Let’s Get Trendy: B2B Marketing Trends for 2020

Posted on November 25, 2019

The digital marketing landscape that is SEO, social media, PPC, content marketing, and more is witnessing rapid progression – And shows no sign of slowing down. As the end of 2019 approaches, our digital marketing experts recap the year and take a look ahead at key B2B marketing trends that will emerge in 2020.

Search Engine Optimization – Justin Kerley

“For the first time, a majority of all browser-related searches on Google resulted in zero-clicks.” – Rand Fishkin

There are still some things we can do to get your brand out there and drive traffic, even if people are seemingly avoiding clicking links. Three of the main areas include:

  • Google is focused on providing answers
  • Voice search usage increases
  • Build your brand to maintain your audience

Google: The Answer Engine

Continuing to focus on the best user experience is most important. This includes shortening the time from query to answer. You may see things like answer boxes, knowledge graphs or videos. They all serve the purpose of helping the user at the expense of traditional web traffic.

Voice Search

  • 50% of all online searches will be voice-based by 2020
  • 55% of US households will have a smart speaker by 2022
  • Many searches are information or navigational at the moment

Getting yourself into a position for claiming one of these answer boxes or search engine page results locations, while it won’t result in site traffic – your content will be out there.

Build Your Brand

Any traffic that you receive from search engines is going to be volatile and is not owed to you for any particular reason. This is one of the biggest frustrations for people because they’re not seeing search traffic from the content they’ve put out there.  Make sure you’re developing content that keeps your users coming back. Or, expand into additional channels (social, video, etc) to capture users outside of search engines.

Paid Search – Andrea Yank

I thought we’d take a look back at 2019 quickly. Some people may assume that nothing really needs to be done when it comes to preparing for voice search for accommodating paid search. However, we are seeing that it actually is necessary. Google added a few options for smart bidding strategies and also continued to put an emphasis on search intent over keyword matching. Lastly, Google made responsive ads a permanent fixture this year.

What’s trending in 2020?

  • Google AI – they recently updated their search algorithm, named BERT.
  • Optimize for voice search: this was a trend in 2019, but it’s not going away. If you need to know where to start – we have a handy blog all about the topic: How to Optimize your PPC Campaigns for Voice Search.
  • More visuals – the human brand processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. We are by nature a very visual society and react better to images and videos. YouTube is doing a couple of things to respond to this: adding more ad extensions to get people to interact with your videos, adding more exciting call to action buttons, and they’re also adding location extensions.

Social Media – Emily Bandt

45% of the world’s population is on social media… which is an increase of 9% over last year. Social media is not going anywhere, so it’s smart to keep it in your plans for 2020.

2019 trends:

  • Over the course of the last year, there was a heavy emphasis on video
  • Push towards engagement
  • Active social media communities
  • Use of social media influencers

A look ahead to 2020:

  1. More highly targeted audiences. Because of the data that we are able to collect on social media, we are now able to narrow down and get more highly targeted audience lists. This is very useful specifically on LinkedIn because of its high cost-per-click. You’re able to get in front of the people you really want to be targeting.
  2. Better content  (Emily’s most highly recommended trend for 2020.) Between all of the social media channels people are on, there is a ton of consumable content out there. If your business is not putting out quality content, people may un-follow you to filter out what they’re not interested in. There is a shift in the idea about posting a lot of content and we’re moving to more of a quality factor versus quantity.
  3. Video isn’t going anywhere. Think YouTube, organic social media videos, and ads.
  4. Diversify your channels – remember that B2B employees and business are consumers too so although LinkedIn is the most popular for B2B companies,  keep in mind that it’s not the only channel that these people are using.

Content – Anne Koepp

“Traditional marketing talks at people, content marketing talks with them.” Content marketing is more relational than transactional.

What’s trending in 2020

  • Expertise
  • Visual storytelling
  • Personalization and enhanced targeting

Expertise

EAT is a pretty significant ranking factor for SEO (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.) What makes strong content? It is topical and ties to your business, answers user’s questions, the author’s credentials, and stronger visuals (branded imagery, infographics, and custom blog images.)

Visual Storytelling

How you present your content matters. Interactive content and video have been proven to hold user attention for longer periods of time. It will help you to stand out against the competition.

Personalization and Enhanced Targeting

It’s really important to target and refine your audience and put quality, relevant content in front of them. It shows your customer that you are putting them first and building trust. The channels that may be most helpful here are email, social ads, and Google display ads. Make sure to do your research – keyword research or asking your current prospects what their challenges are can be very helpful in understanding your customers.

Design & UX Trends – Leeah Reichart

So as we take a deeper dive into design and user experience, we’ll be looking at three specific trends:

  1. Visual interest – anything that is graphical or typographical. We’re noticing that organic shapes are very popular in today’s modern websites, meaning, anything that doesn’t have straight lines – circles, curves etc. Oversized and bold typography is also very popular right now. What we need to realize is that it’s okay to use text as design elements – it can really add to the overall design.
  2. Clean aesthetic – What we’re seeing trending now is minimalism, which doesn’t always have to equal white space. Along with these trends, customized stock images and icons are very important right now. It’s vital to know that a lot of clients may not have access to a photographer so some clients may rely heavily on stock photography. One downfall is that stock images can seem a little cheesy so to combat that, we’re seeing a lot of customized stock images.
  3. The overall emotional user experience – Users expect websites to do cool things, they need to be eye-catching, have movement, have animations or fun forms with button effects or background videos.

So overall, a lot of trends seem to remain the same but there are some pretty important things to focus on for 2020. If you have questions or would like to talk about your strategy, please let us know!

 

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