28 Oct 2025

The Top Digital Marketing Trends for 2020

Digital Marketing

The digital space and natives are continuously evolving. To tide peacefully alongside these changes, you must be aware of the top digital marketing trends and advancements. In this list, we’ve rounded up some of the already successful—as well as up-and-coming—digital marketing trends for 2020 that you should watch out for!

Social Media Marketing

Digital marketing is driven by many facets but is largely synonymous with social media marketing. Nobody can deny the appeal of social media and how lucrative it has been for brands. Just last year, however, Smart Insights projected that the coming years will see a new trend that will affect brands’ social media reach—Digital Detox. As social media becomes more and more leaden with anxiety-inducing news and privacy concerns, more people are choosing to limit their usage. They go as far as delete not only apps on their devices, but also their accounts.

Couple this with the growing appeal of social media minimalism and you have on your hands another trend that is likely to change how brands put out content and how people consume them.

So how do you bulletproof your brand, so it doesn’t shrink from this challenge? Experts recommend one thing: rethink the value of your content. People hanker for value; they limit their usage and find only what they deem valuable. Do remember, however, that since we’re dealing with changing preferences and needs, that what’s valuable before may no longer work for the same group today.

And what’s valuable, you say? For 2020 social media marketing (and beyond), you may want to consider the following:

Social Media “Stories”

Compared to the more fixed and mostly curated Feeds, Stories give users more room for experimentation. This is what makes Stories highly engaging, an appeal not lost to businesses. Hootsuite’s 2019 Social Media Trends Report discovered that 64% of marketers have already incorporated Stories into their strategies or are thinking of doing so. Stories were an instant hit when it was introduced by Snapchat in 2013. Stories go live for 24 hours and are visible within that time period, which makes it an ideal platform for publishing time-bound events and promotions. Seeing the need for more engagement, social media sites soon followed Snapchat. Here’s a brief timeline of the introduction of respective Stories in various social media platforms:

socmed stories timeline

Timeline of Social Media Stories, lifted from Single Grain

There is a lot of benefits to using Stories, including increased brand awareness, high engagement with followers, heightened traffic to your website, and sales generation. You can get creative with Stories by using its many features like polls, links, filters, tags, mentions, and live video option. The regular addition of new features will encourage better possibilities for reaching a greater audience and Stories will see a continuous steady rise for 2020.

Influencer Marketing

In 2016, Forbes defined Influencer Marketing as a “nonpromotional approach to marketing in which brands focus their efforts on opinion leaders, as opposed to direct target market touchpoints.” The landscape has changed since then, with considerable focus now given to micro- and nano-influencers as opposed to the big names in the industry. It may come as a surprise, but circling back to the topic of value, smaller influencers are perceived to be more trustworthy. They have better-defined audiences and can inject a greater level of personalisation that consumers crave for.

The age of fake news has made people apprehensive of advertising that they’d seek out trusted sources for reviews. Influencers have a way of forging authentic connections with their audiences and are more likely to encourage conversion. Mediakix projects that influencer marketing will become a $10 billion industry in 2020.

SEO Marketing

Voice Search

For some of our editorials last year, we’ve made passing mentions about voice searches. And for the right reasons. It’s one of the digital marketing trends for 2020 that’s equal parts exciting and equal parts confusing for many, because of the changes it spells for SEO. The sale of voice assistants has seen a steady increase over the years. A clear indication that it’s gaining a foothold that even industry giants can’t ignore? Well for one, Microsoft upped their algorithms so it closely matches human language and accuracy.

But how does this exactly impact SEO? SEO rules would dictate that great user experience is key to courting more users. Surely speaking directly to a device—instead of typing queries up—is more comfortable, right? As it turns out, yes. This newly minted ease changes the game for SEO. Take keywords, for example. When thinking about keywords, you need to optimise the language, tone, and vocabulary based on them. Use words that your customers would use, instead of industry jargons. In short, write for your customers. This is also helpful when discovering long-tail keywords that may help you in the long run.

Amazon echo

The latest Amazon Echo

Multilingual SEO

John Hughes of Weglot defines Multilingual SEO as:

Multilingual SEO is the act of optimizing content on your website for different languages, so you become searchable in new markets and people in different countries can find your website.

As companies get ready to become global, it’s important that websites are optimised to accommodate multi-ethnic site visitors. This doesn’t stop after you’ve translated your whole website to other foreign languages. Local SEO is important for reaching users near you, while multilingual SEO is vital for capturing international audiences and keeping them engaged.

Content Marketing

User-Generated Content

Value is still a great driver of User-Generated Content (UGC). Mainly used to tap the Millennial Generation and Generation Z, UGC can encourage more engagement from people. Incentivising (with valuable and branded incentives, of course) your audience and customers could go a long way. User-Generated Content is modern-day word-of-mouth. When speaking about value, it has been proven that people deem others’ recommendations to be more valuable than company advertisements.

UGC not only makes people highly engaged but also drive conversion rates. This type of content is viewed by many to be more authentic and credible. It’s a compelling strategy that widens your reach and finalises sales. TurnTo’s latest survey reveals that 90% of shoppers are “extremely” influenced by user-generated content.

Interactive Content

A Demand Generation Report says that 91% of people are looking for more interactive content online. This includes shoppable posts, 360-degree videos, polls, quizzes and polls, and AR/VR. Instagram has made good use of their interactive content in promoting products using these formats. Take Kylie Cosmetics’ lipstick filters which debuted last year, for example.

Interactive content is moving in a very promising direction in 2020 as more and more people demand a more personalised, more immersive experience. Such experiences now defy even the initial limitations of the internet and open up a lot of possibilities for brands.

Check out Honda’s awesome “The Other Side” video!

http://view.wirewax.com/8117237

It’s easy to remember a time when industries grappled to understand the digital sides of their businesses. Just trying things out and wishing it sticks. Although we’re thankful that this isn’t (mostly) the case anymore, it’s still on a not so distant past. As heirs to this intricate, ever-moving landscape, we’d do well to remember the best practices that have helped shape it.

May these top digital marketing trends inspire you to explore the many facets of digital marketing and encourage the growth of your business for 2020 and beyond!

Want expert digital marketers to help you manoeuvre through the intricacies of these digital marketing trends? We can help. Talk to us today and get rolling!