Digital marketing is forever evolving and it is often challenging to plan for what awaits us in this space. Here is my pick of the top 5 #digitalmarketing opportunities and challenges to keep in mind in 2020 and beyond, which were identified by key industry and academic presenters at the recently held Marketing Analytics Symposium in Sydney (MASS):
- The digital wall: Social media users have become protective over their private information, are now privy to the way in which apps and sites store their data, and are increasingly opting out of social media. This 'digital wall' will present challenges for marketers and will change the way in which brands market themselves on and with social media.
- Digital marketing algorithms are geared to work for the platform not the brand; brands must keep this in mind when making decisions involving optimization, and, specifically, how to effectively and efficiently use their decreasing marketing budgets. Marketers too often use AI (artificial intelligence in the form of algorithms) to optimize campaigns, but a lot of the time they don’t understand how AI works.
- The need for personalization is not going to go away. Customers now expect personalization across all touch points in their unique customer decision making journeys. Companies, such as Amazon Go, are able to address this by creating new and unique customer experiences based on knowledge from deep learning about its customers.
- Text unites the ‘tribes’ in marketing: A lot of usable information in business decision making is unstructured, text-based data, which poses a challenge to brand managers. Researchers working with such data need to consider the following: “what does the text reflect?” versus “what does the text affect?”.
- The era of User-Generated Content (UGC) monetization is just around the corner: Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) is likely to become a real opportunity for everyday, non-corporate, creators of content who will be able to make money from the content they create on social media. The question is, if a ‘tipping’ function was to be introduced on a platform like Facebook or Twitter, the way it has been on WeChat, how would social media users respond? Would the content social media users create change if/when other users were able to tip them?
Do you have any of your own tips or insights to share? It would be great to hear from industry practitioners and scholars, and to continue this discussion online.
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