Seven Digital Trends to Start Thinking About Immediately

The first notes of Mariah Carey’s popular Christmas song ‘All I Want for Christmas’ are a clear signal to marketers to promptly do two things.

First, they need to clear their calendars to make room for festive drinks at receptions. And second, they need to prepare for a wave of various forecasts and trends awaiting them in the coming year. This is how the team from Marketing Week, or rather the global agency AnalogFolk to whom they have entrusted their media space, announces their list of trends that are, unlike others, less in the realm of science fiction and more in line with marketing plans. After such an announcement, we have no choice but to convey the seven digital trends for the next year that, according to AnalogFolk, marketers need to start thinking about right now.

Explosion of Platforms

The first thing that needs to engage the gray cells is Facebook, with which brands have come full circle. In the early days of Facebook, advertisers had the opportunity to achieve organic growth, spending time and effort to attract virtual consumers and prompt them to react. However, over time, the possibilities for organic growth diminished, and a range of new paid media options emerged, causing brands to get somewhat stuck in how they communicate with their audience on the largest social network. In this sense, it is time for brands to change the way they communicate with their audience because the ‘standard’ content they posted in the early days of Facebook is no longer sufficient. Advertisers should invest in increasing and working with teams responsible for digital communication, teaching them to be more proactive and even more available to consumers for any questions and requests. In this way, consumers get the impression that they are communicating with a real person, not a brand. Or, as Marketing Magazine states, in 2016, brands will not only exploit social networks but will also behave more socially. Forecasters give good chances to advertising on social platforms like Periscope or the increasingly popular Snapchat. Since these are platforms where users exchange videos, advertisers could use them for their events. For example, a very effective way for an event to achieve greater reach is to engage ‘influencers’ (celebrities or ‘ordinary’ people with a large follower base) who would post video snippets on their profiles.

From Theory to Practice

According to previous experiences of advertisers, if an ‘influencer’ posts advertising content, users will notice it sooner than if it appears in some traditional media (especially when it comes to a brand whose followers are the influencer’s target audience). In doing so, brands should not neglect the quality and creativity of the event itself, as it is also in the ‘influencer’s’ interest to appear ‘cool’ in front of their audience. A good (and very expensive) example of collaboration between an influencer and an advertiser is that of the portal Mashable and Kanye West. The controversial rapper filmed videos via the Periscope platform before the MTV VMA awards. The effectiveness of advertising amidst this explosion of applications, platforms, and other digital media can no longer be tracked using traditional research tools, so AnalogFolk predicts a rise in new tools for collecting user data and tailoring campaigns according to that information in the coming year. Companies will form partnerships with researchers and IT companies that will develop specific algorithms for them to track a precisely defined target group. The term Big Data, which denotes a large amount of data (Facebook alone generates 6 GB of data in one second), will need to be addressed not just theoretically but also practically. A similar thing will happen with the advertisers’ owned media, which will transform from classic portals into mini social networks or mini media (similar to traditional ones, with rich content). To be successful in transforming a classic, informational page into a full-fledged ‘owned’ media, advertisers should publish interactive content (around which the audience can engage), develop a good CMS that allows easy content sharing, and design the site in such a way that users can quickly and easily find exactly what they need.

Brands as Wizards

Programmatic (simplified, media buying based on automation and Big Data) will also become a term that advertisers will need to take more seriously and adapt the ads they publish to it. Although it sounds like science fiction, ads will need to come not in one but in dozens, if not hundreds of variations, depending on the audience. The offering of products will be somewhat different. As Marketing Magazine states, consumers love personalized products, but paradoxically, they are not crazy about too much choice. Therefore, advertisers should simplify the path to their product and instead of offering a plethora of different products, provide fewer, but tailored to the customer’s needs. Yes, that sounds difficult, almost impossible, but on the path to becoming wizards who know exactly what the consumer needs, they can be helped by teams employed to track consumer experiences (‘user experience’). They should find ways to encourage consumers to share information about which product they liked the most and whether they would change it. And finally, the team that compiled these seven digital trends predicts a rise in mobile advertising for the next year. This has been trumpeted since the first appearance of smartphones, but this time, analysts assure, every advertiser, if they want to be successful, must think about how certain content looks or is consumed on a mobile phone. As they state, content may look great on a 27-inch laptop screen or a large screen in a conference room, but one must ask how it looks in real life, on the small screen of a user’s mobile phone. Yes, not only must mobile campaigns be created, but care must also be taken that everything coming out of the marketing workshop looks good on a smartphone because that is the medium where content is most often consumed. In any case, it seems that all the coins (from programmatic, big data, owned media, or native advertising) that marketers have encountered this year are transitioning from theory to practice in 2016. Whoever masters the laws of the mentioned trends first will be a more successful (and wealthier) marketer in the digital, and thus in the real world.