Shopfloor DEALER PROFILE: KNEES HOME AND ELECTRICAL FOCUS: LOCAL MARKETING Top marketing trends


to watch for in 2020 By Heidi Melin, Chief Marketing Offi cer at work management platform provider, Workfront


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dozens of predictions and analyses across the industry, here are some of the top marketing trends to look out for in 2020.


A Customer experience


The idea that marketing needs to be blended with Customer Experience (CX) isn’t new, but it’s likely going to gain traction in the next year. A blended brand experience calls for customer


service and relationship building with serious investment, dedicated to imprinting positive experience, changing feelings,


and


delighting customers with added value. Marketing of the future won’t be able to stay separate from CX. Exceptional customer experience is leading the way in marketing, shifting focus onto inbound strategies for serving and retaining existing customers. When customers share their enjoyable experience or outstanding service, their reviews are more likely than ads to impact new buyer behaviour. How do we start CX marketing? Rely on data and source it from multiple channels, strive for memorable experiences, and infuse the entire customer lifecycle with CX strategies.


Hyper-personalisation A key way to improve customer experience is to make it all about the individual – not generic, not even just slightly personal, but extremely tailored. We’re moving beyond basic automation to greet a buyer by name to digging into personal shopping habits and browsing trends to leverage behaviour, wants, and needs to maximise conversions. Despite this growing trend, 80


per cent of marketers today aren’t personalising their efforts, even though they know it improves customer engagement. Content marketing expert Shafqat Islam predicts: “Consumers are smart and they expect their world to be personalised. Netflix and Amazon set the bar high, and consumers expect that from brands and publishers. Yet, almost every marketer’s website is generic and one-size-fits-all... Personalisation will move from a buzzword to a fundamental part of the marketer’s toolkit, across web, social email and every other channel in the customer experience.”


It’s easier said than done, but here


are some examples of brands that are pulling it off, plus ways technology can help you keep up with the shift from personal to hyper-personal.


Brand integrity We already know how quickly a brand can be damaged by poor online reviews and angry customers taking to their platforms to share negative experiences. Even beyond customer experience, brands are expected to behave ethically in every aspect of their business, and brand integrity suddenly means your action on climate change, inclusivity, and behaviour across social channels.


What this means is a new kind of narrative for marketing, one in which the company tells its story about refusing to continue carrying tobacco or firearms or tweets out support for


s we start a brand new decade, we’re looking forward to the continued innovation in marketing – new technology trends for marketers to explore and new ways of finding and connecting with buyers. From


a human rights campaign. Brand identity now means internal choices that become external stories, carefully presented with honesty, humility, and a consistent moral code. Otherwise, you risk brand recognition for all the wrong reasons.


Predictive analytics


This is another item on our list that is intertwined with other trends. You need advanced AI capabilities to run predictive analysis. Along the same lines, predictive analysis should help you strategise hyper-personalisation with shopping recommendations and curated suggestions, for example. Without getting into too much detail


about predictive models, just keep in mind that predictive analysis depends on AI technology and should be a guide, part of a roadmap for strategic initiatives. When you can harness data to predict trends, opportunities, limitations, and threats, you can stay


ahead of market swings and get ahead of customer desires.


Privacy and data protection The massive amount of data that fuels our analytics and strategies come with some significant safety risks. Most of our social media channels are labelled as high risk for data breaches, and most cybersecurity professionals predict their own companies will experience a major security breach at some point in the year.


And consumers are smarter and


more informed than ever about their own data privacy and what they expect from businesses. They want brands to care about their privacy and personal data security. This might mean you engage a cybersecurity professional or update your policies. You could use the EU’s guidelines laid out in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which are among the strictest.


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