It’s that time of the year again! Amidst the holiday cheer and merriment, it is time to get our crystal balls and wizarding hats out to predict the hottest trends for digital marketing for 2016. Yes, the countdown to the New Year hasn’t started yet but 2016 is looming just around us and will be upon us before you can say Jack Robinson. Digital Marketers always have their eyes peeled for the future trends as the Internet marketing landscape keeps growing at an exponential rate, all thanks to web, which in itself is evolving faster than ever. The web is entering a new Semantic era, with the Web 3.0 touted to be more connected, personalized and intelligent. As words like ‘Internet of Things’ and ‘Big Data’ become the part of our vernacular, they are expected to bring in a torrent of data from all avenues. Digital Marketers need to make sense of this deluge of data and what it means for internet marketing industry. In today’s world, the success of a business depends largely on two aspects, keeping the tab on the current and upcoming marketing trends and being able to apply them to delight customers. In this post, we try to predict the digital trends which are going to biggies in 2016. Get a leg up your competition by adopting these trends.
Visual Marketing
Visual marketing was a big hit in 2015 and it’s going to be even bigger in 2016. From infographic, videos, animations, memes, our prediction is that visual marketing will drive the digital marketing in a big way.
Internet of Things (IoT)
With the emergence of ‘Internet of Things’, there would be an abundance of data floating and that is a huge opportunity for a digital marketer. It would be really interesting to see how Internet marketers weave a digital strategy around ‘Internet of Things’. Check out our blog on ‘Internet of Things’.
Mobile
As we have been saying from the beginning, Mobile will no longer be optional. With mobile traffic taking over Desktop traffic in many countries, marketing will certainly sky-rocket for mobile devices
Video Becomes Bigger
Video content is expected to be huge. From 360 degree videos to live broadcast to creative video ads, video content is going to worm its way into all online avenues.
Marketing Automation
Although Marketing Automation has been touted as the ‘next best thing’ from many years, businesses would really start to reap the benefits of marketing automation in 2016. Tracking the lifestyle of customers in crucial to provide them personalized content and marketing automation will help you fuel your marketing funnel in a big way.
Analytics & Micro-Targeting
Since, 2016 is predicted as the year of data and data without analytics is meaningless and so powerful and micro analysis is required to streamline the data all throughout the year and beyond.
Location-Based Marketing
Although location based targeting is nothing new, the hyper-targeting will take a new form with more personalized location based marketing in 2016.
Relationship Marketing
Loyalty is the keyword. All businesses will aim to create a better and more personalized relationship with their customers. There would be a shift from push tactics into a more helpful form of selling.
Content Marketing
The kingship of content will only get bigger in 2016. Personalization will get a new meaning when it comes to content marketing this year. You need to know your customers, like really know your customers and curate content accordingly. Hyper-targeting and actionable marketing is going to be the norm. The content marketing will move beyond than informing and entertaining into more of creating experience through storytelling, albeit, the older form of story-telling with an intro, middle and conclusion will take short, anecdotal form to capitalize on the dwindling attention span of the consumers. Content marketing will be a huge part of all stages of the sales funnel and content would no longer be a marketing-only initiative.
So, there you have it! Our prediction for digital trends in 2016. When it comes to digital marketing, we believe these trends would emerge in a big way in the next year and they are worth hedging your bets on!
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