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The Marketing Statistics you need to compete in 2020

Author's avatar By Robert Allen 06 Jun, 2017
Essential Essential topic

20 marketing stats for 2020

2020 now looms ahead of us, emerging from over the long-term planning horizon. For years marketers have envisaged 2020 as a distant realm where consumers are empowered, companies responsive and new technologies like virtual reality and the Internet of Things ubiquitous. Now it isn't actually far off, less than three years. Marketers, therefore, need to stop imagining 2020 as some distant concept and start planning for it as business reality.

To help you construct your plan, we've put together this list of 20 marketing stats showing what the state of the market will be in various areas, from search to social to VR, will be in 2020. These predictions can then help you decide where to allocate resources and spot possible opportunities for your business.

For more marketing statistics that cover the major marketing channels, including PPC, SEO, CRO, mobile, ecommerce, social, email, martech, and UX, see our 100+ must-see digital marketing research 2017 statistics.

Plan - Think about how global megatrends will affect how your business will operate in 2020

  • Total Global Marketing Spend set to reach 1.3 trillion by 2020 (Source: Statista)
  • Total Global Digital Marketing spend is set to reach 306 billion by 2020. (Source: Statista)
  • By 2020 Millenials will account for more than half of the US workforce for the first time.
  • By 2020 there will be more than 75 billion devices connected to the internet (Source: TechCo)

Reach- Key trends in the evolution of SEO and how people search for information

  • Total US spending on SEO set to reach 79 billion by 2020. (Source: Statista)
  • Approximately 30% of searches will be done without a screen by 2020 (Source: Mediapos)
  • There will be 21.4 million smart speakers (Such as Alexa, Google Home etc) in the US by 2020. (Source: Activate)
  • By 2020 over 75% of mobile internet traffic will be mobile (Source: Cisco)

Act - How customer experience will change with the introduction of new technologies

  • By 2020, there will be 2.5 billion Smartphone in use. That's more than the total number of web users in 2010.
  • 91% of employees believe their company will no longer be competitive by 2020 if the organisation stays in its current form. (Source: Infomentum)
  • Revenue for virtual and augmented reality technology forecast to reach 15 billion by 2020. (Source: Digi-capital)
  • There will be more than 2 billion connected home devices sold in 2020, and by 2020 over 90% of cars will be connected to the internet (Source: CMO.com)

Convert- What will the size of the market be and how you will you entice them to buy your product?

  • By 2020 there will be over 3 billion email users. That's 300 million more then in 2017. (Source: Radicati)
  • International and domestic ecommerce sales will reach 69 billion British pounds in 2020. (Source: Statista)
  • The market for machine learning applications is set to reach 13 billion dollars by 2020. (Source: Ironpaper)
  • Cross-border B2C ecommerce to reach almost 1 trillion dollars in sales by 2020. (Source: UNCTAD)

Engage- How will interacting with customers change over the coming years?

  • FinTech trends: Transactional value of robo-advisory services per user in the UK is expected to grow from approximately thirteen thousand U.S. dollars in 2015 to approximately twenty-seven thousand U.S. dollars in 2021. (Source: Statista)
  • The market for artificial intelligence will grow rapidly, to be worth over 5 billion dollars 2020 (Source: Markets and Markets)
  • There will be almost half a billion more users of social media networks by 2020 as there are today (Source: Statista)
  • Spending on social media advertising will outstrip total spending on newspaper ads in 2020 (Source: CNBC)

For those interested in the success factors for planning an integrated marketing strategy for 2020, we've created a guide to help you do just that, and it's free for all members.

Author's avatar

By Robert Allen

Rob Allen is Marketing Manager for Numiko, a digital agency that design and build websites for purpose driven organisations, such as the Science Museum Group, Cancer Research UK, University of London and the Electoral Commission. Rob was blog editor at Smart Insights from 2015-2017. You can follow Rob on LinkedIn.

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