The 16 Best Marketing Strategies to Try in 2020

Well, 2020 is here. And, so far, it doesn’t look much different than December 2019. That’s why we
asked dozens of digital marketers for their best marketing strategies of last year—and, boy, did they
deliver.

Here’s a look at what tops the list for marketing experts 2019—and what we think are the 16 best
marketing strategies you can take into 2020.

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1. Educate with your content

Content has long been king and 2019 was no different.

Citing figures from the Content Marketing Institute’s 2019 trends report, Robin Barendsen, head of
digital marketing at office space rental company WehaveAnyspace, noted 77% of B2B marketers use
content marketing.

“In fact, the majority of B2B content marketers use educational assets to nurture leads and build
audience trust, which is absolutely essential for inbound marketing,” he said. “Think about
informational blogs, white papers or quizzes.”

2. Personalize your marketing messages

Peter Wilfahrt, managing director of digital agency Versandgigant, said marketers should personalize
every single message in 2020 by digging into analytics and understanding demographics, affinity
categories and in-market segments. More on that in a moment.

“Only very few brands execute a personalized messaging strategy,” he said. “And we’re not talking
about adding the first name to your email greeting … really dig into your prospect’s mind and
discover what they fear, wish and want.”

While Brock Murray, COO of digital marketing agency seoplus+, agrees consumers should be made
to feel special, he argues automation is the way to go because it allows advertisers to create ads that
dynamically change based on whoever is searching. And, Murray said, results show consumers want
this type of customization.

“With that being said, timeliness also proved to be a critical part of any strategy as users proved they
still don’t want to be bombarded with content, particularly if it isn’t even relevant to them,” Murray
added. “Overall, all of your content and markup should be concise and easily understandable to
ensure your users receive value with each interaction. Transparency and respect of users’ privacy
should also be a critical component of any digital marketing strategy.”

Frank Spear, content marketer at WordPress contest plugin RafflePress, said personalization boosted
his marketing strategy far beyond his expectations in 2019.

“We tried to implement personalized content in virtually every aspect of our strategy,” he said. “Our
opt-in ads change based on the content users read before the popup was triggered. The relatable
promotion is designed to show consumers that we understand their pain points and want to help.
We allow our customers to pick the type of content they want to receive from us when they
subscribe to our email marketing campaigns.”

Effective personalization is the result of efforts like behavioral segmentation, or separating audience
members into groups based on their actions, like first-time purchases, abandoned carts, repeat
purchases and page views without conversion, said Sam White, marketing manager at CBD site Soul
CBD.

“Each behavior group can look very similar to each other demographically and then act in very
different ways,” White added. “Behavioral segmentation is what allows us to speak to each group in
a way that makes sense with how they interact with the brand.”

3. Let data drive your creative

According to Natalia Wulfe, CMO of digital marketing agency Effective Spend, platforms like Google
and Facebook are taking control more control of audience targeting as they simultaneously move
away from manual bidding capabilities. Meanwhile, their algorithms have become adept at
understanding which ad images and copy will drive the best click-through and conversion rates.

“With these shifts, we’ve seen creative emerging as a serious performance driver, carrying equal
weight to other key drivers like placement selection and audience targeting,” she said.

As a result, Effective Spend overhauled its creative design process to incorporate a data-first
approach.

“We analyze the performance metrics of existing creative, identify where the gaps are, and then
design new creative that directly impacts those poor performing metrics,” she added.

4. Invest in original research

One of the best marketing strategies of 2010 was investing in original research.
Tamas Torok, head of online marketing at Javascript development company Coding Sans, said Coding
Sans has been publishing its own research on software development trends since 2017, and these
reports have generated links from reputable websites and yielded thousands of subscribers.

“This strategy worked because we came up with something new,” he said. “New data attracted links
and it was beautifully presented, which made people share it on social media.”

Coding Sans plans to publish at least three new reports with original research in 2020.

Matthew Zajechowski, outreach team lead at digital marketing agency Digital Third Coast, agreed
using proprietary data to create long-form content with graphics has been an effective 2019
strategy, resulting in backlinks from thousands of high-authority publications.

“Publishers want new story angles to cover on a subject even if they’ve covered it a billion times
before,” he added. “Having proprietary data allows us to have that unique angle and presenting it
with graphics makes it easy for them to share. We look for writers and publications who cover that
subject and present it to them as new research or a study.”

5. Update your content

And don’t forget the content you’ve already published.

In fact, Cyrus Yung, co-founder of SEO company Ascelade, said updating old content is a strategy that
has served Ascelade well as Google has a freshness ranking factor and most sites eventually see
content decay.

“They have old articles that have ranked well previously and have attracted backlinks, but the search
traffic for that particular article is on a downward trend,” he said.

Mark Webster, co-founder of online marketing education company Authority Hacker, said 2019 was
the year Authority Hacker focused on this tactic of refreshing older content instead of just pumping
out new, high quality content.

“After some testing, we found that making simple updates and tweaks and, most importantly,
changing the date of the article to represent the newest revision [made] our rankings instantly
[jump] up,” he said. “It’s no secret Google prefers fresh content but we had not anticipated this to
be such an easy win.”
What’s more, it’s cheaper to refresh old content, so Webster this small technique a “huge win.”

Jeroen Minks of PPC agency Vazooky Digital, too, called updating existing website content “one of
the best and most successful marketing strategies that I [used] last year.”

“By going through each article and page individually and [updating] them, I have seen a big increase
in organic rankings which have led to more website traffic and new customers,” he said. “Part of the
content optimization was to involve other experts in my articles, which led to more external links
and a better social media presence.”

6. Try subscribing to HARO

Another popular 2019 strategy was responding to queries from journalists on services like Help A
Reporter Out (HARO), as they are constantly looking for experts in a range of fields.

In fact, Olga Mykhoparkina, CMO of chat platform Chanty, called answering HARO queries “by far
the best marketing activity we’ve done this year”—more so than even guest blogging and fixing
broken links.

That’s because Chanty gets an average of five to ten links a week by responding to relevant queries.