by Marketing is one of the most vibrant and dynamic niches. In 2016 we will see constant increase of web and social media content quality, which will require adequate strategies companies will need to use for engaging their audience. Mobile internet will also play a big role in the future, and businesses that provide their customers with appropriate apps will become much more visible. In this article we summed up some of the most important marketing trends for an ongoing year.
Contents
Develop recognizable brand
Digital age brought plenty of opportunities to entrepreneurs. Starting a business is now easier than ever, but to turn your startup attempt into successful and sustainable company, you will need to make your products or services recognizable to consumers, which requires a powerful branding campaign. In digital age branding is more important than ever and you can use plenty of advanced tech tools for building your brand. Branding requires: marketing, designing and sometimes even programming skills and it is a very difficult process. In this article we divided it into several equally important steps:
- Create an authentic logo, colors and message– to do this you first need to determine most important values your company or product represents. Start thinking as a customer and determine the way you wish for your product or business to be seen. With all this in mind and some designing skills, you will be able to create recognizable and designing scheme.
- Gain customer loyalty– this is not an easy task and you should do elaborate market research beforehand. Best way to gain customer’s loyalty is by providing top notch products and services, great user experience and helpful customer support.
- Promote your brand– this phase includes shameless promotion through various types of media, which should be backed by intelligent marketing strategy. Make a great website, be active on social media pages, use guerrilla marketing, PR stunts and always be involved with community issues.
Content marketing
Attracting potential customers with interesting and useful content is one of the leading trend in digital marketing niche. Content marketing is not a new thing, long time ago companies released interesting and colorful magazines, which turned into internet content with the introduction of World Wide Web. When someone says the word ‘Content’ most people think about articles, although there are various other media that can be used for delivering good-quality content. Useful and interesting information can be wrapped in videos, podcasts, graphics, eBooks, photos and various other forms that can be used for sharing creative thoughts.
Company’s content marketing strategy needs to be customized according to their customer’s interests. It should contain secret calls to action, but it shouldn’t be too promotional. With figuring the right content strategy companies can turn their presentations into places where potential customers hang out during their free time, which will drastically increase number of visitors and conversion rates on their websites.
Social media
Last decade has been the time of social media and it is hard to imagine a successful company that doesn’t use huge marketing potential these platforms bring. Companies use different ways for engaging their social media followers. Gaining the highest number of reactions, comments or shares is not the only parameter that determines social media campaign’s success.
Entrepreneurs always need to work on increasing their conversion rates, because high number of followers won’t instantly increase company’s revenue. For increasing conversion rates, entrepreneurs need to target their audience much more closely. If they do it by using paid ad platforms, they need to use right behavioral and interest criteria and if they do it by using organic means, content they share on their pages should be strictly made for specific group of people that has high interest in buying their product.
Develop an app
The year 2016 will be the year of mobile internet. This is also confirmed by Smart Insight’s study on mobile marketing, which says that in 2015, 51% of internet users accessed their favorite websites through smartphone devices. With this in mind companies will need to make a large shift towards engaging mobile users, and the best way to do that is by creating mobile apps. Same study determines that more than 80% of mobile internet traffic goes through mobile apps and less than 20% of users access website through mobile web.
Although most entrepreneurs think that creating an app requires a team of IT experts, today there are platforms that allow people without any knowledge in coding to create your own app, make it functional and release it through some of the most popular app stores.
Although social networks are slowly taking the lead when it comes to customer engagement, company websites are still places where magic (and most purchases) happens. That’s why companies need to build authority websites. Places where they post trustworthy information and share other trustworthy links from around the web. Making this kind of website requires some of the practices we described in previous paragraphs including innovative design and elaborate content strategy.
Marketing trends are changing at a very fast pace, which is why entrepreneurs and professional marketers need to closely follow their company’s business insights and choose strategies that create highest customer engagement.
