As 2016 nears, the excitement grows! It’s that time of the year where you start thinking about your personal targets for next year, isn’t it? It is also the ideal time to try to predict the newest trends in digital marketing!

Don’t worry, someone has already done the hard work of trends-spotting for you! In this post, we have condensed the insights from the leading visionaries in the industry – so you just have to sit down, take notes, and get ready to rock your Xmas party small talk with you boss (this is more useful than you think, in case you were wondering).
Hotwire PR, one of the leading tech, mobile, consumer and B2B PR firms
just published its seventh annual “Communications Trends Report”. The report, based on feedback from over 400 agencies across 22 countries, is as close to Santa’s Little Helper in his workshop at the North Pole as you can get.

Well, what gift did he wrap-up for you? What are brands planning to do in 2016?
Engagement! Interactions! Social!

[Tweet “Brands will look to engage consumers with age-agnostic content that emphasizes certain values”]

Still? Yes, still! But the reasoning is clear: even though we have all been talking about this for years, did we ever achieve real engagement? We are pretty sure that very few of you will say yes to this question.
So why is 2016 going to change this? [Tweet “The time is ripe to leverage this data to personalize digital marketing activities”] and meet the consumer’s needs and brands will have two strong reasons to do so: new tools and adblock.

2016 will be the year of the shift from counting to understanding: conversations, stories and user generated content on social media are not just numbers in your metrics, they have a value that goes beyond sentiment: people are expressing their interests, what they really care about. Tools (like ROIALTY) are able to categorize these interests and segment the audience accordingly.

2016 will be the year of the shift from visibility to engagement: as AdBlock technology is proliferating, brands need to find new ways to talk to people, instead of just shouting at them from the space around (or over!) the content they want to consume. Thanks to the insights collected with the tools mentioned above, it will be possible to build consistent content strategies for each cluster of interests.

Some practical ideas? Check out what one of our clients has already achieved or read a review from the customer side.

And after you’ve done that, here’s some more food for thought for your conversations – and your planning:

  1. Virtual Reality will play a significant role in Consumer Experiences and while VR will continue building momentum in the gaming and entertainment spaces, marketers will begin looking at new ways to integrate this content into a range of content strategies.
  2. Real-time content, rather than planned content. As organic content reach on social media is dramatically decreasing, marketers will focus resources more on real-time content.
  3. Hyperlocal content: you’ve read above how personalisation will open the doors of engagement, this is true not only for interests, but also for localisation.
  4. Marketing campaigns providing a service is a natural consequence of what we’ve said so far. They will become more useful and targeted. Also, social innovation and solutions, useful for the specific community will be the driver of the new forms of business, such as the sharing economy.
  5. Brands as activists: brands are increasingly asked to position themselves on social and political issues. Therefore, communication strategy should be oriented to humanizing the brand and linking it to society.
  6. With the fragmentation of video platforms, marketers will focus resources on production experts, planners and account managers to find out which platforms work best for brands (again, listen to your audience and follow its behaviour).
  7. The news industry is evolving towards a new form of journalism: data journalism, structured journalism and real-time journalism, are good examples. For the moment, let’s call them third-party publishing channels. Platforms such as Medium and Linkedin Pulse are expected to amplify their news on other channels… they are following the audience!

ROIALTY platform is monitoring this trend, while we as a team, are working on them. Real Time, social profiling, knowledge of the information and data about people are considered the main drivers to capitalize on the Fan/Follower base of Brands.
We help brands to create personalized digital marketing activities based on the interests and behaviours that we profile from their audience.

And on Tweet “ROIALTY’s 2016 objectives list there’s a live profiling and storytelling solution, involving Virtual Reality and a new form of Journalism”… so stay tuned!