2019 was quite a year for all things digital, but 2020 is set to be even more transformative as marketing continues to evolve at a rapid pace.

Keeping up with this stuff isn’t easy, but that’s why you’re reading this blog. We spend most of our time immersed in digital and have seen enough bandwagons come and go to know what you should really be looking out for.

Here are the key digital developments on the horizon that we think are going to impact marketing significantly this year.

Private messaging will become a core communication channel

Are we stating the obvious here? Hasn’t this already happened?

Not really. At least, it hasn’t in the world of business. Firms (particularly those of the small to medium-sized variety) have still been reticent to adopt chat bots and private messaging en-masse.

However, many have adopted platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to connect with clients. And that trend is likely to continue this year.

If you’re running a business of any size, private online messaging could be your key to a much wider, more engaged audience. It can’t be ignored any longer.

Hey, BERT

Some are referring to it as ‘next-gen SEO’, but call it what you want, the impact of Google’s ‘BERT’ update in 2019 is hard to underestimate.

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. In human, that means it is focused on helping Google deal far better with searches that rely on context.

It relates to the way featured snippets are pulled from search results, but also the way in which Google will rank websites. If your website is badly written or suffers from a lack of clarity, it will probably fare poorly on Google in 2020.

Google sums up the power contained within this update rather neatly: “Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.”

This is, of course, also linked to voice search, which is fast becoming the default input method for people as the presence of digital assistants grows within homes across the world.

Mini influencers

Few small or medium-sized businesses can bank on Jennifer Aniston shouting loud and proud about their new product. But, as 2020 rolls into view, they can expect the rise of smaller influencers - often referred to as micro-influencers.

You may already be contributing to this trend. If you have become unquestionably and unexpectedly devoted to someone’s channel on YouTube who isn’t a star, you’re experiencing micro-influencing at work.

They’re people just like you and I, but they’ve decided to consistently create content that draws in large audiences within small niches. As a business owner, you can capitalise on their audience and use their influence to promote your products, without spending a fortune on celebrity endorsement.

A shift in the social spectrum?

Twitter, Instagram and Facebook will continue to be incredibly important marketing channels this year, but there’s a change afoot.

These big platforms are experiencing plateaus in growth (there are only so many humans on the planet, after all), which is leading to a greater focus on smaller social sites.

TikTok, Medium and Reddit are great examples of this and are becoming new favourites for marketers.

There’s no need to throw your social media eggs into one of these new baskets just yet but dipping your toes in their waters during 2020 would be a very good idea indeed.

Wrapping up

Are you ready for 2020? It’ll be another wild ride in terms of digital.

We’ve only scraped the surface above, but which of the trends covered are you most looking forward to this year?