000

2019 was a busy year for marketers. With dozens of new marketing tech flooding the market. Hundreds of courses on marketing mastery, and thousands of sales funnel videos. Predicting digital marketing trends for 2020 became as hard as cooking a perfect macaroon.

This year we have to take this to the next level and go out of our comfort zones and be competitive than ever to stand out. Learn more!

Below is a summary of the top 8 digital marketing trends we will see explode in 2020.

1. Predictive Marketing

We are living in the age of data abundance. Know more! Where people engage with brands over several channels. They consume content in an unstructured manner, and do a lot of homework before making a buying decision. Predictive marketing is taking all these unstructured interactions. Looking at existing positive data patterns, and anticipating results accordingly. More and more mature platforms have started to talk about predictive analytics and predictive lead scoring on their blogs and podcasts.

Some common usage would be identifying the likeliness of a new lead making a purchase decision and what sequence of messages to deliver to them. Or perhaps identifying the most promising channel for message delivery (ex: Email vs SMS vs Push) and determining the type of message to send out accordingly based on the predicted buyer stage.
Many industries have invested heavily in this technology. For example, hotels and resorts have the ability to determine the expected number of guests on a particular day or event to increase their booking rate.

Also, innovative e-commerce businesses have been leveraging predictive data. Learn more! Such as past purchase history, consumers’ preferences. And click-through behaviors to recommend new products and better personalized retail experiences for their shoppers. No one does it better than the online retail giant, Amazon, where they can detect the time and your readiness to buy. Then deliver highly targeted product recommendations via email or recently, via browser extension called “Amazon Assistant“.

2. Smarter Ad Bidding

Google ($103.73B ad earnings) and Facebook ($67.37 ad earnings), topped the digital ad spend in 2019 according to E-marketer. Their 2020 race is getting brands the best return. Learn more! On their spending using smarter ad bidding options. In fact, ad bidding is the first thing Facebook and Google ad specialists preach during training calls.

While ad bidding is not particularly new, both giants are getting creative with new options. For example, Google recently announced during Google Marketing Live 2019 a smarter automated bidding that uses machine learning. To optimize towards selected performance targets in each and every auction—a feature known as “auction-time bidding”.

Smart automated bidding also includes different types of bid strategies such as Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, or Enhanced CPC. Advertisers can use either of these strategies at a campaign level, group level, or portfolio level.

Google and Facebook will also be offering more local business and event-based ad support to bridge the gap between local experiences and advertisers.

3. Shoppable Posts

Although shoppable posts on social media have been introduced over two years now, 2020 will witness an explosion of these blinking dots. Learn more! Primarily because of easier, out-of-the-box integrations with third-party apps and e-commerce marketing tech.

As the number of Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest users are growing and buying impulses are triggered through feeds and stories. E-commerce businesses are realizing the impact social can have on their e-commerce sales with measurable numbers and increased traffic. According to Instagram, the number of active worldwide users is 1 billion, and 90% of them are following shopping brands.

Furthermore, interactive ads would minimize the bounce rate and reduce the sales funnel as customers are provided with a seamless online shopping experience.

4. SEO Structured Data

According to JumpShot, a marketing analytics firm. 49% of Google searches resulted in no clicks in the first quarter of 2019 which means that almost half of these searches are lost, missing the chance of gaining traffic.

Another significant change is that the number of visitors that businesses are getting from organic efforts and SEO is expected to decline.

Google has been prioritizing rich ‘visual search’ snippets. Read more! Across all their platforms and devices. Which allow visitors to get all the information they are looking for a lot faster and help them decide on the right website to click through. Right from the top results. Based on a study conducted by Path Interactive, among people aged between 13 and 18, 40% of them are going to get what they need through rich snippets.

This effort by Google will drive more informed click-through and will decrease bounce rates dramatically. The technical implementation of these rich snippets is a big part of what is called structured data and “Schema Markup” which is expected to become the top focus of SEO talks in 2020.

The good thing about Schema Markup is that it is coming to the easier adoption phase. With more out of the box plugins for main-stream platforms like WordPress and Shopify, making it easier to configure without technical know-how. If you have a custom build, you can implement this SEO boost manually with JSON-LD.

5. More Interactive Email Experience

Engagement-based emails have been one of the biggest trends. Read more! In digital marketing for 2019. While email is not going anywhere anytime soon, email consumption, design, and delivery are evolving. In the upcoming year. You will see more naked emails (plain text) and more interactive emails. Such as Google AMP for Gmail.

Dynamic or interactive content boosts users’ engagement and entices them to take action right from their emails. Instead of having to visit another page to take action. 91% of buyers are looking for such content online.

Examples of dynamic content are polls, quizzes, surveys, animated call-to-action buttons, and add-to-calendar events.

6. Multi-Channel Social Messaging And Enhanced Attribution

Marketers are finding that more and more potential buyers as well as existing customers are all scattered across the web and are willing to transact directly from their preferred messaging channel. Messaging apps are seizing this opportunity and providing new APIs to open messaging between businesses and consumers.

Apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat, are not restricted to personal uses any longer. And while some have limited private APIs like WhatsApp. Others like Facebook are more flexible when it comes to automated bots and already have fully-fledged marketing tech available on the market.

As the total number of active users on these 3 channels combined is 4+ Billion. More businesses are going to expand their customer engagement channels and adopt at least 1 to 2 new messaging platforms in 2020. This will help them effectively communicate with their audience and improve their personalization strategies. This also allows customers who are worried about anonymity to directly reach out to brands and interact using their preferred channel.

Due to this expansion, marketing platforms are able to track more data accurately. And create a better attribution model to determine if a conversion came through a Facebook chat or through SMS. At the end of the day, one of the toughest problems for marketers is measuring attribution from referrals they are actively active on or integrated with. Multi-channel social messaging will force a native solution to this problem.

7. Templated Marketing Automation And Better Integration

According to Forrester, the yearly spend on marketing automation is estimated to reach $25B by 2023.
While you will hear new buzzwords in 2020, like AI-powered marketing automation, these capabilities will not live up to their promises. At least until the end of 2021.

Templated MA campaigns and integrated single-point solutions will be a 2020 trend. This is because marketers are seeing a bottleneck in marketing ops due to the amount of work needed to execute a given campaign.

For example, running a paid ad campaign requires many components such as a landing page, a form, and a lead data platform before delivering the lead to a nurture workflow. Not to mention, analytics and data consolidation need to be handled externally by a company on a site like adverity.com and requires manual work to put together. This process depends on at least 3 tools communicating. With each other as well as tons of redundant work each time they want to launch a new campaign.

Marketers are therefore looking for consolidated tools and out-of-the-box campaigns, which can be deployed with few clicks. A templated campaign can include a couple of landing pages, ready forms, data tracking. And workflow with all its messages created based on campaign goals, such as a paid ad campaign. With this capability, marketers can cut downtime, decrease costs and focus on improving their content versus doing redundant work.

On another note, marketers are now expecting better integrations with third-party apps, either natively or using custom APIs. According to the 2020 martech replacement survey, 32% of marketers were looking for more/easier integrations, when considering a new marketing tech.

What marketers consider when looking for a marketing automation platform

Lastly, better integration and single-point solutions allow for cross-channel reach and personalization. Which is a key driver to conversion optimization.

8. More Voice Search Adoption

Voice search has started to pick up the pace and just as predicted a few years ago “50% of online searches will be voice-based in 2020”.

Besides using smart speakers like Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, or Google Home to answer users’ questions and play music, brands can leverage these devices to provide voice service for their customers.

Thanks to startups like Blutag and Jetson, businesses that sell online can now turn their product catalogs into fully-fledged voice-enabled marketplaces. Let their customers use their existing voice-enabled devices to place orders with simple voice commands. This leads to a quick and simple customer experience by getting them to their intended results, fast.

As you have noticed, there are major trends that have been emerging in recent years and continue to rise in importance while new strategies have recently developed which marketers started to focus on in order to grow their business.

The main takeaways are to always keep up with new technologies and discover how to make the most out of new developments to stay ahead of the competition.

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New Year’s Resolutions For Business Owners

IH Admin — Fri, 10 Jan 2020 02:05:31 +0000

The new year symbolizes a clean slate. People often take the opportunity to create elaborate, and usually difficult-to-stick-with, New Year’s resolutions. We listed simple resolutions for business owners to help them have a successful year ahead.

1. Give Your Business A Financial Health Check

Look at the money coming in and out of your business and consider whether you have sufficient headroom. If not, what can you do to address the issue? For example, do you need to spend more time chasing late payments, or could new financing facilities provide an answer?

2. Prioritize Productivity

Unproductive businesses rapidly fall behind their competitors, so think hard about how you can improve. That might mean reconsidering out-of-date processes, for example. Or investing in new technologies to automate mundane manual tasks that take up too much of your employees’ time.

3. Find Out How To Make Your Customers Even Happier

This year, talk to your customers about how you can serve them better and what else they might want from you. That doesn’t mean giving up on new customers altogether – but put your current customers first.

4. Be (Digitally) Present

Over the past two decades. I’ve witnessed the financial industry shift from in-person education and networking events to webinars and LinkedIn connections. If you’re a business owner without social media sites, or worse, without a website, this is your year to be digitally present.

Whether you’re selling a product or service, you can be sure that your customers are going to research you before they make a purchase. What they see online has become your first impression. So it’s important that you make it a good one. If you’re not very tech-savvy, consider outsourcing to a digital marketing company or freelancer or even hiring a new employee. Being digitally present doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. But it has become a true necessity in the world of business

5. Fund Your Future

The new year is the perfect time to look toward the future. Consider adding to or setting up a retirement savings plan. As a business owner, the benefits of creating a retirement plan include significant tax advantages. Attracting and retaining better employees, and contributing to the plan to save for your own retirement.

Although setting up and administering a retirement plan can be a difficult and time-consuming task, you have the option of working with a financial advisor. Who can demonstrate the various options and find the right plan for you, your business, and your employees. Business owners are constantly being pulled in different directions, and trying to prioritize can be difficult. Setting small, short-term goals for the new year is an excellent way to create momentum, and it can help set the tone for the next 12 months.

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Creating Infinite Impact, the Infinity Hub way

IH Admin — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 08:18:53 +0000

It was 2007 when I’m sitting at my desk, consuming my coffee, and applying for almost every job vacancy online. Thought it’s not going to work out. Why are they going to hire me if I haven’t had much experience myself? That fear of being rejected visits me almost every day and I somehow get used to the idea that I will not make it.

I tried to build my portfolio, applying for certification, reading books, improving myself. I’d realized that the path to gaining people’s trust is not as easy as I thought it would be. Fast forward to 10 years after, I now have a 4-year old baby. A Digital Marketing company called “Infinity Hub”. And this year like in the past years, being the CEO of this company made me a better person every single day.

GIVE FIRST.

A lot of people would think that when you have a bachelor’s degree and had a formal education in a good school. You will definitely land a good job. It’s our destiny, they say. But I never had the chance to maximize that privilege because I am focused on my goal – to give first.

Built my portfolio by giving quality work in exchange for little to almost no monetary benefits. What I learned throughout my exposure to the startup community in Davao is to give first – the service. The assistance and invest in building relationships first then you’ll be able to reap the fruit of receiving those smiles and the bigger gift. Which is trust from the community.

This is what I continue to impart to my team at Infinity Hub. Our mission is anchored upon providing quality services and ensuring that our clients get more than what they deserve. With a focus not on what they want but on what they need.

This attitude had helped me, my team, and Infinity Hub to be where it is now. We will continue to give first with the promise of bringing in quality services and putting the clients on top priority.

FOCUS ON THE GOAL.

Infinity Hub’s thrust is geared towards being a partner for achieving our client’s success. Our client’s joys are ours too thus we couldn’t afford to let our clients down.

Being goal-driven myself, I make sure that my team’s passion is aligned with our client’s goals. I will always make sure that aside from ensuring my clients’ success. My team will also get the fulfillment they deserve as we hand in handwork towards achieving our primary goals.

Infinity Hub will not be where it is today if not for the dedication and positive attitude of the people behind it. We focus on the goal. Execute plans based on the needs of our clients and we make sure that the fruit of our labor is beneficial to all sides.

We focus on the goal, yes and I am proud to say that this year. We have helped our clients achieve theirs in the most cost-efficient and effective way possible.

PAY IT FORWARD.

This 2017, I was given the opportunity to give back to the community that enriched me and helped me achieve my goals through the Rural Impact Sourcing Technical Training (RISTT) Program. RISTT is a government-initiated program that aims to create a nation of Digital entrepreneurs by providing comprehensive training. To equip the talent pool in the socially disadvantaged areas in the country.

The RISTT inspired me as it helps communities develop their talent pool and inspire the locals to see the possibilities and opportunities in this Digital Age. There are a good number of Digital entrepreneurs and it’s even more motivating to see the numbers grow day by day. Some people say it’s weird because I am helping out my future competitors but for me. Building the community and empowering them is as good as it challenges every person to do better. Truth be told, some of the trainees are even better than I do and are more creative and that is something to be thankful for.

We will achieve our goals if we only help one another. I will always be indebted to DICT for the opportunity to serve and pay the favor forward. I’am learning every day from my teammates, from Infinity Hub’s clients, from the trainees. And the people I encounter and there’s no better way to keep learning than sharing it with others and gain more insights in the process.

Infinity Hub aims to continue creating Infinite Impact by helping businesses with their Digital Marketing strategies.

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