On Jan 15th, Glue Up held a series of panel discussions across Asia, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Philippines, to hear marketing trends being experienced or identified by marketing professionals.

As we all know, trends in marketing strategies are changing every single day, some more impactful than others, and through our panel discussions, we’ve unearthed some of the most important trends that you should consider going into 2020.

Quick Trends

• Privacy Concerns
• Budgets & Hiring
• Social Detox
• Influencer Shake-up
• Social Support
• Video Engagement
• Google Weight-Loss

Privacy Concern is at an All-Time High

Ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal with Facebook, users on social media took privacy concerns to such a level that it caused the EU to pass the GDPR laws that hold companies who save user data to strict accountability.

Of course, as most data collection exists in any company that’s online, they’re likely serving a global market, and therefore, GDPR has affected companies around the world and not just the EU.

Accountability has done little to sate the appetite of the privacy-concerned masses however, so it’s important to know that your potential customers are indeed very aware of your practices and will be sensitive to their data.

This has caused some minor behavioral patterns, for example, there’s been an easing of form questions on websites for contact pages, including reducing “Full Name” fields to just “Name”, and “Phone”, “Address”, and more being reduced to optional fields rather than required.

These form changes are not to comply with GDPR, but rather to ease the likelihood that users would complete the form without worrying about the data they’re about to give.

Budgets & Hiring Trends Favor Data Roles

Recent trends in marketing, not just in the run-up to 2020, but in the past decade or more, have shifted away from creative roles in marketing, to more data-oriented roles.

With cost-effectiveness becoming a more prime strategy, companies are relying on data to point them in the right direction. Data collection has become so robust these days, that even the smallest of startups can run rudimentary A/B tests.

If campaign A performed better than campaign B, then we use A going forward. Simple, Sweet, and (mostly) risk-free marketing.

Something not shown here due to the small sample size is the growing usage of event-marketing in strategies. Check out some of our tips for running an engaging event!

From the Panelists

However from our panelists these past weeks, we’ve also learned that data is somewhat taking a backseat role depending on the talent on-hand. While data is great, it’s useless unless you have marketers who can identify successes, problems, trends, or who is more willing to see the answer staring them in the face.

Another point from panelists includes that data is so granular these days, that it can overwhelm marketers and can often time blind them to some of the more basic marketing principals because they could have been following the wrong data points, in a world where there are now thousands of data-points available for a single customer.

People are Taking More Breaks from Social Media

A recent trend that currently has no real cure-all, is that users are taking more breaks from social media in lieu of recent fake news cases being circulated around Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

While these are of note, it’s only real effect is that some businesses may find fluctuating engagement on their social media pages that break the norm, but overall this just emphasizes the importance of good social media content to make the most of your follower-ship.

From the Panelists

During our panels, we learned from speakers and the audience that this general trend may not be as clear-cut as it seams. Yes, if you asked in a survey if people take breaks, a “break” could mean differently to different people.

Had they put down their phone for 5 minutes?

What if they are turning off their phone, but then switch to a PC? Maybe they consider not using their mobile device as a break, but still, continue using other devices.

Influencers with Fewer Followers Have Higher Engagement

Influencers originally needed to have hundreds of thousands to millions of followers to land marketing gigs, but this trend is most certainly being bucked.

Nowadays and going into 2020, it’s important to influencers who are more targeted to your audience, which incidentally means they’ll likely have much fewer followers, and that’s a good thing.

As you reduce follower-ship but choose the right influencer to target your audience, you’ll find that you get more engagement. Refer to the above image to see a sample data set on this relationship.

Social Media as a Customer Support Platform

While Email and Phone are still the best channels for customer support, social media is rising quickly as a form of forum-replacement strategy.

With the ease of use of social media and constant notifications, it keeps your customer-base engaged and gives the aura of your company being transparent in a world where transparency is key.

It costs nothing, and moving your public discussions to social media will help spread your brand’s clout as an open, helpful, and active company.

Among this trend is something to keep an eye on when it comes to chatting apps. The line between social media and your favorite chatting application is getting more blurry as time goes on, so it’s smart to leave your Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, or WeChat link on your website so customers can reach out.

Even Facebook has released a feature for Facebook pages to place their page’s chat feature as a chat-box for websites as a first-touch chat option.

The beauty of this is that it instills a sense of community among your customers, and any questions could potentially be addressed by a customer to a fellow customer long before you get to it.

Video is a Growing Engagement Area

Video is by far one of the highest-grossing areas for engagement and enacting users to buy. If done correctly, it can entice, convince, and persuade viewers to take a certain, and likely positive, stance on your product or service.

Duration of the video has some influence on the viewer, as the longer the video, the higher likely hood that their affinity with your brand increases. Shorter videos, therefore, convert less often but have a higher probability of being shared if they’re engaging, entertaining, or educational.

Video also depends heavily on the channel and medium you’re posting on, here’s some tips we uncovered during our panel discussions:

• Post long-form videos on Youtube, since it’s algorithm prefers to promote longer length videos
• Remember to always use subtitles when posting social media video content as all videos are played in Mute firstly
• The first 3 seconds are crucial to getting someone’s attention when they scroll through their social feeds
• Short-form videos don’t do well at all on YouTube but do extremely well on Facebook.
• LinkedIn has a Max video length of 10 mins.

Google is Making it Harder to Find You, and That’s OK

Google is changing the way it helps find what you’re looking for.

If you haven’t noticed, take a look at your latest Google search results on the first page. You’ll notice that in some popular keywords your search, you actually have to scroll down before you can find the legitimate links found by the algorithm. Like So.

Google has ceded a great majority of real-estate on results pages to ads, snippets, twitter quotes, images, video reels, definitions, Q&As, and other functions that Google offers. If you’re a business with a popular or competitive keyword, you’ll start to find your website getting fewer visitors.

And that’s OK.

Google has identified that there are 2 types of searches people make on Google. One is confirmation intent, the other is problem-solution intent.

Confirmation intent is when we just need to quickly confirm the definition, flight time, time zone, calculation, currency exchange etc. We’re not interested in buying anything, we just want answers.

Problem-solution intent is when we’re searching for something that helps us with a problem. “Cheap shoes Oaklahoma” is not a confirmation search because the user has a problem of finding cheap, shoes, in Oaklahoma.

Therefore, the searcher will actively skip the Definition of “shoe”. They’ll skip the “Q&A” post. They’ll skip the “shoe review” videos. The searcher will either click an Ad or scroll down to find the most appropriate website result.

So in the coming 2020 year, and we assume you are not expanding your page count on your website, you’re going to incur fewer website visitors, but should indeed have the same or increase in conversion rate from customers who are looking for your solution.

Or in other words, you’ll be filtering out visitors who just want a quick definition, leaving fewer bounces on your website, which then leads to better SEO.

Now Back to You

There are a lot of trends coming up, we couldn’t list them all, and we probably wouldn’t be able to, but thanks to our panelists at our recent Marketing 2020 Predictions events across the region for participating. Without their insights, we wouldn’t have this great feedback and trends. You can find our speakers below!

If you enjoyed this article, consider subscribing for more content like this in the future, and to hear early one if events like the panel in this discussion might happen in a city near you. For more info about this particular panel, check out our round-up here.

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