Many top IT giants have already planned the ‘Work-From-Home’ module for their employees until mid 2021. They have even allotted budgets for their employees to set up ergonomic home offices. In a way, it also helps them in reducing the expenses on managing the operations at the offices. For all we know, they might continue with this working model, even after the pandemic is over.
Even the restaurants and shopping malls which relied mostly on walk-in customers had to start with home deliveries in order to survive. At the same time, many businesses had to close down, because they were not able to adapt to the current situation.
COVID has really hurt even the businesses of top sports betting sites like lines.com because most of the big events were cancelled or postponed. Many such companies saw deep decline of their revenues. Now that the sports activities are slowly coming back to life again, they can expect to see the turnaround very soon.
“What we are seeing now is going to be a new norm for many years. This is the right time for businesses to make the necessary changes in order to sustain themselves and make profits.” - Robert D. from StrategyStocks. He has also published a post on how to trade oil with CFD and make money, which has received a lot of likes and readership.
Most of the business activities have now moved online, because it is an effective and cheaper medium for staying in touch with customers, and for engaging new prospects. Companies which did not have any kind of online presence are now scrambling to create their websites and mobile phone apps.
In this post, we shall touch upon some of the trends to expect in terms of internet marketing strategies for the year 2020.
1) Get social to engage more prospects -
Nowadays, almost everyone is connected to the internet from their mobile phones and tablet PCs. Social media websites like FaceBook and Twitter get more than a billion active visitors every month.
The lockdown phase has forced people to stay in touch with each other through social media apps like FaceBook, and through mobile messenger apps like WhatsApp. Since more people are going social, companies cannot afford to overlook these powerful platforms for marketing their business, and also for building long-term branding and relationships.
2) Integrate chatbots for offering quick and proactive customer support -
You will be surprised to know that many businesses want to integrate chatbots for handling their customer support requirements. They are software applications that are powered by Artificial Intelligence to offer real-time assistance to customers or sales prospects.
Basically these AI powered chatbots keep evolving themselves as they keep collecting more data from individual customers. They can be programmed to handle even complex customer support applications.
Experts recommend usage of chatbots for offering customer support, because they provide instant response to the queries from customers, and are available for 24 hours round the clock.
You can save a lot of money on resources, because these software applications will never ask for overtime pay, or holidays, not will they need any breaks in between the work. They will keep serving your customers tirelessly, without any interventions from your end.
Interestingly, more than 45% of consumers also prefer interacting with chatbots. than with actual customer service personnel at service centre. It could be mostly because they provide accurate and quick response. Therefore, chatbots are being seen as a rapidly growing trend in digital marketing and customer support for 2020.
3) The need for content marketing has grown more than before -
When it comes to internet marketing and search engine rankings of websites, it all boils down to the number of quality backlinks and contents that you publish on other high authority blogs or websites.
"We were anticipating a steep fall in demand for our guest posting services this year. Surprisingly, the demand for content marketing and guest posting services actually increased. Now more companies have realized the need for growing their popularity online, and improving their search engine rankings. We saw an increase in our business, and need had to actually hire more resources, instead of having to layoff any of our employees.” - Sunil Gupta, CEO of ACG Digital Marketing.
The current slowdown of worldwide economy is a temporary phase. You will need to continue with your content marketing efforts to keep the momentum going. It will put your company in a better position to rake in returns, when the economy bounces back eventually.
4) People are hooked on to videos more than ever now -
If you still haven't tried video marketing for your businesses, then this is the right time for you to get started. Now that almost everyone has mobile phones with internet connection, they look forward to check out videos from different social media and messenger sources.
This is the right time for companies to create innovative and creative videos, and try circulating them. When people are convinced about your product or services, they will gladly share your videos with their friends, and also in the groups.
For the year 2020 you should integrate live video streaming in your digital marketing strategies. It can prove to be a highly potent combination with influencer marketing techniques.
5) Up your email marketing efforts -
Even though it is one of the oldest forms of internet marketing, you can still generate huge numbers of genuine clicks by using email marketing. With the advancement of technology, even email marketing has progressed quite significantly. You can use email marketing automation techniques to streamline the processes. However, it is of utmost importance to personalize the emails in order to encourage positive interactions from your recipients.
