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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Blogging: Stop Following, Start Exploring

The title “Stop following. Start Exploring.” is the slogan for a popular Indian educational portal Shiksha (means education), but it also holds true for bloggers. As a newbie bloggers, most of us start with choosing a niche for our blogs. Some of us don’t even know what niche we should choose. Whether, it should be a multi-niche blog or  a single niche blog, etc.  Now even if you somehow figure out the niche you are interested in and created a blog with related domain name, the next step is to curate contents for the blog.

The old saying in the blogging world is “content is the king”. But, how true is that? I would say very true and content is the only thing, which differentiate your blog from the millions of blogs on the internet. Now to create contents for your blog, the popular method is to bookmark popular websites related to your niche and try to figure out what is working for them and what is not. For example, if you are interested in gadget niche you may follow something like GSMArena, Anandtech, Phonecurrent and create a similar website.

Bookmarking popular websites isn’t a bad idea nor analyzing them. However, following them extensively to the core where you start focusing on only a few popular blogs and trying to be like them will not take you anywhere. After a year of blogging, you will find yourself nowhere in the crowd and you may ultimately quit blogging. And the popular blogs which you were following w

Why? Because, you chose to follow them, and they chose to explore.

#Stop Following 

No popular websites on any niche became popular overnight. There are various factors, which have contributed to their success. They have started early, they chose a niche which wasn’t populated by that time and most of them are godfathers of their niche. They started from the scratch and were really passionate about what they are doing.

Now among all these factors, there is one more thing which has made them what  they are now. Now, before I spill the beans, let me ask you one thing.

Which popular blogs, those bloggers used to follow? Note that there weren’t many popular blogs that time and almost everyone was a beginner.

The answer is none. Instead of following anything, they choose to explore things, which were related to their niche. They still do the same and we still do the same as well. That is following them.

I began my blogging journey with the same attitude of following some of the most popular blogs related to technology niche. I started as a writer for tech blogs, which helped in learning about blogging. Later, I created my own blog in the technology niche. Fortunately, after 6 months of blogging I was in better position than most of the tech bloggers in the same field who started even before a year than my blog went live.

You may call it a luck or just coincidence, I was able to choose topics, which were low competitive as well as had high search volume without using any SEO software. I did apply some basic SEO techniques, which worked perfectly well with the blog. After 8 months of blogging, the blog was getting around 300K pageviews a month, among which 90% of the traffic was organic, 2% from social media and 8% from referral.

Woohoo, happy ending, right? Nope.

Now after 2 years of starting the blog, the blog is still in a strong position, but couldn’t bring the satisfaction a genuine blogger will look from his blog. If I ask myself how exactly is my blog different from thousands of other technology blogs on the internet? How many topics I started before anyone in the web world and found solutions for them? well, I barely could answer anything. Except the fact that it has grown large, brings good revenue and I never applied any Black hack techniques. Is that enough? Well, at least not for me.

#Start Exploring 

Since I keep creating new blogs every now and then, this time I thought of building a blog, which purely contains solutions or topics discovered by me (mostly). The blog is Technicalnotes and as the name indicates, it is a tech blog and technology is the niche I love.

For this blog, I stopped following and started exploring. I also did not use any off page SEO tactics to make it achieve good rankings in search results. It wasn’t necessary because the contents in the blog were first to be published in any blog on the internet. As far as link building is concerned, if you are the first one to publish anything important, the links will flow automatically as the popular tech blogs will pick your contents and link back to them as reference or source. Basically, you are making them follow you, instead of following them.

Now talking about the result so far (though, it’s too early), in last few months the blog has grown much faster than I thought and the results are impressive. It has quality  and unique posts. The links coming to the blog are natural and at the end of the day you will have something original, which you have created by exploring things instead of following.

Conclusion 

If you are a newbie, have started blogging in 2015-2016 and looking for a long-term goal, I would recommend you to start exploring things on your own than simply following the footsteps of the popular. Try to create your own contents, do extensive research and then publish your post. It may look difficult in the beginning, but you will grow to be a much experienced and mature blogger with an opinion over the years.

Blogging is a crowded place with more number of spammers coming with new tactics to trick the Google algorithm every day. Now if you don’t create a unique blog with unique contents, then there is no reason for Google to rank your blog higher than the blogs which has contents similar to your blog and have published it before you could. And the possibility is that Google may just destroy all your hard work by penalizing it for the crime you didn’t commit while targetting the spammy blogs. Now it’s completely your choice to create something which is worth having and boosting about or just follow the masses.

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2015 Social Media Predictions

There is always interesting discussion at the end of one year looking into the next – What are the social media predictions, trends and hot topics to look forward to. This year I thought to analyze several of the expert predictions for what is to come from a recent Business 2 Community post.

Many marketers are looking forward to a “buy” button availability. During summer 2014 the “buy” button has been tested on Facebook and a roll-out to the rest of us seems to be in the eminent future. And who wouldn’t love the one-click opportunity to buy when the products or services seem impending from those potential Facebook clients. As the article says, this is a strong prediction for 2015!

With the introduction of the ‘buy’ button both on Twitter & Facebook, social commerce will truly get its wings. To ensure the most targeted offer on social for customers based on demographic & behavioral attributes, vendors will build cross channel consumer profiles. Customers will benefit with more relevant offers and companies will benefit with a more comprehensive customer profile across social and traditional channels.

Impending Facebook algorithm changes will make it harder to be promotional. post too many “look at me” posts and your content will not be shown to your target audience. In this social media overloaded society, it will be increasingly important to create content that engages your audience. Starting in January, content on Facebook pages will have increased scrutiny, that why I think that this next statement is likely true for a 2015 outlook. It’s a no-brainer really, work smarter and not necessarily harder. Invest more on sharing your influence and expertise and less on the shameless self-promotions that many are getting tired of seeing. It is not about quantity, but instead good quality!

Businesses will no longer strive to push content out daily. Instead, they will focus on longer form content (stats show effectiveness here) that provides context, hard data and analysis.

Another thought shared by one of the 25 industry experts I agree with, as well as disagree with. As far as social media predictions go, it is certain that social media will continue to be further integrated within business practices, how can it not? What I disagree on is that business owners should never choose their social media channels before considering their overall marketing plan – Just because a social platform is out there, does not mean that you should be there. Be sure to choose the right platforms for your business to be on. Also, always be aware of the implications of being there. Do you have the manpower to properly manage the platform? Is your voice being heard? Are your customers there? Careful consideration needs to take place FIRST!

Social media will continue to be more closely integrated with day-to-day business practices.

DISAGREE: Social media will continue to be more closely integrated with day-to-day business practices. Many businesses will think social first when crafting a marketing plan or developing sales outreach strategies. In addition, businesses will continue to invest more of their marketing and strategy budgets toward existing and new social platforms, as well as social analytics. Specifically, as the organic reach of promotional content faces more challenges, paid placements will become essential in reaching potential customers via social media.

Feel free to read more of what the social media predictions for 2015. There are several more thoughts that merit careful consideration. No matter what happens though, during 2015 we will continue to find more businesses participating in social media to reach their customers.

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