The total advertising spending in the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa) is stuck around three billion U.S.Dollar and will slightly decrease in 2020. This is a tough situation for all digital agencies in a fierce battle for customers with many competitors around. The top ten SEO companies in United Arab Emirates grossed more than $27 million USD in 2019. And this money is earned hard, as the clients are carefully selecting the needed services on a tight budget.
The need to keep up with growing marketing trends
Despite the lack of growing investments in the gulf region, the need for digitalization of businesses is not fading away. But only 37 percent of businesses have a digital strategy and only 3 percent are in an advanced state of their digital transformation. For the digital marketing strategy, the need to focus on the most effective and latest upcoming trends is mandatory. On of these trends is influencer marketing. The global marketing industry with a size of 15 billion U.S. Dollars is spending up to 75 percent of their budgets on social media influencers. The market size in the MENA region is estimated as 160 million U.S. Dollars with a 50 percent growth rate in 2020. In the UAE 99.06% of the population are active on social media. The success of influencer marketing leads to a new name, s-commerce (social commerce), which reflects the value of social media for commerce.
Dubai keeps the highest awareness levels for SEO in the region
Compared to most cities in the Middle East, Dubai companies value SEO (Search Engine Optimization) the most. As a tech hub, Dubai has entire Quarters centered around internet business. Especially the presence of Indian Tech companies has fostered the recognition of SEO methods as the important marketing instrument.
The smartphone is growing to be the device for shopping among young people
The trends of mobile and connected devices as primary tool for shopping online for products like electronics, clothing, and footwear continues. More that 50 percent of under 25 years old have recently purchased a smartphone.
YouTube Advertising offers outreach like television at a fraction of the costs
With 7.88 million citizens of the UAE, which equals 82 percent, using YouTube, this keeps to be the channel of choice for advertisement. With TrueView In-stream, TrueView Discovery, Bumper Ads, and TrueView for Shopping YouTube offers a wide range of options for advertisement campaigns that complement influencer marketing strategies. You could find a growing number of specialized agencies in the MENA region.
Snapchat is still being strong in 2020
Snapchat has a huge user base in the 18 to 35 age group in UAE. To run ad campaigns on this platform is important in 2020. So, your social media marketing efforts include this running ad campaigns on Snapchat is staying an important part of social media marketing. Around a million active daily users are using the platform. The most popular Business uses of snapchat are flash sales, scavenger hunt, and secret menu Item.
Create a personalized customer experience with data-driven marketing
Customers attention in the digital realm is a precious good. The time a customer spends to get what he wants gets shorter from year to year. With lots of offers just a click away, personalized engaging and relevant content helps to keeps the customers loyal. The upcoming global trends for data-driven marketing in 2020 are important for the MENA region too. Keeping data collections GDPR-compliant and protecting the data by yourself instead of relying on google or facebook is a must in 2020. Based of these ethical data collections highly personalized marketing automation campaigns are creating a more on point experience for the customer.
The knowledge about the customer enables the marketeer to create a seamless multichannel experience. In this way a unified brand experience can persist through all accessible channels like website, webchat, email, paid advertisement, and SEO.
Artificial intelligence helps to outsmart traditional SEO
Chatbots and other conversational interfaces are reducing the response time to customer requests. The application of AI helps to be faster and smarter than traditional enterprises. AI tools help with smarter personalization and they create better content strategies, stronger analytics and reporting systems.
Digital marketing opportunities in the year of Dubai Expo 2020
25 Million Visitors are expected to visit Dubai at the end of 2020 with a lot of opportunities for the UAE economy. The Dubai Expo 2020 is expected to lift the GDP of UAE by an additional 5.5 percent. The increasing business activity offers opportunities for marketing and SEO.
The government and expo2020 leaders offer special support for SME and startups. This growing number of companies demands more digital marketing services.
