The customer of 2016 is on his way, and the fight for the online attention of customers has already begun. Your customers on social media are changing really fast. Managing social media networks, you might have already noticed that the requirements of the audience to products and services are rapidly growing. Mobile revolution accelerates the change in users' behavior.
I am not trying to scare you that your chances to deliver your content to the target audience using the already established marketing channels and techniques will be decreasing each year... but wait a minute. Yes, that is exactly what I am trying to say. Be prepared. By 2020, to reach or engage the target audience on social media, which will be more legible than it has ever been, will be very difficult.
As marketers and social media management experts, we need to know about the changes and recent trends and be ready for them:
Everyone talks about the personalization
75% consumers like when brands give them personalized offers and content. Consequently, there are only two main reasons why your followers unsubscribe from letters and social media profiles from both commercial and noncommercial organizations:
- Their email and social media marketing turned into spam (69%)
- The content is no longer relevant to the subscriber or the follower (56%)
That does not mean email marketing is dead. Email is still a digital trend, a key communication channel that allows marketers to acquire leads and customers. The secret sauce is personalization.
Personalized letters, social media posts, or any content you use can increase the number of clicks / conversions by 14%, conversion rate by 10%, and a personal approach to purchasing can increase sales by 8%.
Mobile dominates desktop
2015 will likely to be known as a year of mobile. Judge for yourself, in 2015 mobile traffic finally overtook desktop traffic in 10 different countries in Google, Google has officially made mobile-friendliness a ranking signal, and mobile commerce sales has grown 32%.
What does it mean for a brand? This means that now mobile optimization of your website have an impact on all the aspects of your work: from visibility, traffic, and conversions to engagement and sales themselves. So make sure your call to actions are easy to use from a mobile, content is easy to read and view, emails are optimized, and your users can contact you in a click.
Native advertising
The consumer of 2016 is quite picky about how to spend his time and what content to consume. This means that now consumers easily ignore intrusive adverts and it takes only a glimpse to reveal any hidden advertising. Therefore, native advertising became trendy.
Native advertising typically comes in forms of promoted videos, promoted posts and stories, promoted music and playlists, images, websites and promoted listings. Concisely, in any form that can inform, entertain and inspire consumers without overtly selling anything. Why should you care? Because such formats of advertising can increase the loyalty of the audience and the effectiveness of your campaigns in 2016.
Video advertising
2015 was the year of storytelling, consumer engagement, and audience building. Having realized that video would not promote itself, brands started renewing their video strategies and focused on the full-funnel video marketing that finally became mainstream.
Due to the fact that more than 650 million videos have been uploaded by almost 67 million creators to more than 30 video platforms, now videos are not about creating them but about standing out from a crowd. Unfortunately, there are no strong tips on how to create videos that go viral, but you can still use this checklist to increase your video's chances:
- Focus on emotions.
- Use a strong call to action.
- Set video duration at ~40-75 seconds.
- Create high-quality videos.
- Experiment with new video creatives often.
It will not be a surprise for you that the consumers are to accept video advertisement rather than the text- and image-based ads. In 2016, Google is finally getting on board including video-based advertisement in a search. Even if Google is not starting a trend, video-based ads will definitely become a turning point for video marketing and bring it to the next level.
Paid social media advertisement
It is time to recognize that social media is not free anymore. Veterans of social media presence continue losing social referral traffic, and it is harder than ever to get attention for a new commercial page, group or profile.
Now to stay alive and to get organic reach for your posts, you need to invest money in it.
The data is your everything
The maximum cost that I'm willing to pay for a click at the moment is $0.45. And it doesn't matter how attractive an idea of running a campaign on a huge blog is. That is because I know a landing page conversion and I know how free users convert into paid ones. Guess to what the guesswork can lead you when your intuition screams that $0.60 is a good deal for a click for you. Right, to investment losses.
Fortunately, the web now provides us with all the data what works really well and what does not work at all. When investing money in any online activities, a digital marketer is expected to prove his ideas with numbers. Calculate return on investments, so the decisions could be based on numbers and not on your (even brilliant) intuition.
In conclusion. In only 7 years, we all have made a huge leap in digital marketing. Therefore, these 6 trends are not unexpected, they were easily predictable as a direct result of all the changes that happened over the last years. Some of the trends have been already adopted and are now successfully used by marketers all over the world. Want to jump into 2016? Then come check if your website works well on mobile.