Dmitry Miroshnichenko, business development director of Go Mobile digital agency, spoke about the main trends in digital marketing for the next year. We translated vc.ru’s article so that you could read and check.
The advertising market is growing at 8.8% per year and the share of digital in the total split of budgets is growing at an average of 15% per year. Technologies are reactively developing, new formats and platforms are appearing, and advertisers and agencies are quickly adapting to new realities.
Fresh example: TikTok fast takeoff. At the beginning of 2019, brands practically did not know about it and by the end of the year, marketing activations on the site became one of the main media tools.
This article about trends at the beginning of the year is a good way to compare coordinate systems with our partners, customers and the rest of the market.
New mobile native
The growing penetration of advertising develops banner blindness and stimulates the demand for AdBlock solutions. Therefore, the main task of brands in 2020 is to learn how to natively (even more natively!) integrate advertising content for different formats and platforms.
“Advertising breaks” were replaced by product placement. It is becoming more personalized and sophisticated. Technologies allow you to automatically integrate the product into suitable placements:
- On top of images (the in-image format was available as an independent technology, and this year it launches as one of the features of myTarget).
- Inside video content. For example, in China, the Mango TV channel uses AI to detect empty places in the frame (shelves, walls, smartphone screens), marks them as potential for advertising and uses viewers’ social data to automatically adapt the placement.
Brands try not to impose their product and to be useful. To do this, they try to catch the user at the time the problem appears to solve it.
Many large companies follow the path of mutual integration of their services, solving several tasks at once: building functionality, retaining and attracting new users by creating a comfortable ecosystem.
Audio
Voice assistants
According to Just AI, by 2023, the Russian voice AI market will reach 33 billion rubles.
Among the famous voice assistants are Alice, Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant. Local brands are also involved in creating assistants to streamline processes. This year, Oleg from Tinkoff Bank or Maroussia from Mail.ru Group were published.
It is easy to imagine how advertising of other holding businesses could be integrated into voice assistants: for example, mentioning the possibility to buy insurance when buying tickets. To advertise third-party companies, it’s also easy to come up with mechanics: for example, recommendations of restaurants not far from the address the navigator laid the route to.
Such offers do not look like annoying ads, but are more like a friend’s advice. For brands, the benefit is that the listener cannot swipe and skip the message, but listens to it to the end.
Podcasts
In America, they have already shown themselves to be an effective tool that increases brand loyalty and helps build long-term relationships with consumers.
In addition to simple advertising inserts (jingles), podcasts suggest more complex and native integration formats. An author group invites a guest to a brand representative or discusses a topic a brand poses.
Augmented Reality
Masks
Why are masks good for business? This is a great tool to increase brand awareness and promote your account on social media. Interesting masks give great reach and audience growth. In stories using the mask, the creator’s account is displayed. Many users will go to your account to view content, find other masks and save them.
Like any tool, masks adapt and move to new formats. For example, prediction masks have become a new trend now . Users like to share their reaction to the prediction and be part of the community.
Instagram Games
Another interesting format for masks. It can be attached to the face of the user or only to their actions. For example, a user can catch chips flying from above on their mouth or bounce a character by blinking at obstacles while running.
Online fitting
More and more brands are integrating AR into their applications to increase sales.
This function gives the user the opportunity not only to consider the product from all sides but also to decide whether it suits them. For example, you can test the color of lipstick on yourself, try on sneakers. You can even see how a particular piece of furniture looks in the interior.
In August 2019, the Lamoda online store added the function of online trying on sneakers into its iOS app. Thus, the brand wants to reduce the number of refusals from purchases by 10-15% and increase sales.
Influence – redistribution of the market
In 2019, TV channels received less than 10-15 billion rubles due to the redistribution of budgets in favor of bloggers.
Another redistribution happened at the platform level. Last year, new channels broke into an established set of influencer platforms. We consider TikTok and Likee to be the main ones.
Growing services are interested in creating a loyal community of content makers, so they give users maximum opportunities for development. You can become a popular tiktoker in a couple of months, while the same path on the Instagram will take at least a year (and much more resources).
The threshold for entering these platforms is reduced compared to YouTube and Instagram, including due to low content requirements: all videos are short, may be of poor quality, the main content format is dancing and vine.
New faces have grown on the platforms, which already have the same weight as influencers on other channels, but are still cheaper.
Advertisers quickly attracted a lot of attention from the audience and the opportunity to get more coverage and engagement at better prices than at classic venues.
Following the audience and advertising budgets, bloggers from other platforms come to new sites. For them, this is an opportunity to increase the total audience and get additional monetization.
Video
If you read this article, you use the Internet and have heard about this trend a hundred times (well, or noticed how rapidly the number of video content has grown).
Video is a simple and understandable format for absolutely all age categories. Given the increasing pace of life, there is no mystery as to why such content is gaining popularity.
Let’s look at the trends within the trend.
Naturalness and UGC
The trend for naturalness began in 2018: body positivity, a minimum of makeup and natural colors in clothes. Users of social networks have become critical of Photoshop and reality embellishment.
Perfect pictures no longer attract the attention of the audience. Therefore, natural first-person shooting, with shaking the camera while walking and approaching the heroes face goes to the top. Audience likes to feel part of what is happening and “to peep” at the lives of other people through the screen.
Brands are starting to work more and more with UGC. It gains an average of 28% more engagement than brand content. For example, Apple and GoPro post only user-generated content in their official Instagram profiles.
Challenges
Brands are trying to find access to a new audience, mastering new platforms.
In 2019, the TikTok and Likee video platforms were actively gaining popularity, and brands were experimenting with a new advertising format: the hashtag challenge.
The mechanics are simple. Users shoot videos (often under a specially created track), set a hashtag and perform creative tasks (dance, lip-sync or interaction with a brand product). In return, users receive additional coverage of their videos and the opportunity to win prizes.
Such a tool provides good coverage among the young audience: for example, our challenge “Wild Scritchers” for Rosman has got more than 5 million views under the Screechers Wild track and more than 11 million views of the brand’s page on Likee.
An even more important aspect is UGC. For each of the challenges, tens of thousands of users create their own content. Such a high involvement of the user in interacting with the brand affects the brand image and loyalty to it globally.
Many brands try to do campaigns at the junction of the funnel. For example, to reach + purchase, so that the campaign is effective at all stages. For example, our #ColgatePlaxChallenge involved buying a Colgate product. The brand received not only user engagement (1,500 UGC), an audience reach of 10 million, but also additional sales.
The battle for Big Data
Advertising platforms are migrating to the black box format. The technologies are self-learning, they use large amounts of data for the most accurate targeting, but at the same time, the advertiser has a minimum of settings. A good example here is Google Ads, which every year leaves the advertiser with less choice and closes the process on the site itself. Google thus closes many goals:
- Sells unpopular placements.
- Tests new formats.
- Hides the actual distribution of budgets.
- Leaves maximum information inside.
The first news of 2020 is again about the struggle for data. Relying on the global trend of online privacy, Google said it will refuse to support third-party cookies in the Chrome browser. Previously, Safari (Apple) and Firefox (Mozilla) have already done this.
In the long run, such measures significantly reduce the competitiveness of third-party technologies that work with data (DMP, Retargeting). The Google and Facebook sites will still have a maximum of user data, and this data will simply become more expensive.
Interested in or need help with digital marketing and related areas? NIX Solutions has a lot to offer.