The marketing trends that will dominate in the next 12 months will include Customer

Experience, Employee Engagement, and Content Visualization. Marketing has moved beyond
branding and advertising; marketers must work together with other departments to focus on
building great customer experiences and engaging them for long-term relationships. But aspects
more traditionally considered as marketings domain are cited too: up-to-date technology,
personalization, an easy mobile experience, brand image, and design all add up to the overall
customer experience.

Strategic marketing transformation is the term used to describe the process when a business
operating without a strategic marketing plan evolves by changing its fundamental business
processes and procedures. Your strategic marketing plan defines goals and determines which
marketing tactics you will employ to reach your customers including content marketing, SEO,
email marketing, social media, advertising, and offline marketing.

It then lays out a plan for how every part of the organization will be involved in these tactics.
To put it simply, the marketing strategy is no longer only the responsibility of the chief marketer
or CMO. Strategic marketing transformation recognizes this and ensures that the brand, company
reputation, customer relationships, and the customer experience as a whole are considered in
every business activity.

Quick Takeaways

The marketing trends that will dominate in the next 12 months will include Customer
Experience, Employee Engagement, and Content Visualization. The definition of what we
consider as «marketing» is constantly changing and becoming broader.

Customer Experience

2020 will be the year of the customer. We’re seeing a massive shift in beliefs about what
marketing actually is. In a sense, when you focus on building a positive business culture and
providing great service, the marketing almost takes care of itself. The growth of online content
has given consumers more power.
73% of people say that customer experience is an important factor in their buying decisions, but
currently only 49% of US consumers say that today’s companies provide a good
experience. Efficiency, convenience, knowledgeable and friendly service, and easy payment
options are what people value most in their customer experience. This is how you can provide a
great experience in order to keep your customers and attract new ones. In fact, as you go through
this list, you’ll see that every trend is really just one factor of the overall customer experience.

Employee Engagement

Your employees are the human face of your brand, so concentrating on interactions between
your employees and your customers should be a key part of your marketing strategy. When
you’re turning the responsibility of creating a great customer service over to your
employees, you need to make sure that they want your business to succeed as much as you do.

Visualization

While advancements in voice search are certainly influencing the way that we’ll create content
now and in the future, you shouldn’t neglect visual content either. Adding data
visualizations, infographics, images, and videos to your text not only makes it more interesting
and attractive, but it can help your message to be absorbed better too.

Personalization

Today’s consumers are flooded with marketing messages from multiple channels to the point
where they have started to tune them out. 80% of consumers said that they’d be more likely to do
business with a brand that provides a personalized experience, as per a survey by Epsilon. This
was obviously complete science fiction at the time, but not quite two decades later, reality has
almost caught up with the marketing future of Stephen Spielberg’s imagination. Improvements in
technology such as AI combined with increased data collection and insights from social media
and other sources have made it possible and easy to hyper-personalize everything from content to
design to product recommendations and everything in-between.

Strategic Marketing Transformation

When you’re reading about up-and-coming trends in an article like this, it’s all too easy to think
that being successful in marketing can be simplified to following a list of best practices and
making sure you’re using the latest techniques and technology. The business of marketing is
becoming increasingly complex. To put it simply, the marketing strategy is no longer only the
responsibility of the chief marketer or CMO. Strategic marketing transformation recognizes this
and ensures that the brand, company reputation, customer relationships, and the customer
experience as a whole are considered in every business activity.

Voice Search

Voice search shows no sign of slowing down and will continue to be a major influence on how
brands create content and market themselves online. We’re not quite at the commonly cited
prediction that 50% of searches will be driven by voice in 2020 , but this statistic is probably not
that far in the future. The smart speaker business is booming, with around a quarter of US
households now owning a Google Home, Amazon Echo, or another smart speaker. Consumers
are also expecting to use voice search more in the near future – 61% of those aged 25–64 who
already use a voice device intend to use it more in the future according to research by PwC.

Smart speaker users can ask their digital assistant to «ask Patròn for a cocktail recipe.» This not
only helps to increase brand awareness and visibility, but it also enables users to buy the product
directly from the recipe results. This has the added bonus of making your content more likely to
be picked up as a featured snippet or found on position zero on Google.

Will 2020 be the year of the rise of the robots? Maybe

We’ve already seen huge advancements in AI over the last few years, and a great increase in the
number of businesses using AI-powered technology and automation to assist their marketing
efforts. Remember, the human aspect of marketing is still important , so the idea is to use this
technology to enhance your marketing efforts, not replace the real people behind them. It’s
enabling hyper-personalization of customer experiences and marketing messages at scale.

Focus on Customer Retention, Loyalty and Advocacy

A huge part of providing a great customer experience is making sure that CX is ongoing and
focused on keeping your existing customers, rather than just attracting new ones. Many of the
above-mentioned trends and technology can be helpful for increasing customer retention rates.

Live video is incredibly popular with consumers, and people spend three times longer watching
live video than they do watching pre-recorded video. Video is also the most popular way for
consumers to learn about new products.