12 Ways You Can Stay on Top of the 2016 Wave of Marketing Trends

Happy New Year and you’re off to the races when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of your customers with your refreshed marketing campaign. How can you stay ahead of the trends and ride on top of the waves of popular marketing approaches in 2016? The data suggests that this year over 2 billion people around the world will own a smart phone.

When the competitive surf is up, your marketing has to be timely, concise, and dynamic, nearby, relevant, flexible, actionable, shareable and mobile-friendly. It’s a tall order to build a marketing strategy that addresses all of these characteristics. The best strategy will require a holistic approach in which no one part stands alone. Launching and sustaining such a marketing plan could be daunting unless you consider incorporating parts systematically.

Here are 12 ways that you can stay on top of the 2016 wave of marketing trends.

1. Treat me like a person, not a transaction. Relationship marketing is key to ensuring that your clients visit your business and stay with you for the long term. Finding ways to help your clients solve their toughest problems helps you create that connection.
2. Repetition equals automation. If you are posting the same information across multiple channels, then using tools that will automate the process will save marketing resources – time, money and personnel. The most important task is to know what to automate.
3. Marketing gets closer to the client through location-based strategies. Tate Design has emphasized the need to claim local and reap the benefits. We reviewed how “near me” searches have grown over time.
4. Now you see it; now you don’t. Building off the psychology of supply and demand, quickly expiring content or once-viewed expiration of content sustains client interest. Technology such as Snapchat allows a marketer to entice clients to engage quickly or lose the opportunity. The approach is likely to be very popular with younger clients who are distracted easily by novelty.
5. Remove the crazy rabbit, pop-up advertising. Ad blockers will decrease the roving ad across posts and publications. These were the visual equivalent of the dinnertime telemarkers. For many clients, this is a long over due trend.
6. Social media – it’s a tool, not a strategy. Building client awareness, loyalty, referrals and trust in your company and its products should be your marketing approach. Pulling out social media from the marketing toolkit and then channeling into creative discussions with clients is the bottomline.
7. Get mobile – here, there, everywhere marketing! Tate Design has been guiding clients to improve their online presence across various technologies, especially mobile devices. Smart marketers will stay in front in of their customers wherever they access product information and will connect the experiences seamlessly.
8. If you are going to be everywhere, then you’d better solve something. Content will continue to be king. Your product or service has to address a client’s most urgent needs. There is no point in having bells and whistles, if the content does help the client succeed.
9. Take two: putting your content on camera. Tate Design previously described the importance of telling stories as a marketing approach. Trends suggest that putting those stories on video and sharing them with clients are a surefire way to keep interests high.
10. Write the client into the story. Interactive marketing is taking cues from virtual reality to give clients a sensory experience in 3-D of products and services. Examples include an inside look of a house for sale, or a beach view at a vacation destination. This trend may expand upon the success of video viewing of products or services.
11. Bring out the measuring stick on big data. Marketers will have access to new tools that pull together hard numbers and text-based information. Reliable and easy-to-use evaluations of unrelated datasets will give marketers a clearer description of customer preferences.
12. Show me the money on marketing. Executives will demand that marketers provide clear information about how market plan A performed against market plan B. Investments in marketing will be based on performance.

Marketing approaches need to be built to withstand the rigor of powerful waves of competitors and unpredictable dynamics of the target client’s needs. Tate Design ensures that your marketing strategy surfs ahead and on top of the waves of innovations in technology to let you finish strong.