Mark Twain once said, “There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.”
With the New Year comes countless people who create new resolutions. Typically these New Year’s Resolutions only last for a few weeks, which means most people fall back into their old habits. I get it; change is hard, but if you don’t adapt or push for greater heights then you’ll fall into the second group from the quote above.
With all of that said, I want to touch on five marketing trends that will help take your business to new heights in 2016…
1) Marketing Automation Will Continue to Grow
Long have passed the days of only having the option to manually pushing out social media updates, email marketing campaigns, and the sharing of content marketing assets. Sure, the manual process may still exist in some organizations, but imagine the amount of time savings (i.e. cost savings) you can obtain by adopting marketing automation. Further, marketing automation alone is worth $5.5B and leading the way with lead generation as well as nurturing.
Executing automated marketing campaigns not only helps you keep track of touch points that are positively impacting your business, but also aids the sales cycle. Being able to hone in on the lifecycle stages of leads by delivering content assets that drive more interest will only foster growth.
2) Mobile Will Not Overtake Desktop
Of course mobile marketing is important, but the key to success there is how active your current and potential customers are on mobile. Per Rand Fishkin at Moz,
“2016 will be the year that growth rates for mobile begin tapering off. Note — I’m not saying we’re at “peak mobile,” but I am saying the growth rate has reached its apex and I think in 2016, the percentage growth numbers will fall.
Simultaneously, I think we may have reached the peak of desktop/laptop decline, and I expect that in 2016, desktop usage rates will stay largely unchanged. Most everything that mobile was going to replace or take away from desktop use has been taken, and I’m skeptical that things like creative work, programming, long-form writing, computer gaming, and other tasks that big monitors and full keyboard+mouse inputs were made for can be successfully cannibalized by the screen that fits in our pockets.”
3) The Adoption of Podcasting Will Continue to Rise
About 46M people listen to a podcast, up 12% from 2013. This medium is taking off now because of the happy convergence of three big trends:
- The technology has finally improved enough that listening to podcasts is easy and convenient for ordinary listeners.
- Talented professionals — many of them veterans of NPR or other radio outlets — have begun to focus on the medium.
- A new generation of podcast-focused businesses are figuring out how to convert these professionally produced, popular podcasts into serious money.
Understand the value you can provide your target audience by implementing podcasting. From there, integrate it with your content marketing strategy. Doing so, could potentially provide another revenue stream for your business. Nevertheless, this route is worth testing and making time for.
4) Content Marketing Won’t Just Be A Marketing Function
The development and execution of content marketing won’t just fall on the marketing department. Rather, more businesses will begin to test different ways to create meaningful connections with their target customers and build relationships.
Communication involves content and strong engagement involves great, high-quality content. So, running an entire content production will be more of a collaborative effort to drive towards the ultimate goal of growing sales and margins.
Moreover, make sure you take into account the following:
- How much is a lead worth to you if obtained through content marketing?
- What does the content production look like?
- What are the major KPIs you will track to validate what’s working?
5) Real-Time Marketing Will Grow Market Share
Utilizing tools like Snapchat, Facebook Live, and Periscope will help marketers, entrepreneurs, and businesses attract higher engagements among their target audience. As such, social media will continue to be used as a channel to funnel in traffic for these real-time marketing efforts. More specifically, you’ll see real-time marketing leveraged as a way to “sell” without overtly saying, “Buy from me.” Since people buy from people, having an interactive space will only help grow brand loyalty, affinity, leads and sales.
