During 2015 digital marketing became one of the most important tools for businesses. Trends such as wearable technologies, content marketing and personalisation of a company became among the most important as marketing hurtled through the digital stratosphere.

With digital trends on the rise this year, we don’t expect them to stop in 2016. By tracking marketing trends, your small business is able to keep up with the big brands and jump on and bandwagons that come your way, instead or running after them only to be left trailing behind.

Mobile Will Continue to Dominate the Desktop

In the New Year we don’t expect to decrease in the amount of people using their mobile phones for shopping. As a result, they are only set to become more integrated in shopping trends. What can the small business do to adhere to this heightened mobile tendency?

If your business is online you must make sure your site is mobile friendly. Without this, you’ll lose more sales than ever. Getting an app would earn you even more brownie points with millennials, as they trust this technology; 14% wouldn’t buy from a company that doesn’t have a mobile site or app.

Video Content Will Take Off, Big Time

Video marketing has been flirted with for a long time by big brands, but at the moment it still doesn’t seem to be a main form of marketing. This is set to change for 2016, as video content looks ready to rule the roost.

The transparency of video leaves little for the company to hide behind, as even tweets can be barefaced lies to get more followers. Video content gives the customer a closer relationship with the brand. *Enter relationship marketing*

Get Cosy with Your Customers

Social media has brought brands and consumers closer than ever, and with such direct interaction relationship marketing is at a new level. The result of this is we (as consumers) don’t like generic brands. This is a great triumph for small businesses, who have the ability to interact with customers and determine personalised needs for each individual.

One way of tailoring your services to a customer’s specific needs is to create a customer profile from information based on social media, offers and past customer purchases. This can then be used to create a personalised list of products for customers (although this does take a lot of time, money and energy).

Gone in a Flash

Ephemeral technology has been increasingly successful in 2015. Apps that applies constraints on user content have become increasingly popular, with Snapchat now bragging 100 million daily active users. This kind of technology allows the user to be more creative, as they are so limited in their expression that every word, picture and video counts.

Your small business can use the rise in popularity of this technology by creating short snap stories and uploading them via the app, or by extending this use to the latest limit-enforcing app. We’re watching Xpire – the app that brings ‘disappearing’ posts to Twitter.

What are your marketing predictions for 2016? Leave a comment in the section below.

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About The Author

Karl Bilby

We work very closely with our expert accountants to bring you the latest factually correct tax and accounting news. We also enjoy writing about small business news that we hope you find useful!

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