The world is changing rapidly. Thousands of years have passed from the neolithic revolution to the dawn of the industrial one.
Now, new revolutions happen fasterOpens a new window than you can keep track of them. This is the reminder of what revolutions, both small and big, are going to shape 2020.
Social media censorship
Conservatives have been claiming that Facebook and Google censor them for the longest time. This may or may not be true, but the fact is, major social media platforms do censor content.
Facebook has released a set of rules about censoring hate speech that is very vaguely worded. But that’s just the beginning, this year the company announced it will be censoring “sexually suggestive†emojis.
Also, as Mark Zukerberg rolls out Facebook News, there will be people curating the newsfeed to make sure there is no fake news. While this sounds good in theory, in practice this means Facebook does have control over what content users can see.
The challenge that comes with that is making sure your marketing content on Facebook is not hit by the algorithm or the reviewers by mistake. This is why proofreading companies like Pro Essay Writer don’t only consider the tone and the style of the text, but its ability to pass Facebook filters as well.
Taking back control of your privacy
The internet used to be a place where you can act anonymously and control what you see. A safe space, if you will. Now that nearly half of the internet is on Facebook, and 88% of searches are done on Google, this sense of not being watched dwindles.
Both companies monetize their services with advertising revenue, so both collect servers’ worth of data on their users.
No wonder that over 60% of users don’t trust Facebook with their personal information. 74% of respondents to the survey do not believe sharing personal data in exchange for free services is a fair trade-off. This is why many are taking back control.
You can see this by the growth of the VPN market. It has shown stable growth that measures in billions over the years, and the forecasts see it grow even further.
Source: GeosurfOpens a new window
This is a huge challenge for marketers as users are actively resisting being monitored for advertising data. The general impact is going to be negligible in 2020, but as time goes on, more and more people will be accessing your website with a VPN.
This will make it much harder to perform lead scoring and analyze the data on website visitors as locations and IP addresses are going to be misleading.
The other issue marketers face is the number of ad blockers people use. The original AdBlock has been around for a long time, but now there are dozens of similar apps. Their wide popularity makes banner advertising close to useless.
The battle for CX
One of the most important trends that is already transforming digital marketing is the growing importance of customer experience. Over 80% of companies surveyed by Gartner expect to compete based on customer experience. A Forrester study commissioned by Adobe shows making CX king increases profits by up to 15%.
What this means for you is you need to craft extremely personalized experiences. This includes gathering more and more information on your audience, including behavior patterns. This information is going to serve as a basis for understanding customer needs and being there at the right time.
Other methods of improving customer experience include investing in creating user personas and customer journey maps if you haven’t already. Using DevOps for improving CX is also a good call. It can help you figure out potential problems before the product is even released.
Artificial intelligence and machine learningYou may know that Big Data analytics is transforming the digital marketplace already. Google is using machine learning, so do other big companies. The difference is, in 2020, AI will be more accessible to everyone else as well.
Many solutions are already out there, waiting for the mainstream market to notice. A medium-sized company can probably afford many of them, from high-level analytics to streamlining regular tasks.
For instance, image captioning that is already quite advanced can be used to categorize user-generated content.
IBM’s content clarifier API can be used to summarise or simplify large bodies of text. You can also train an AI to simulate user behavior on the website, making bug fixing and customer journey mapping so much easier.
Where AI and ML truly shine, though, is handling Big Data. Feed a wealth of data into the well-trained algorithm, and you may end up with correlations and insights no human is capable of seeing.
Most of the technologies that Forbes companies believe to be important to their business are connected to AI in some form.
This graph also shows that a mere three years ago, big companies didn’t realize the importance of edge computing and IoT. These two technologies are next up on our list.
Edge computing
The reason people surveyed by Forbes didn’t think edge computing is important is that they weren’t dealing with that much data. Sure, the amount of data in 2017 was still huge, but by 2020 the internet will have produced 44 zettabytes of data.
With that much information to process, speed is going to become crucial. This is why the number of multi-cloud edge computing solutions is going to increase in 2020. In fact, Microsoft has already launched Azure Sphere that handles just that.
Internet of Things
The biggest event of 2020 is going to be the wide adoption of 5G networks. It’s being tested in many countries right now, but even Singapore is rolling out commercial 5G networks in 2020. When that happens, it’s going to disrupt a lot of industries.
Logistics, medicine, and transportation will be among the first industries to undergo a change. As driverless cars working on super-fast 5G networks hit the market, many long-haul drivers may lose jobs, Elon Musk predicts.
But that’s probably not going to happen anywhere in 2020. What you should be planning for is improving your business with IoT. If you own a warehouse, it’s time to consider modernizing it.
Another thing you should be thinking about is how to integrate your products or services with IoT. Ericsson estimates there will be 29 billion connected IoT devices by 2022, and your company needs to be a part of that.
Wrap up
From minor trends to potentially disruptive innovation, you know what lies ahead of you in 2020. Prepare in advance so that when the new technologies hit the market, you’re ready for innovation, not afraid of it.