Apps as we know them will start to disappear. Virtual Reality will become more common [the first one is for sale and the rest will soon follow]. Let’s dive into the major ideas shaping markets the rest of this year.
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1. Native content
Adblocks will get more inventive in storytelling formats with rich media that showcase great photos, videos, graphic and written content. Hopefully, well written content will outweigh the popularity of click bait and list articles. Obi-wan is our only hope.
2. Programmatic buying
Everything is automated. Online display advertising that is aggregated, booked, flighted, analyzed and optimized via software interfaces and algorithms. When buying ads space, you never actually speak to a human. While it include RTB it also includes non RTB methods and buy types such as Facebook Ads API and the Google Display Network. One of the best parts is to mid-campaign evaluate what is really working such as geography, time of day, audience segments publishers to narrow your search to get the the highly effective ads. This is different than traditional advertising in which a buyer agrees to a certain run of ads and is locked in to the contract.
3. Audience as the content creators
More than 50 percent of millennial trust their peers opinions about products rather than their own. The consumers now have the power to praise or lift a brands influence within their circles on social media. This is pretty scary to not have all the influence anymore, but it can also provide a huge opportunity to allow user generated content to become a part of their marketing and advertising campaigns.
4. Search marketing
It is incredibly important to factor in your industry type and location when targeting organic or paid search exposure. Also be aware to not overlook or disregard the significance of branded and unbranded terms, desktop and mobile search as well and ranking factors.
5. Mobile marketing
The percentage of time being spent on apps (86%) rather than mobile web (14%), proves that the need to develop a dedicated mobile app for your service is paramount. Also, when you look at conversion rates for the mobile web (0.92%), tablet (2.86%), or traditional desktop/laptop (3.41%) it is safe to assume people are browsing the different tablets with different purchasing ideas in mind. With mobile allowing a much smaller amount of information to be shown and easily comprehended, you need to figure out what is the most important. (Easy to read and view content on mobile, calls to action that are easy to use, contact details that don’t require finger dancing).
6. Search behavior
25% of overall search queries are now on mobile devices with a pretty even usage between desktop and mobile. The difference comes on mobile the average visit duration and # of visited pages is much lower on mobile with higher bounce rates.
7. Mobile advertising
Search, social and advertising are a priority on mobile, but you should not discount email marketing as this has also become highly popular on mobile as well as still important to desktop. It is purported that mobile ad spending will exceed that of desktop in 2016.
8. Email marketing
The amount of opened email rate in 2015 were 48% mobile, 30% webmail, 22% desktop. In the past 3 years, mobile emails have grown 180%.
9. Social media
Social media as a digital channel rather than a place for socializing with friends. It is pay to play, but really the organic reach with FB is almost zero as opposed to almost 100% of zero. Ad space is getting more expensive and the talk is no longer on using social to gain trust and engagement with your followers. Now you need to be making money off of it. Of course social media is still great for traffic, brand awareness and customer engagement, but unfortunately it is no longer free traffic. You must pay to really get noticed or having a very good written piece of content that is shared by others. You should move beyond vanity metrics to thinks that are more important such as conversion and click through rates.
10. Digital content assets
Media creation is a digital assets that will provide brand value and still be alive in the future as opposed to ads. Ads will not be seen in the future even though you may have spent thousands on it, but a video will last forever as it is indexed by both search engines and social media. your website is your most important digital asset and it should always be evolving and giving readers something new to view each time they come back. Keep in mind the more links you have to rank high on Google or Facebook is what are your digital content assets.
11. Crowd sourced content
It’s no secret that paying for the creative concepts from advertising and marketing agencies is expensive. What is cheaper is the number of people that use your product who have their own specific reasons why they choose to stick with you year after year and furthermore their reason probably lines up with many others using it as well.
12. Data
The web now provides us with all the tools to discovering what is and isn’t working. A/B split testing can now be automated to show you which is working. Believe the data not your intuition.
13. Influencer marketing
To get a wide audience to care about your product you need athletes, celebrities or other online influencers to help reach the right audience. They can not only reach a large audience in scope, they always bring with their faces product credibility and trust that someone can rely on. This is obviously been used for a while, especially since Peyton Manning started getting into making commercials and promoting products.
14. Virtual reality
It is still in the early days of it’s evolution, but with Google and Facebook and other huge web influencers are putting a lot of money into this, it could go in any direction possible in the next few years.
15. Wearable technology
From the having your phone connect to a watch to getting all you need to stay on track with your health on your wrist, the wearable tech of today is only getting more in depth. Now it is a must for watches to test your heart rate and why stop at the watch when you can have wearable shoes and shirts. Excited to see what is happening in this field for 2016.
