The digital marketing game changes fast. Experts like Jeff Kamikow, a revenue guru who’s been around since before “online marketer” was a viable career track, are quick to point out that if you’re not leading the digital pack, you’re behind the curve.
“I’ve worked in the same industry my entire career,” says Kamikow. “But that doesn’t mean I’ve done the same thing — far from it.”
In other words, what works this year isn’t guaranteed to work next year. In fact, what works this year might be an active detriment by next. Search Engine Land has a great primer on key SEO techniques to master in 2015, for example. Most are time-tested and right on the money, but it’s an open question whether the finer points of a contemporary strategy that incorporates SEL’s broad strokes will have much relevance by the end of 2016.
That said, no marketer worth his or her salt refuses to peek around the digital bend for fear of making an erroneous prediction or bad projection. So, with the usual caveats about things changing and nothing being settled in a fast-moving industry, here’s what savvy marketers are looking forward to in 2016.
1. The Continued Rise of Mobile Ad Networks
Advertisers are finally embracing mobile ad networks’ power. Mobile ad networks use historical prospect data, location information and other inputs to deliver highly relevant, highly effective ads designed for opportunistic conversion. Whereas traditional forms of digital advertising take the old “spray and pray” approach, mobile ad networks are akin to heat-seeking missiles (of commerce, not destruction).
2. Social SEO Takes on a New Meaning
Word broke recently that Facebook is working on its own internal search engine — or, rather, a far more expansive search feature than what it already has in place.
Once deployed, and depending on what other functionality changes accompany it, this new feature could lead to an explosion in the volume and quality of original content published direct to Facebook.
Over time, Facebook’s publishing capabilities could come to rival LinkedIn, the only major social network that’s really figured out how to (or cared to) square the longform publishing circle in a bite-sized-content world.
It’s premature to speculate how Facebook’s internal engine will interact with or affect traditional SEO practices. Keep this one on your radar.
3. Mobile Functionality Is the Future
Mobile ad networks are poised to revolutionize digital marketing, but they don’t do any good for sites that aren’t effectively optimized for mobile in the first place.
Google’s recent “mobilegeddon” algorithm update is merely the most visible in a long string of algo changes and priority shifts designed to penalize mobile-unfriendly websites and reward responsive or mobile-first design. If your website is still optimized for desktop browsers, stop what you’re doing and invest in a mobile retool.
4. Learn to Love the Snap
In 2014, Snapchat founder and 25-year-old person Evan Spiegel was roundly criticized for rebuffing Facebook’s $3 billion buyout offer. How could a company with no revenue to speak of and a completely unproven business model turn down an offer that would make its founder one of the richest people in the world overnight?
In retrospect, Spiegel’s call looks brilliant. Snapchat is turning into the stealth marketing medium of choice for political candidates, blue-chip brands and everyone in between. A just-announced plan to sell sponsored Lenses for up to $700,000 per day is likely to have future investors seeing dollar signs — and deep-pocketed advertisers lining up to snag a cut of the platform’s millions-strong captive audience.
Oh, and if you can’t afford $700,000 a day, plow what you’ve learned from Facebook and Twitter into an old-fashioned organic Snapchat campaign. Either way, learn to love the Snap.
5. Marketing Is Going Virtual
Snapchat might be the newest social marketing darling, but it’s far from the sexiest. That honor arguably goes to Oculus, the Facebook-owned virtual reality company set to release its first production-grade VR headset in early 2016.
Virtual reality has made tremendous strides since the bad old days of nausea-inducing lag and uncanny-valley imagery. It’s now, well, pretty darn reality-like. Early VR marketing is likely to leverage traditional video, logo placements and other fairly straightforward techniques.
Going forward, it’ll be interesting to see how creative advertisers are willing to get — and how far early VR 2.0 platforms will let them go. And though Google Glass is dead for the time being, marketers can’t forget about the eventual elephant in the digital marketing room: augmented reality, which is sure to take the mobile ad network model to the next (several) level(s) in the coming years.
6. IoT Could Break Marketing
The consumer-facing Internet of Things has taken a little longer to arrive than some predicted, but it’s finally here. By the end of the decade, expect connected sensors to live inside a host of inert objects, from household appliances to retail kiosks. Savvy marketers are already drawing up plans to integrate IoT devices into comprehensive, multichannel campaigns — as well as more opportunistic touches, like kiosks serving on-the-spot retail ads to passing prospects or appliances automatically ordering new supplies.
Remember the Basics: SEO Techniques to Master
Let’s circle back to Search Engine Land’s primer on SEO techniques. Before you can take full advantage of these 10 SEO trends for 2016, it’s a good idea to grasp some SEO basics that too often get sidelined in favor of sexier, but less meaty, concepts. It’s a walk before you can crawl thing.
Your first SEO-related New Year’s resolution for 2016 should be brushing up on these key SEO techniques:
- Identifying measurable, mission-critical KPIs that support reliable benchmarking
- Re-familiarizing yourself with your analytics suite — yes, many folks don’t know how to read a Google Analytics report
- Boosting your website’s page load speed
- Simplifying your website’s navigation and layout
- Developing an external content network with no-follow backlinks
And your second? Well, the sky’s the limit.
