- eco Study Digital Marketing Trends 2020 names the marketing top trends 2020
- Only 22 percent of companies want to use AI in marketing in 2020
- Experts see the greatest potential for AI in the use of recommendation systems (75 percent)
Artificial intelligence (AI) offers many exciting opportunities in the field of Marketing, but its use in practice lags behind. According to the eco study eco Digital Marketing Trends 2020, only 22 percent of companies want to improve their marketing with the help of AI this year, in 2019, it was 23 per cent. As in previous years, content marketing enjoys the highest level of attention among marketers – in 2020, 78 percent of those surveyed want to address their content strategy. In 2020, companies will also focus on marketing automation and ensuring solid data quality.
In February 2020, eco – Association of the Internet Industry and absolit Dr. Schwarz Consulting surveyed online marketing managers from a total of 923 companies. The survey focused on current marketing trends and the use of artificial intelligence in marketing. “AI holds an almost infinite potential for use in marketing”, says Dr. Torsten Schwarz, expert in online marketing at the eco Association. “It lies, for example, in the evaluation of customer potential through neural networks, highly intelligent chat offers, natural language processing or automated target group and turnover analyses through deep learning.”
Recommendation services profit from AI
The greatest interest in AI is shown by online retailers, one in three of whom wants to address this issue in marketing. They see particular potential for recommendation systems (75 per cent) and the automated segmentation of customer clusters (69 per cent). In the B2B sector and among brand manufacturers, only a few people in charge are still interested in AI solutions. Companies in these sectors first want to build up a solid data foundation in order to then deal with further trend topics.
“There is a big gap between theory and practice. While experts preach AI, many companies are still overwhelmed with the task of bringing order to their data and automating marketing processes,” says Dr. Torsten Schwarz.
Marketing budgets are no longer growing so strongly
The study also examined the development of marketing budgets. A slight downward trend has been discernible here since 2018: around two percent of the companies surveyed are pulling back annually and are refraining from increasing their advertising budgets again in the new year. This year, the proportion of companies that want to reduce their budget has even risen by four percentage points to almost 20 percent.
Download the study eco Digital Marketing Trends 2020.
