The end of 2015 is fast approaching and companies are starting to form their 2016 plans to meet next year’s objectives.
Marketing is constantly evolving, especially with today’s innovations like new social media platforms, increased use of mobile devices to access the internet and new apps. Customer expectations are more demanding than ever and businesses, both B2C and B2B, need to keep this in mind when creating marketing, sales and customer experience strategies. Here are 5 marketing areas to keep in mind when planning for 2016.
1. Marketing Automation
According to Chiefmartec, the number of marketing automation providers have doubled to over 1,800 from 2014 to 2015.
With content marketing becoming a growing piece of the overall marketing strategy, automation will become an essential way to amplify and use the content for marketing purposes, and will also help the sales teams with through nurturing prospects and managing leads. Marketing automation will become more closely integrated and used in conjunction the entire suite of marketing tools, from CRM to email.
2. Mobile Will Overtake Desktop
In 2015, mobile traffic overtook desktop traffic in 10 countries including the US, and Google expects that trend to continue as evidenced by their update to their search algorithm to factor in mobile-friendliness in search results. With the emphasis on mobile usage, both B2C and B2B need to ensure that their websites are easy to use and quick to load on mobile devices, whether it’s viewed on a smartphone or a tablet. For companies who’s websites are more complex, such as e-commerce sites or sites with many or large figures/charts, the creation of a separate mobile app may be necessary to facilitate a functional mobile experience.
3. Increased Use of Inbound Marketing
B2B marketers that create blog content receive 67% more leads than those that do not, and the benefit of using inbound marketing to generate and nurture leads is expected to continue to increase.
According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2015 report, inbound marketing is the dominant marketing strategy for companies with under 200 employees. The same report shows that the advancement up the corporate ladder correlates strongly with an positive perception of inbound marketing ROI, which means we can expect inbound and content marketing to be increasingly included in marketing plans.
4. Expectation of Responsiveness
With the rise of quick access to information, customers expect companies to keep up with the pace too.
Internet users expect their mobile experience to be comparable to their experience on desktop. Mobile users are more ready to abandon a slow-loading page than when they’re on desktop. For emails, just 4% of customers expect businesses to respond to their emails within 15 minutes in 2014; that jumped up to 14.5% in 2015 and this trend of expecting near-instant responses is going to continue. On Twitter, people want a response to a Tweet within an hour; on the phone, 60% of customers will only hold for 5 minutes before hanging up.
5. Search Past Search Engines
After Google, the next largest “search engine” isn’t a search engine like Bing or Yahoo, it’s the social platform, YouTube. Search capabilities within social media platforms, such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, will continue to improve. The benefit to companies and brands is that their pages and updates will get more visibility; this may also mean the need to stay aware of best practices on “search optimization,” not just on Google, but also on the different social platforms to stay ahead of the competition.
Now that you’re aware of some of the major trends to anticipate in 2016, it’s time to start planning. If you’d like to chat with us about how to develop your marketing strategy for 2016, contact us today.
