Our look at the latest trends in digital media and technology and how they will impact marketing this year.At the start of each year, there is always a lot of interest in predictions for the year ahead and the latest marketing trends."What's Hot?" and "What's Next?" are always the most common questions when I give webinars and talks! As we near the end of the first month of 2016, and people look to the year ahead, the interest increases. Since it's that time again, in this post and a series of others looking at customer lifecycle tactics, I'll look at what I see as the latest trends in marketing which look set to continue into the rest of 2016.
forecasting
In this guide we review the techniques which are most relevant to creating forecasts given the impact of digital disruption. This guide is a briefing on 8 key techniques. It is designed to help all those involved in marketing who are keen to support the change process in their organisation to make more use of digital marketing.
Access the Marketing Forecasting techniques for marketing planning guide.Digital Marketing activities with the greatest impact
Here, for your reference, is the full alphabetical break-down of activities which helps explain the results. For example, Big Data is surprisingly high, but this includes market insight and predictive analytics
- Big Data (including market and customer insight and predictive analytics)
- Content marketing
- Communities (Branded niche or vertical communities)
- Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) / improving website experiences
- Display (Banners on publishers, ad networks social media including retargeting and programmatic)
- Internet of Things (IoT) marketing applications Marketing Automation (including CRM, behavioural Email marketing and web personalisation)
- Mobile marketing (Mobile advertising, site development and apps)
- Paid search marketing, e.g. Google AdWords Pay Per Click Online PR (including influencer outreach)
- Partnerships including affiliate and co-marketing
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Social media marketing including Social CRM and Social Customer Care
- Wearables (e.g. Apple Watch, activity trackers, augmented reality)
Following the views from marketers and businesses, changes in consumer use of digital media and technology is core to understanding trends in digital marketing. Today's consumer buying decision is certainly getting more complex...
The increasing complexity of the purchase decision
We're continuing to see consumer decision behaviour increase in complexity. This example of today's complex consumer purchase behaviour from research analysts GfK shows the complexity of today’s customer journeys across multiple devices and through time, particularly for high involvement or high-value purchases, such as insurance in this instance.
Car Insurance Multichannel journey
The graphic shows how involved today's purchase decision is. Over a 35 day period it averaged 9 visits to 5 different websites amounting to 34 minutes in total. The influence of online channels is clear with 82% of purchasers researching online against 4% using offline only.
Increasing mobile usage
This year we have also seen a continued strong growth in mobile use, shown clearly by Mary Meeker's annual mobile trends round-up from earlier in the year. So, unsuprisingly, the use of mobile marketing will continue to be one of key trends to follow in 2016
To see more predictions from Smart Insights commentating on which marketing techniques you should pay attention to in 2016 see our compilation of Digital Marketing Trends for 2016. It covers social media, email marketing and search.Recommended managing digital marketing resources
source by:http://www.smartinsights.com/managing-digital-marketing/marketing-innovation/marketing-trends-2016/
