Top 10 Digital Branding & Marketing Trends For 2016

What are the top digital marketing and branding trends to watch for in 2016 that will impact your company? Borenstein Group’s insights for corporate marketers and professional communicators alike.

YouTube’s video app has had the second most unique visitors year over year with only Facebook ranking higher. With YouTube acting as the undisputed king of online video and Facebook beefing up its own video platform, 2016 is poised for brands ready to commit to mobile video marketing.

2. 5 Seconds is all You’ve Got!

Analytics Research shows that when it comes to mobile video advertising, if you don’t catch the attention of the viewer in the first 5 seconds, you can forget about it as engagement drops dramatically. Whether it’s humor, drama, or shock value – the premium for higher results is what happens in the first five seconds.

3. Marketing Automation Matures

As marketing automation platforms mature and collect big data, marketers will struggle to make data into actionable information to make intelligent decisions. The platforms are not the solution, they are the tool to make better decisions for both demand generation and customer experience.

4. Shared Economy Drives Greater Opportunities

The notion that even affluent customers are looking to make extra bucks is revolutionizing the concept of social sharing in the information space. Additionally, physical transactions such as transportation, hotel rentals, driving your own car and sharing resources like knowledge communities are rampant in digital-first startups and grown-ups like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and Tinder.

5. Privacy is the New Piracy

After experiencing cyber security attacks and stolen data in virtually every organization, from banks to the white house to the military, data piracy will become a major concern for non-Millennials, who inherently trust mobile-first, as new collaborative platforms such as e-healthcare records, accounting online service providers, and other Software-as-Service companies will be trusted with your utmost secrets. Who you can trust will become a branding issue, not a cyber security issue.

6. B2B Digital will Become Consumerized

From both a design and content perspective, Customer Experience (CX) and User Interface (UI) on your desktop, tablet or smart phone, have been initially-owned by impulse-based B2C advertising to consumer brands. In 2016, as B2B corporate buyers now use the same devices (BYOD) for work, they expect their B2B suppliers, vendors, and partners to match their consumer experience and demands for speed, responsiveness, and ease of use even with the most complex B2B enterprise software systems. The divide between what’s right for B2B and B2C will diminish by default of the standardization of the devices being used.

7. Who’s Da Boss? It Might be a ‘bot.

As marketing and CRM platforms automate workflow of tasks, many marketers will find themselves reporting to a robotic system rather than a human being. The danger zone will be amplified as companies struggle to identify when a human needs to be involved, like when to send a tweet or determine the timing of a campaign based on market research data.

8. Your Brand Reputation Isn’t an Algorithm Online reputation management will transform from predominately robotic SEO that matches up with the latest Google algorithm for ranking your favorable mentions, to shifting to value-added authoritative content that is shared with third-party validated media platforms, not your old-school wire releases alone.

9. Authenticity & Anonymity in Product & Employer Reviews

As 2015 has come to a close, giants like Amazon are experiencing the backlash and responding with adding ‘VERIFIED PURCHASE’ to their product reviews as trust has dramatically eroded in the authenticity of product promotions versus genuine reviews. That struggle will be accentuated as employer review sites will face the same issue of verifying the authenticity of company reviews. Until now, they had little to no consequences. However, the threat of litigation will force them to do something, and the pressure to generate advertising revenue will result in more paid sponsorship and paid reviews which will further erode consumer confidence in the trusted brands.

10. It’s Not You, It’s Your Phone!

With GPS-enabled apps such as Google Maps and Waze, which enable your smart phone to pinpoint your location at all times, advertisers will create new WAZE to remind and reward you for stopping by their store. Already in action, loyalty coupons beamed to your smart phone will become the new way to get your business, and eventually replace the old coupon clipping routine.

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4 ways to create personalized marketing messages

One way to obtain higher levels of engagement and collect actionable data is to make personalization a priority. Use these tips to initiate personalized email marketing campaigns.

If I were to ask you if you would prefer to receive one-size-fits-all (spam) messages or ones that are personalized, which would you choose? I'm guessing that pretty much everyone would pick the personalized messages. They're more relevant, engaging, and actionable.

As a marketer, this is pretty much a no brainer - we know how our clients and prospects answer that question. Accomplishing personalized messaging is perceived as much harder to do in practice. But with a game plan and steady progress, you can transform your marketing program and your results from marginal to fantastic using personalization techniques.

Here are four ways to begin developing more personalized communications:

1. Ask questions and store them in your digital marketing database

A question or survey can even be just a button in an email. Send an email that merely asks, "Did you buy?" Then, put two buttons in your email that delineate a "yes" or "no" response. The answer is then easily stored in your digital database and you will be able to send a different message to those that bought compared to those that did not.

Of course, you can add more information into your digital database by conducting a survey - or better yet, using progressive profiling techniques to gradually ask one or two questions in exchange for content or another offer. Make sure all this data is going into your digital database and that you are using it to tailor your messages. If you don't have immediate plans to use the data, I question the wisdom behind even asking the questions in the first place.

2. Integrate data from other systems in your company

CRM, order management, shopping cart, call center, and ERP systems are all great candidates for integrations. In these corporate systems, there is a goldmine of information that you can use to personalize messages.

Meet with other departments and understand what systems they have, and what data they are creating and maintaining. Figure out how you would use this data to personalize your messaging. Get your digital marketing platform's API guide and begin understanding how you can link data and feed data into your marketing platform, and then pull in your IT teammates to make it happen. Make sure they understand the importance of having this data connected to your marketing systems, or it will continue to be a back burner project for all.

3. Capture and use behaviors from within your own marketing systems

Behavioral data is among the most powerful data you can use to personalize communications. Why? It's fresh, immediately actionable, and highly relevant to each recipient

First, you need to add web tracking to your website. Explain the importance of this step to your website owners, and make sure they know that you have both synchronous and asynchronous tag management options.

Next, build out automated and triggered communications based on browse abandons of pages and sites, PDFs viewed, videos watched, emails opened and clicked, SMS messages opened, and more.

4. Link to data from other systems

Some of these systems might not even be owned by your company, but your customers and prospects are using them along their customer journey. Incorporating this important outside information will allow you to meet them on their turf.

Examples include webinars, event registration and attendance, geo-location activity, social participation, app downloads or actions and more. At IBM, we call these "Universal Behaviors." The beauty of a universal behavior framework is that you can capture real-time behavior happening in other systems, and link that data to triggered automated messages which are deployed by your digital platform. Perhaps the best part about it is that the communication - email, push or SMS - can happen not days or weeks later, but immediately. This is personalization at its best.

Employing these approaches singularly or in combination will ensure that you will remain fresh and relevant in what you are communicating. You will enjoy higher engagement metrics and results. Also, hopefully you can begin to taper down your non-personalized e-blasts that we have all come to loathe.

What are you doing to drive higher levels of personalization in your marketing department?

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