Executive Summary
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a vital part of any website or digital marketing strategy. The Digital Marketing landscape in 2020 has revealed that consumer expectations are outpacing companies' technology, innovation, experience, and personalization efforts. With an endless number of choices, consumers are overwhelmed by the "burden of choice" and are more likely to make poor decisions, be less satisfied, and abandon the experience. Companies need to humanize the digital and social experience by moving from marketing communications to digital conversations.
2020 is shaping up to be a watershed year for social media, with voice, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and other areas of innovation integrated into most leading social platforms. This trend doesn't seem to be stopping anytime soon as social media players pursue competitive differentiation.
This coming year is shaping up to be a big year of advances in Social Media Marketing, as social networks innovate across artificial intelligence, content, experiences, and programmatic buying. Below, you can find the top 10 Social Marketing Trends for 2020.
Social media marketing in 2020 will require marketers and agencies to look beyond technology to capitalize on the top 10 Social Marketing trends below.
Stories, Stories & Stories
As users, we naturally gravitate to stories. We are wired to love a good story. We know this to be true because all successful brands, e.g., Coca Cola, Nike, or Apple, start with the experience and look to create an emotional connection. Their marketing teams leverage this narrative approach and leverage it to their full advantage. Scott Donaton's article in Fast Company (The 10 Commandments of Content) says it best. "The challenge is clear by now: Intrusive, interruptive, self-centered marketing no longer works the way it once did, and its effectiveness will only continue to diminish in the social age. The question is, what will replace the legacy model. There's a one-word answer: stories."
Social media is pivoting from text-based platforms initially designed for desktop use to truly mobile-only networks that enable users to capture in-the-moment experiences and stories along with the video is at the heart of the catalyst. Most major social media platforms now include story features. The vertical visual format became popular from Snapchat but has found itself replicated across Facebook, Instagram, and the other leading platforms. Nearly a billion users across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat already turn to Stories to share. This mass adoption is why most social platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, and just recently, LinkedIn, have Story features.
Stories are ephemeral, offering audiences a real, immediate, and personal experience of topics and trends. Stories can be as easy to create, which is why marketers are leveraging live and vertical videos along with user-generated content (UGC) to create social marketing campaigns that connect with the audiences at an authentic emotional level to inspire action. Advertisers have already realized that Instagram Stories ads can be beneficial, with Snapchat and Facebook following up with their current hype and demand.
Marketers also need to invest in modular messaging and content architectures to establishes a versatile platform for story creation, optimization, and delivery. Building content ecosystems and brand champions for production, collection, and curation of the content should also be a top priority in 2020. No alternative content creation will yield a better ROI.
Start experimenting with Stories. If you aren't already creating Stories, it's time to start. Stories are easy to create and allow you to produce content quickly, so make 2020 the year to start experimenting with different structures to find what works best.
TIP: Ensure that you shoot your videos vertically, i.e., mobile-first format. Start simple and experiment until you find length, composition, and narratives that appeal to your audience. Take the time to optimize these for SEO as search engines crave UGC. TIP: Stories should accommodate new trends, emerging threats, best practices, and tactics so you can engage and inform your audience. The degree to which your story strategy will be successful is dependent on the level of effort and investment. Start small focused on a topic or a channel to establish cadence and success formula. TIP: Stories need to be rooted in the company's differentiation, but be modular and scalable enough to apply to multiple audiences, across multiple channels and various stages of the buying cycle.>User-Generated Content (UGC)
The lifeblood of all social media is user-generated content. The success of social media and video platforms is a testimony to the importance of UGC. User Content is authentic, personal, and often useful. Search engines and prospects love genuine reviews, facts, statistics, and case studies. UGC drives traffic and conversions, and all research proves that it is a cornerstone of any successful B2B and digital marketing campaigns.
Referrals, word of mouth, case studies, and the story behind a product are essential in enhancing the buying decision of the product. Lots of businesses have started taking help from user-generated content for promoting their brands and products. With the help of user-generated content, the promotion of your product will be secure. It is essential to reach out to an audience that connects to you and your content with deep domain expertise and quality content that created or curated by an ecosystem of experts.
UGC uses natural language conversations, which translates well into voice and visual search intent-based patterns, i.e., what people would typically type in a search engine. Work with employees, partners, and customers to create, promote, and reward these contributions, but also create an inbound process to action the failures and losses. Streamline and invest in the process as no content or marketing initiative will yield a better ROI.
If you still have doubts, look at companies that have built their business on UGC and user feedback, companies, such as Uber, Doordash, and Airbnb. Airbnb entirely relies on user-generated content for their social media content.
No matter how you want to leverage UGC, you should have a place for it in your content mix. User-generated content is free, authentic, and trustworthy. If you don't already have a program, then in 2020, you should look to incubate a small social media UGC program.
TIP: Formalize a customer vanguard program and focus these brand champions on a specific topic. Recognize these champions for any engagement, but reward them for measurable contributions. It is essential to understand that they don't work for you, nor do you want to force an agenda as that can have a negative backlash. Finally, create forums or workspaces about topics that interest these users and promote the wins as well as the lessons learned.Customer Experiences & Journeys
Segmentation and personas will always remain essential components when it comes to market research and journey marketing. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be at the forefront of targeting and analyzing vast quantities of customer data to identify insights, predictions, and recommendations to reconfigure marketing and business strategies. AI on social media platforms can now generate emotionally targeted marketing text that delivers emotional engagement at scale and which will profoundly influence social commerce.
AI will be the cornerstone of technology that drives programs and campaigns to educate dynamically, inspire, entertain, and enlighten target audiences to take informed action toward a buying decision. It will capture the buyer's attention with the right content at the right time. This approach is something that can drive instant buying decisions for customers. The concept of micro-moments has become a new way to gauge customer behavior and understand just when to deliver them a marketing message that has the power to generate conversions across channels and customer journeys.
Social Marketing strategies in 2020 demands that marketers not only understand the behavior and search patterns of their target audience but that they know, for each segment, the customer journey, i.e., the series of interactions from initial consideration, to purchase and implementation, and then to subsequent purchases. Combining these segments and customer journeys creates hundreds if not thousands of "microsegments," which form the basis of 1:1 personalization.
Delivering the kind of holistic brand experience that today's consumers expect relies on marketers' abilities to orchestrate touchpoints across all channels – not only seamlessly and updated with moment-to-moment relevancy, but also with the right cadence and synchronization, and even matched to the customer lifecycle. Identifying touchpoints is critical to creating a customer journey map and understanding the customer experience to optimize all the interactions and conversations that add up to it. At the heart of this will be AI and social listening technology.
Artificial intelligence will be responsible for powering personalization and capture micro-moments with the intent of improving customer experiences delivering real-time value to the company's customers. AI is now powering customer segmentation, retargeting, push notifications, and click tracking. According to a study by Blueshift, 28% of marketers are using AI for product recommendations, and 26% are using it for campaign optimization.
From chatbots to social media ad optimization, platforms such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook have been quick to adopt artificial intelligence to enhance customer interaction, especially in the form of online customer service. In 2018, the growth in AI-driven communication had been undeniable, and Hootsuite has predicted that by 2020, more than 85% of all customer service interactions are AI bots.
2020 will bring an improved adoption of AI as part of social customer service, and it's time for more brands to give it a try to ensure that their customers are finding the answers to their questions as fast as possible.
Major, Micro & Nano Influencers
Influencer marketing, fueled by social media, has become a legitimate marketing practice. Getting mentioned by Instagram stars, Twitter influencers, YouTube millionaires can have a significant positive impact. As with so many other marketing disciplines, innovation is leading and in many cases pushing innovation and best practices. Artificial intelligence, ecosystem orchestration, and machine learning will play a much more significant role in influencer marketing.
As influencer marketing grows, influencers are becoming more expensive for small and medium-sized brands. The number of social media influencers has grown exponentially over time, and the prices for their services have also skyrocketed. Justifying the ROI plus the potential backlash of dishonest influencers along with recent U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulations have marketers questioning the real value of working with online influencers.
These factors have led more businesses to look at other alternatives, including micro-influencer marketing. Micro-influencers may not have the outreach of the major players. Still, they have an even more significant influence on their followers as they are often considered experts in their niche.
Smaller businesses are starting to reach out to and utilize micro-influencers, which typically have fewer than 30,000 followers. They are also 6.7 times more cost-efficient than using macro-influencers. Micro-influencers tend to adopt a more authentic and conversational approach, which translates into a deeper level of trust.
According to Sparxoo 2019 research, "Micro-influencers typically have 60% higher engagement on their content, likely because they have 22.2x more weekly conversations than the average consumer. Plus, because they have lower follower counts, they're generally 6.7x more cost-effective for marketers than macro-influencers.8 Their content is often more affordable, and sometimes they'll work for free products rather than cash."
Nano-influencers are often deep domain experts with around 10k followers. They are ideally suited for startups and growth-stage companies with limited resources. These influencers tend to build their brands on a vertical knowledge platform with a bias towards objective data-driven insights.
Audiences are naturally going to connect and engage with influencers in their communities, which they deem to have in-depth expertise, authentic, and honest conversations. For marketers, this represents lower CAC, improved pipeline yield, and higher conversion rates from their communities. Despite boardroom pressures, companies continue to adopt influencer marketing as part of their overall digital marketing strategy as it connects social and commerces an authentic user-centric conversation. During 2020, we see a rise of micro and nano influencers, niche communities, and grassroots community campaigns.
In 2020, we will see an increase in the quantity and sophistication of influencer technology to help identify, engage, and measure influencers. These will spawn new creative practices, content formats, delivery mechanisms, and push the boundaries of infotainment. The growth of influence on individual and organizational effectiveness in the B2B marketing world will continue to grow as it allows marketers to borrow brand equity to accelerate their plans.
TIP: identify a new nano-influencers for a limited engagement to assess the influence model, synergies, and outcomes. We suggest visual mediums, i.e., webinars, podcasts, and video, to capitalize on the influencer's personality, personal brand, and expertise, which gets lost in text-based formats.Social Listening & Orchestration
Social listening is the practice of crawling through the web and social media platforms to identify and engage in the array of conversations that promote your brand or inspire a user to take action towards a buying decision. Social monitoring (listening) is the act of crawling and mining the web and social media platforms to find all mentions or relevant conversations. This technology includes mentions on social media, mentions of industry keywords that signal the interest to buy a product, mentions on blogs, forums, and news sites.
New powerful online tools powered by AI and machine learning can rapidly combine data and behavioral patterns to gain predictive user insights. Social listening offers marketers' the ability to orchestrate and optimize touchpoints across all channels and stages of the customer journey to ensure with moment-to-moment relevancy. They also help create the right cadence and synchronization and even matched to the customer lifecycle. Identifying touchpoints is critical to creating a customer journey map and understanding the customer experience to optimize all the interactions and conversations that add up to it. At the heart of this will be AI and social listening technology.
While using social listening for these two causes is expected to become even more prominent, the real trend of 2020 is going to be using social media listening for lead generation and social selling. So far, only a tiny number of brands do this. Yet, that number is gradually rising as marketers discover that they can find people looking for the exact services they offer on social media.
Whether it's social listening to ensure that you're aware of what your audience is talking about or if it's providing content to facilitate social selling – B2B marketers need to take into account the different hats they're required to wear and cover all their bases.
Social Video Marketing
In 2018 we saw the launch of Facebook Watch and the arrival of IGTV, both of which continue to emphasize the ongoing importance of video for social. Instagram IGTV launch established "social TV" as a legitimate media platform similar to traditional TV. IGTV allows broadcast of long-form video content in a format different to other videos on social media platforms, exclusively for Instagram users. The rise of social TV and vertical videos, such as through IGTV, encourages more brands to become broadcasters, meaning the variety and novelty of different video content for mobile users. Features such as these continue to boost Instagram popularity amongst users in 2020, opening new avenues of social media marketing.
According to Entrepreneur, "200 million Instagram users use Instagram Stories each month." Cisco reports that by 2021, live video is going to make up 13% of total video traffic compared to 3% in 2016. Video delivers marketing ROI, according to recent research when comparing dynamic video retargeting campaign to traditional retargeting campaigns, the click-through rates (CTR) are measured at 74%, while the return on investment (ROI) increased by 49%. Frankly, No medium matches video when you need to create captivating content, and it is unique in its ability to drive brand narratives across channels and stages while maintaining conversational state.
Snapchat was first to implement vertical video, but Facebook and Twitter now use vertical video ads as well. IGTV, Instagram standalone video app, hosts videos up to 60 minutes in length and mandates vertical video. Mobile-friendly portrait videos deriving value from authenticity, direct follower interactivity, and product showcasing are now available on all major social channels.
According To WordStream, social video generates more than 1200% shares than text and image. Video shine sin complex customer journeys, such as, B2B where there are multiple touchpoints, stages, and audiences that need to align for a purchase event. Video boosts SEO, but It also offers a personality and character to help with brand sentiment and equity.
Video format makes it easier to offer personalized customer experiences and narratives. By 2020, the video makes up more than 85% of all consumer's Internet traffic in the U.S. Visual search features are partially responsible for the mass social video adoption. Pinterest, Bing, and Google are innovation in visual search technology, such as, visual and voice search is changing the search and content landscape.
TIP: fuse social media marketing, social advertising, social stories, and video to create narratives along the buying cycle. Borrow brand equity from influencers and domain experts. Focus on the short question and answer formats with the idea length around 3 - 5 minutes each. Include customer testimonials and case studies. Add transcriptions, captions, and metadata to each video and ensure you embrace YouTube.Social CRM & Commerce
Social eCommerce and CRM are now mainstream retail channels on par with other commerce platforms. From shoppable posts to Instagram Storefronts, social networks are continuously evolving to become retail platforms. Incorporated into most leading analytics and intelligence platforms are social data. Social data delivers deep demographic, psychographic, and behavioral insights that enable marketers to identify and act on customers' behaviors, decisions, and patterns. Most one-to-one marketing and account-based marketing strategies depend heavily on data-driven techniques for new account acquisition, cross-sell, and upsell. These tools offer predictive and prescriptive critical insights that trigger, power, and orchestrate personalized marketing experiences.
Virtual assistants powered by Artificial Intelligence now drive much of conversational commerce. Social media platforms are transforming to one-stop-shops for trade, communities, and search. Facebook Marketplace and Pinterest's "Buyable Pins" continue to streamline their own social commerce experiences and, most recently, Instagram's recent forays into buy-direct content.
The unique blend of peer engagement, trust, and compelling visuals that have made social commerce dominant in Asia is, finally, poised to change the eCommerce landscape across the globe. 2020 is the year for retailers to experiment with the growing array of social shopping technologies.
Tip: Set up shoppable Instagram posts and Pinterest buyable pins. Promote your products with contests. Incent, promote, and leverage high-quality user-generated content. Livestream your product demos, and where possible, create stories or series based on top-performing content.
TIP: kickoff a small social data intelligence initiative to create an account profile for ABM, lead qualification, or territory planning. We would suggest focussing on a single channel, topic, or stage of the buying cycle for measurement or attribution purpose. Also, include social communities' insights to drive SEO and content optimization.>Profitable Social Ecosystems
Social ecosystems are the natural next evolution in social media advances. Social media communities are social groups segmented according to demographic or firmographic traits, whereas, ecosystems are a collection of communities, or part thereof, aligned to a mutually agreed upon business outcome. For example, an ecosystem could be prospect, partners, employees, and brand champions focused on a specific topic and channel to convert prospects into the next stage of the buying cycle.
We've seen the ecosystem in action with influencers, brand champions, blogs, and content creation programs. The idea being that a company aligns a collection of resources across multiple social communities with a specific objective or problem in mind. We call that process "creating a market lense." This approach can be very successful and the reason that ecosystems are making their way to the heart of many digital and marketing transformation initiatives. In a hyper-connected world, marketers will need to start looking beyond the customer persona to the ecosystems that surround them and influence their decisions.
The changing mindset from online community management to building productive, agile ecosystems continues to gain momentum. Orchestrating a trusting, collaborative environment with partners and customers has become a competitive differentiator for many companies. Building and sustaining integrated ecosystems requires expertise in platform, culture, and channels to nurture and build profitable communities. Ecosystem management is essential for complex B2B go-to-market and multi-tiered channel sales models.
Ecosystems empower marketers to become a critical business enabler by providing a platform to redefine approaches toward innovation, knowledge management, product development, lifetime value, and sales acceleration. We see evidence in investment capital companies, such as Boston-based OpenView, who train their portfolio companies' executive teams on ecosystem thinking. This trend will only accelerate in 2020.
TIP: the first step and probably easiest for marketers is sales and marketing alignment. Build and focus a small ecosystem of partners, employees, and brand champions on a product, sales channel, and stage or sales funnel. This step also has the added benefit of creating a forcing function to integrate, at some level, marketing automation with CRM. TIP: companies can also utilize their social media ecosystems to launch new products, seek customer feedback, and gain valuable customer insights.>Conversational AI Socialbots
Today's AI-powered bots are much more powerful and are increasingly becoming a marketer's favorite tool to have one-to-one personalized conversations with their customers. The innovation of voice-related and AI technologies is, in part, responsible for driving the mass adoption of conversational bots. These bots help automate, manage, and boost productivity, but their real value is customer engagement. Bots are a proven, low-cost approach to maximizing and accelerating conversions. They are unparalleled in maintain conversational state across complex buying cycles.
Bots have evolved to become intelligent assistants that offer a voice to customer experiences. These assistants can engage in meaningful conversations that move the customer towards a mutually successful outcome. These solutions hare still predominantly discovery and search-related but are quickly evolving to include a broad spectrum of front-office capabilities, such as processing payments, customer support, and complex inquiries.
According to recent research, "by 2020, 85 percent of customer interactions with enterprises involve no human whatsoever, so chatbots have plenty of upside in both the near and long term." Companies save time and costs during the lead process because chatbots can help automate the lead qualification process.
Bots promise a 24x7 virtual sales and support force in an always-connected world. They allow you to connect consistently with your customers, providing timely information based on their interaction and where they are in the buyer's journey. As a salesperson, chatbots can educate, inform, and inspire your target audience to take action toward a buying decision.
In 2020 companies should be implemented or optimizing their chatbot experiences to ensure they are connecting with customers in a way that's enjoyable and easy is the best way to build trust and keep them happy and loyal."
Social Media Personalization
According to eConsultancy, 74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement. Personalization is not a new concept, as it is the foundation for all marketing strategies. Campaign Monitor observes a 760% increase in revenue from segmented campaigns.
Given the vast amount of information being uploaded by people each day, it's become effortless to get insights into all kinds of information about the user. This approach has opened the door for enhanced personalization, and that, in turn, has increased consumer expectations for the same. While personalized marketing can be unsettling, it's also genuinely convenient for the user, and customers are not likely to give up the benefits any time soon.
However, the enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union has helped in establishing transparent data policies, encouraging honest communication between audiences and brands. Marketers are looking for ways to strike a balance between personalization and privacy, and in the process, give their customers more control over their experiences.
In 2020 we expect marketers to tap further into the potential AI holds for B2B marketing to bring even more personalization, and social media will be at the center of much of that effort by the social network platforms themselves. Still, it extends into most enterprise applications, data, and analytical solutions. Extracting insights of social data or said differently, the collective intelligence from communities will become one of the few sustainable competitive advantages for companies.
Identifying and analyzing social signals and user social, behavioral patterns with AI, marketers are now able to detect buyers' propensity to buy or to move closer to a purchase event.
Learning from buyers' shares, clicks, likes, and comments, AI can be used to tap into content preferences and deliver a highly personalized experience to every buyer and customer. We believe that this trend will grow even stronger in 2020, as B2B marketers become better at capitalizing on social media data delivered through AI.
Conclusion
Keeping pace with ever-changing social media trends and best practices is going to become increasingly more difficult and resource-intensive. 2020 does offer an opportunity to capitalize on these areas of innovation and trends. Getting ahead of the curve will have a significant impact on your social media plan.