As an integrated marketer, one of the things

that I look for is great research institutions

that are putting out free research that
will help my clients as well as my students at
Northwestern and on Coursera. Edelman Research is
one such company. They recently published their
trends for 2020 which are significant trends
that you need to think about for business and marketing. Edelman Research is one of
my go-to research houses. Their Edelman Trust
Barometer is one of the best measures of how we
as consumers trust companies, social media, news reporting, and other institutions
and government. It's a must read
for IMC marketers. I also like their published special reports on things like
trends and trust in social media and in
digital marketing. The first trend is that more and more people
are listening to podcasts and are listening to them for longer
periods of time. So the first one is the rise
of the audio influencer. Today, we are looking
for people we can trust. We are now doing it not only in our texts and through
blogs and vlogs. But now we're doing it
through podcast as well. So watch for the rise of the audio influencer and the
attractiveness they have to marketers who are trying to align their products with a
specific target market. A second trend is shown by the Edelman Trust
Barometer that said that people distrust
brand messages. As a result, we are also seeing the rise of the brand ambassador. A
brand ambassador is a
person who is aligned with the brand and aligned with a specific target market that
the marketer
wants to develop. We will see a rise in the
influencer and movement to brand ambassadors as we move forward in the
digital marketplace. Gen z and Millennials really distrust
unauthentic content, especially if it comes
from influencers. So as a result, the third trend is In
Authenticity We Trust. You need to show a human
side to the marketplace, and you need to be authentic
in everything you do, as well as transparent. People are looking for that,
particularly, younger audiences, younger markets want to have authenticity as a
central part
of your business strategy. In my class, I like to use Cluetrain Manifesto
which was actually published in 1999 as a
guide to how to be human. You might want to take
a look at that to reinforce this third trend. Micro or Nano influencers are
becoming really important in your marketing strategy
because they're less expensive than the influencers. They also have very
tight-knit communities. So trend four is to the rise of the Micro or Nano
influencer. There we will see growing
throughout the '20s. Today, influencers need to track their social media impact. So
Instagram in 2019
came out with Checkout, which is a metrics-driven
system that allows them to say, here's the results that I
could bring to a company. As you'll see, tracking
is in a number of the top 10 trends identified
by Edelman Research. Part of being transparent and
authentic is being human. So there's a demand here
for transparencies. In a business setting,
if we make a mistake, if we go a wrong direction, we need to tell people
clearly what's going to happen and what we're doing
to alleviate the problem. So transparency is a
very central part of your marketing mix if you want to succeed and be authentic
to your target market. One important component in my digital marketing class is the
concept of amplification. What that is, is being
able to put out a piece of content and have a lot of people pick that up
and talk about it, which amplifies your message
out into the marketplace. In 2020, companies are looking at paid amplification as a
way
to ensure that this happens, and we see this trend growing
as we go through the '20s. Essentially, it's
allowing you to buy amplification and
get your message out to the target market
that you want to target. One of the central points of integrated marketing
communication is the concept of being able to track all of your
marketing activities through to the return on
investment that it provides. Ninety-three percent of all marketers are
using influencers, but now there's
really a push to say, we need to be able to measure
your influence and what you're saying all the way
through to the first sale. This metrics-driven
marketing will impact influencers and
brand ambassadors. Privacy is becoming a more
and more critical component that you need to address in
your marketing programs. People want to know why
you're collecting the data, what you're doing with it, and who you're sharing it
with, and they demand control
over that data. We need to keep up with privacy legislation and
privacy discussions and keep your company on the
forefront of what's happening in terms of
consumer privacy today. Gen Z is a huge market. They account for 40 percent of the
entire buying market in
the United States today. You need to think about what
are the unique needs of the Gen Z marketplace and how they want to build a
relationship with you. Brand ambassadors, influencers are just a component
of the way that they want to do
business as well as being transparent and authentic. So we need to begin to align
with the Gen Z marketplace
in order to succeed. So those are the top 10 trends identified by Edelman Research,
and they're trends
that you need to keep up with in the '20s.