At the end of the year, it’s always fun to look back and see if those early-year predictions came true. Actually, it’s more than fun. Examining what the experts got right and got wrong helps you plan more soundly for the upcoming year.
I scoured the web for 2019 marketing predictions from major organizations, and found eight worthwhile reads, even at this late date. A lot of what you’ll see here are trends that should pick up even more steam in 2020, and perhaps a few that will fizzle out.
- Adobe called out data-driven creativity, experiential commerce, ethical personalization, account-based B2B marketing and CXM (customer experience management).
- Gartner mentioned profitability over customer experience, user-level control of data, content creation, drastic cuts in analytics departments and a trend toward shorter video.
- HubSpot saw growth in content marketing, video, native ads, SEO, AI and VR. Privacy was also identified as a core issue.
- IBM talked about the “martecheter,” AI, “consulgencies,” agile marketing, customer centricity and a few other visionary items.
- Martech made mention of 5G as facilitating more integrated and imaginative content marketing, personalization, customer journey and data privacy issues. Fascinating read.
- Moz was on the money, talking about answers-driven search, voice search, SERP feature intrusion and video.
- Oracle, oracle that it is, foresaw B2B growth in content marketing, retargeting, social media and video, data-driven marketing and ABM (account-based marketing).
- Search Engine Land highlighted mobile-first indexing, page speed, brand as ranking signal, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and Amazon search.
There you have it. Anyone ready to proffer a prediction for 2020?