Based on the stats and factual information on the performance of Digital Marketing in the year passing by, following are the trends that the online marketers are most likely going to witness in the year 2016.
With 2016 just round the corner, it’s time for marketers and industry leaders to look forward to what lies ahead in Digital Marketing. In the same context, we captured the thoughts on Digital Marketing Trends in 2016. Enlisted below are the Top 3 Digital Marketing Trends that Industry Experts visualize in 2016:
Tushar Bakaya, Marketing Analytics Head, AskMe:
Digital marketing will evolve exponentially over the years and become more and more complex. Digital marketing in India started with basic desktop advertising and now it is all about mobile app advertising and retention. I see the following trends in 2016:
80% to 20% traffic split between mobile and desktop.
Death of WAP and 100% growth of mobile app.
More focus on user retention rather than customer acquisition.
Karanam Srikanth, Digital Marketing Head, Spectraforce Technologies:
Paid Social Marketing – Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter will become costly and the organic reach will become less efficient.
Paid influencer Marketing – It has just started and will become most important in the next 2 years.
Video Marketing. This is happening now and will grow in good numbers in 2016.
Vikrrant Bhola- Senior Manager Digital Marketing, Iffco Tokio General Insurance:
Here are the top 3 trends that I think are going to have the impact on the Digital marketing for 2016:
Mobile First: As we move in 2016 Mobile will be first priority for any brand when they think about reaching their end consumers. Consumers are switching from one screen to another almost real time and this will be trend changer with all primary marketing happening around Mobile. We will see focus shifting on smaller screens with brands reaching out to their customers in more personalized manner through leveraging the power of mobile.
Video content: As we move forward lot of content will be consumed by user via video and in their local language which will surely rule the roost in the online marketing world.
User content review: Any brand content having genuine user review will have more reach then branded content. From online reviews, to social media posts and blogs, the need of genuine user review will rise and will also keep brand on their toes to create positive impact about their product among the consumers.
Afzal Khan – Regional Head Asia Pacific (Digital Marketing), StarOfService:
The future is in world of constant connectivity where majority of people will be spending their maximum time being online or will be always connected via their gadgets/devices using mobile, tablets, smart TV’s etc. It’s all allowing future generations hanging around Digital Media by consuming information from more sources, future formats that will be embracing our life or larger spectrum.
Although in INDIA, digital is still in early growing stage but it’s going to grow exponentially quicker and shift is going to be more towards Mobile. Like in late 90’s telecommunication revolution took place in India, similarly the penetration of Internet infrastructure is going to bring huge growth for Digital Media with the initiatives and active interest of Govt. of India by launching Digital India program.
Top 3 trends that I foresee raging in 2016 will be:
Content Marketing
Mobile Marketing
More of Data Driven Marketing
Ajay Anand – Head of SEO &Digital Advertising, Times Internet Limited:
From Search perspective, “Web of Apps” initiative by Google could be a game changer where apps will be indexed like a normal website, hence cutting down the need for installing multiple apps on a mobile device.
2016 will see a bigger pie of media ad spends and a continued shift towards mobile internet usage.
Soumyajit Dey – Digital Lead Cloud Performance Marketing, IBM:
The scope to evolve is endless. Digital marketing is so dynamic that every day you find something new in this field. Top trends I foresee is mobile marketing, mobile commerce, digitization of events (face to face events being converted to more digital) and emergence of more stronger data-driven marketing with lot of intelligence predictive analytics tools being available.
Rahul Tripuraneni – COO and Co-Founder at Starobe.com:
Content marketing
Native advertising
Intrusive advertising – while the above two are more or less self explanatory, what I see will be a big shift in digital advertising is, for a lack of better word, intrusive advertising. Marketers and digital techno-strategists will build tools and ways to know the customer better, communicate at a personal level, and influence at an individual level. All this at scale. Digital marketing will see a mass customization movement hitting it soon.
Akshat Mathur, Digital Marketing Specialist/Expert:
Digital Marketing is the future of the industry with every brand trying to make a mark in it. This medium is always changing with new trends and new technological ways to market your product. Top 3 trends:
Mobile Marketing – Within Digital, Mobile marketing is the future as brands are realizing the power of mobile as a very personalized medium for the consumers. Mobile also allows you to reach out to tier 2 and tier 3 cities which is still low in number on the desktop medium. More & more consumers are now getting into mobile and brands are using this insight to market their product.
Content Marketing – Native advertising is the future for Display advertising. With consumers turning blind towards display advertising, brands are now moving into branded content through video articles and case studies. Content marketing will be the most effective medium to acquire high-value customers as it allows brand to send the brand message through influencers.
Performance marketing – Due to the power that the digital medium provides of tracking, more & more brands are moving towards ROI-based campaigns. Brands are now shifting their focus on achieving their business objectives through digital medium. In fact, a lot of brands are using offline medium to build awareness for the brand & run a parallel digital campaign to acquire customers through engagement driven campaigns. Digital medium allows brands to track users to the minutest of detail. Delivering right message at the right time allows them to acquire customers at a cheaper cost.
Amit Duggal – AVP, Digital & Mobility at Omnicom Media Group:
Personalization (Content and Context)
Virtual reality
Wearables / IOT
Nilotpal Roy – Product Marketing Manager At Sokrati:
Content is King, Context will be God – More & more relevant digestible content snippets will become the engaging factor in the coming years. As more & more similar content is created, showing the content to the right person at the right place in Digital will be big. Also more power will be present with the online user & user generated content will also become a force to reckon with.
Multiple Devices But Single Identity – Mobile is going to be the next big thing, we all know that by now, but more importantly as mobiles, tablets, wearables get more popular, we are slowly moving towards smart homes, with connected devices. In such a situation every user’s identity on devices & behavior will become the next big thing to identify & make use of. Also as we speak & set top boxes keep evolving, I feel that Smart TVs with customized ads will also become a part of Digital. This will really take remarketing to a whole new level.
Better Analytics – With the evolution of more accurate Data Analytics platforms, more evolved site data & user movement data will surface which will allow marketers to understand users based on their social signals or buying behaviours.
Apurva Chamaria, Head Of Global Brand & Digital Marketing, HCL Tech:
The spends on digital marketing will surely increase in the future. This spend will not increase at the cost of spends on conventional marketing but will be net new spend. Newer ways to target and reach the customers are going to come up. I believe that the future of digital marketing is huge and the scope will increase even further. The top 3 trends will be:
Video ads will start dominating
Mobile will completely dominate desktop. It will be mobile first and web responsive.
Micro-targeting and Personalization will be the new mantra
Shivkant Singh, Head Digital Marketing At Bajaj Capital Ltd.:
People Say Digital Media is Future, but I think Digital is present. In my opinion some of the experiences our Kids may never have like, folding down the corner of a book, renting a movie or leafing through the classified section of the newspaper. The Next generation will have a richer media experience than any other.
In the process of evolution 3 most important thing which will happen eventually are:
Focus will shift to more on small screens.
Importance of Building of Optin Audience will increase.
Movement towards automation of different process will be faster.
Jignesh Gohel, Founder & Marketing Head – OLBUZ:
Digital marketing is one of the most emerging fields these days and I have seen lot of changes in last 9 years. We will see lot of improvement in personalized search, mobile and wearable devices and IOT (internet of things). Search result will be more personalized and quality will be improved. Marketers will have to understand user behavior of mobile & wearable devices and will have to mold the strategy accordingly.
Malak Karajah, Digital Marketing Head, Laimoon.com:
In 2016, I think businesses and marketers will be putting more effort on Marketing Automation, Creating Meaningful and Useful Content, and Mobile Marketing.
As for the more distant future, wearables will be playing a huge role in changing how businesses communicate with customers and honestly, I can’t wait for it. There’s a lot of progress in wearable technology; it’s not quite there yet but it will be.
Shreya Shivangi, e-business Consultant, Caterpillar:
Convergence of communication, technology and media
Mobile ecommerce
Smart Responsive Analytics
I had co-authored a paper on “2020 – India at the Fulcrum of Digital Age”, which is quite contextual to above question. If you are keen to know more please visit https://shreyashivangi.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/2020-india-at-the-fulcrum-of-digital-age/
Infographic of the major catalysts for the exponential Growth of Online Marketing Industry
Nishant Choudhary, AVP, Marketing, Zoffio.com:
Digital Media is booming all around the world due to number of users or we can say simply Digital Marketing is booming.
Top trends for 2016 must be based on qualitative as well as quantitative data. As per Moore’s Law, Internet users are increasing day by day same as chips in the circuit.
Due to this, the demand of products is going to increase around the globe.
The number of Internet users in India is expected to reach 402 million by December 2015, registering a growth of 49 per cent over last year, says a report by industry body IAMAI. This number is expected to further surge to 462 million by June next year as more people come online, especially through their mobile devices. The total Internet user base stood at over 300 million in December last year, which grew to 375 million by October this year.
Muhammad Talha, Head of Digital Media, DalGroup:
Focus will reduce on mobile apps (I know this is controversial but this is what I think)
Cross Channel Marketing will increase in demand (including demand for skillful marketers)
Big PR firms will enter content marketing and competition for small agencies will become cut throat
Archana Dhankar, Digital Marketing Head, Dynasties:
The three trend we will see emerging in 2016 will be Video Ads and video Marketing, the video Landscape is changing drastically and so will the communication channel change for people. I see these interactive mediums to be at the forefront and many brands leveraging the same. In 2016 Mobile will totally dominate the digital space as all the internet users are now on mobile and we are already witnessing the start as all major brands have introduced their apps for things that we do in day to day like real estate, Home shopping, insurance booking which still hasn’t caught the online wave and it will now start to catch up with e-commerce trends.
Prashant Kumar Pracheta, Head of Analytics, CarDekho:
Native APPs would be game changes in 2016. The main advantage is to send push notifications as per user behavior and retain them.
Increase in sales for smartphones compared to desktops.
User Touch Points (Sometimes, we sent too many communications to same users i.e. sms, email, mobile notifications for the same things). This becomes annoying for the users. So now companies are focusing to have a robust communication strategies. Ideally the user should receive only 1 type of communication in which he/she is more comfortable with.
Paroma Sen, Head Marketing, NDTV Ethnic (IndianRoots.com):
Digital media will evolve with the evolution of what we perceive as screens. With the oncoming of Internet of Things, we are going to be surrounded by screens everywhere, with every surface being a potential screen, and therefore a potential way of reaching your target customer.
In addition, with the onslaught of messaging this seems to project, what will become increasingly important is the relevance of the communication – in other words, showing a customer a marketing message (even when they are not expecting it) may be alright if the message is relevant to their current needs.
Finally, another trend I expect is the amalgamation of information at the source which will enable marketers to deliver relevant and personalized communications in a timely manner – an end-to-end marketing tool that goes beyond categorizing customers by their demographics or location, and enables brands to reach out in a more meaningful manner.
Mohit Doda– Senior Manager, Digital Marketing, Reliance Trends:
I think it is unwise to limit digital to only marketing. If a brand does so, it is yet to understand digital. You can’t go digital by having a presence on social media or running ad campaigns. You need to think digital in everything you do. This is how digital marketing is evolving. It is transcending the ‘conventional digital marketing’. The digital marketing personnel are becoming key drivers of progressive thinking, which is a mix of product interventions through technology, evolved customer experience and data driven decision making. Three trends that I foresee in 2016:
2015 helped majority of the marketers realize that India is a mobile heavy market. We also saw that mobile is app heavy until now. 2016 should see some interesting marketing on mobile which is beyond apps.
I see brands investing heavily in video content in 2016. While this was true for 2015 too, but this year only a handful of brands created digital video content. Next year we will see most of the major brands following this trend. I also feel that a lot of this video content will not be product oriented. Brands will endorse positive causes frequently.
We will see brands spending significant budgets on paid social media.
Personally I am waiting to see some innovation around IoT, omni channel retail and personalization at scale, in 2016. These are yet to take off in a big way in India.
Sidharth Shukla, Head Digital Strategy And Social Media, Cheil India:
A truly accurate prediction on its evolution will always never be possible as we have seen from the past. But some of the things that I will hold important as we move forward are:-
Content most definitely. The more we can produce the better and how can we get our customers to contribute as well
Ad blocking and its consequences, this is small right now in India but growing – we will need to and should start having conversations on this front and what it means for us in the context of online media , for example – impressions recorded but not actually served and brands still end up paying for those– how do we tackle this issue? A linked conversation to this would be using or increase the usage of formats which cannot be blocked, product seeding for example.
Social listening and derived intelligence will play a larger role in what we do, not only from the perspective of better communication or to see what works and what does not, but can we use such centers to get brands to play a proactive part in conversations, can we use this to personalize experiences and communication which we have with customers and consumers?
Dikdyuti Sen, Head of Marketing, Delivery Hero Middle East:
Digital Media, rather the digital ecosystem, is evolving rapidly and it is hard to know what is around the bed. However, here are three trends that we will see for sure:
Mobile or to be more accurate, portable devices, will continue to see exponential growth especially in the developing countries. And this will have a strong influence on short transactional behavior such as ticketing, local commerce etc.
Media streaming has had its share of hiccups mainly due to media rights and piracy issues, but it will gain momentum. An indicator of this change is the slow but steady disappearance of CDs and DVDs, and the sudden explosion of wireless audio devices.
Online Banking and Payments is evolving and adoption of this will witness phenomenal growth, driven by the growth of digital commerce.
Bhaskar Anand, Digital Marketing Head, MavenClickZ Media Pvt Ltd.:
Video ads will start dominating. Video ads are certainly nothing new, with social channels like YouTube dedicated to hosting billions of videos and advertising platforms like Facebook and Bing already offering advertisers video options. 2016 is set to be different because Google is finally getting on board with in-SERP video advertising. It’s a sign that users are becoming more accepting of video ads online, and as that trend continues, expect to see more types of video ads popping up in more unexpected places. With Google’s ownership of YouTube, the possibilities are virtually limitless.
App indexing will lead to an explosion of apps. Google has offered app indexing for a while, but as the ranking possibilities for apps become more complex, 2016 will be the year more business owners realize the online visibility advantages of a dedicated app. A mobile-optimized site works wonders for appealing to the mobile crowd, but soon, apps will begin to replace them. Apps can do everything that websites can, except in more intuitive, convenient, accessible ways. We’re still several years away from apps completely replacing websites as a medium, but 2016 will be a pivotal year in app adoption from business owner’s perspectives.
Mobile will completely dominate desktop. 2015 was a big year for mobile—not only did Google announce that mobile traffic finally overtook desktop traffic in 10 different countries, it was also the year they released the “Mobilegeddon” algorithm update to phase out sites not optimized for mobile. But apparently, you don’t have to have an optimized desktop site in addition to a mobile version—according to Google, a mobile-only site with no desktop counterpart is perfectly acceptable. This alone won’t be enough to drive down desktop traffic, but it’s clear what side of the fence Google’s on; they’re banking on desktop traffic fading away, meaning the smart money rests on mobile-focused online marketing.
Dr. Vikram Venkateswaran, Marketing Leader and Digital Evangelist:
2016 will see the evolution of customer journey maps in India, with marketing organizations within enterprises hiring experts in design methodologies to chart customer touch points (Including on digital platforms) and investing to stay relevant on them.
Digital Media would be device agnostic but would still be platform dependent
Because the first prediction, design thinking would take prominence with digital marketing finally moving away from technology and taking a business context approach led by business leaders, designers and design thinking
India based marketing product companies would go mainstream in the digital marketing space leading to a big boost in product development, management and marketing. Services will continue to benefit from this boom.
Braj Mohan Chaturvedi, Digital Evangelist:
Content will rule and change the digital marketing is done in 2016:
Content in all for – text, images, video, infographics, will gain ground. Brands will allocate bigger budget for content marketing. The expectation of the brand will be to get best content possible. Industry will see end of mediocre content. This year we will see rise of infographics and video content as It works best for engagement, and users don’t get bored. The infographics and video will also bring in migration from long text content. This year we will also see rise of content process outsourcing, and acquisition of established blog sites and other media platforms.
Ajay Jain, Author, Photographer, Journalist, Traveller:
1. Content will be ‘kinger': Brands are realizing that content is back to being king, but they might up the ante a bit more. It might still not be emperor, so ‘kinger’ is the word I invented. Everything is content – FB updates, Tweets, Instagram posts, blogs, press releases – and all these influence purchase decisions.
2. Video: 2016 might be the tipping point – or strengthen for 2017 to be the year online video will become the mainstay for digital communication.
3. Engagement with digital influencers to go up. These include bloggers, YouTubers, and those influential on social media including Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. I am not sure how Pinterest and Twitter will pan out though. For brands, PR through these digital publishers could become significantly more important in their communication mix with traditional media getting tougher nuts to crack.
Swati Bhargava, Co-Founder, CashKaro.com:
Marketers to embrace video content: Online video viewers are expected to reach 1.5 billion in 2016, and by 2017, 74 percent of Internet traffic is expected to be video. With growing interest in visual content, it is likely to drive greater investment in video in 2016. While 2015 was a significant year for online video, video content will become even more vital to the digital marketing mix by next year.
App to App Affiliate Tracking by Retailers: As hot as mobile commerce is today, it’s still evolving as new platforms and devices are introduced. While mobile commerce is still in its early stages, retailers are expected to enable App to App tracking system by 2016. This in return would help affiliate partners to drive dedicated traffic to these retailer’s apps more than ever.
Increased spending on Affiliate Marketing: It is estimated that online retailers will increase spending on affiliate marketing by 16.7% per year through 2016. This exceeds the growth of spend on paid search through the same time period. Affiliate marketing is still going strong for one simple reason — it works. Affiliate Marketing can be a source of high-volume, targeted traffic and they have become unrivaled experts at optimizing their own sites.
Avijit Arya, Chief Mogul at Internet Moguls:
Every business small or Business will engage with Videos and eventually have their own production houses so they can produce one better than the other.
Many digital marketers who have not kept up with the extremely fast paced change will lose their jobs and shut down their businesses , clients know more than the basics its not 2009 it’s time to make your value felt by reading their data points and interpreting money making options.
Analytics and mobile only experts and businesses will win BIG the gains are going to be huge for those who begin now and take on 2016 with a bang. Which means by end of January have your new pitch new ideas new way of working ready with teams trained and boots laced up ready to take on this superbly exciting year ahead.Here is the video of the #Askaviarya you tube show:
Deep Sherchan, CMO, Simplify360:
Rise in Customer Service on Social Media: In 2015 we have seen major push from brands towards servicing their customers and resolving their issues online. This push is coming from every part of the industries – banks, telecom, retail, online commerce, airlines, insurance, media, fmcg etc. We are also seeing technologies finally reaching the level of sophistication that will enable brands to service their customers on social media.
360 degree view of customers: One of the most repetitive question which every brand is asking is “Who are my customers?”. Fans and Followers count are becoming irrelevant, the main target here is who among these millions of fans or followers are my actual customers and who are my propects? Can I cross sell my service to these segments. Hence understanding the 360 view of customer’s social profiles and their footprints are becoming very important for brands to segment their audience and target with right messages. We will see rise in technologies and activities which will enable brands achieve this.
Earned to Paid: For many years social media experts have been pushing for earned media and for better content marketing. This still has huge importance for a long term social media strategy, but many brands are not being able to effectively leverage their content marketing making them reluctant to push what ever they have through all the paid channel in social media like Twitter Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads and YouTube Ads. In 2015 we saw the rise in Ads on Instagram and YouTube, 2016 will take this to next level with every brands having a dedicated social media ads budget.
Swati Mehta, Enterprise Marketing Lead, Octane Marketing Pvt. Ltd.:
With each passing day the growing importance of internet and shifting nature of consumer engagement is magnifying in the eyes of India Marketers. Digital Marketing is no longer a mere component of the larger marketing strategy; it is now seen as foundational to marketing. With 400+ million internet users and 200 million+ smartphone users in India, a big chunk of India consumers can be reached through the digital platform at an unprecedented speed and ease. In fact in 2015, Online has emerged to be largest communication channel in India.
2016 looks to be a great year for Digital Marketing in India, and I anticipate it shaking up the game with top 3 trends:
Mobile will subjugate Desktop: Mobile usage will eclipse desktop usage in 2016. Google announced that mobile traffic finally overtook desktop trafficin 10 different countries. Yet we see that for most of the campaigns, content and creative is first developed and tested on large screen (desktop) and then deployed on mobile platforms (responsive design). This approach has to change in 2016 to mobile first (design, develop and deployment) with optimised experience for the desktop.
Video is the Key: Video is everywhere, and it’s the best way to engage with millennials.2015 was a busy year in video marketing. In July, YouTube announced that 400 hours of video were being uploaded to the site every minute. In November, Facebook announced that they are generating 8 billion video views per day. 2016 is set to be different because Google is finally getting on board with in-SERP video advertising. It’s a sign that users are becoming more accepting of video ads online, and as that trend continues, expect to see more types of video ads popping up in more unexpected places.
Social media and email marketing will become more and more intertwined: Our research (in) shows that 74% of marketers said that social media helps in increasing exposure. Overwhelming 90% + India marketers also believe in the continued importance of email in their 1:1 outreach to consumers (and customers). We believe in 2016 email will finally move from ‘batch and blast’ mode to an integrated part of CRM program and multi-channel marketing.
These 3 trends aren’t the only ones that will emerge over the course of the next year, but they will be some of the most significant.
Himanshu Arora, Co-founder, Social Panga:
Thanks to several successful digital marketing campaigns executed by various brands in 2016, we expect the marketing world to take up digital marketing in a much more serious and planned fashion. Some of the trends that we expect to see are: -
Rise of the Mobile: The mobile platform saw considerable traction in 2015, with companies such as Myntra deciding to eliminate their desktop platform completely. We expect to see this trend continuing, and in fact getting much stronger, as more and more people across the world get access to cheap smartphones and Internet connections.
Engagement: The New Metric: So far, reach and page likes / followers have been some of the most dominant metrics to judge social media performance. All companies have been trying to reach as many people as possible, and get the maximum number of people to follow them back. However, we are now seeing a clear shift in strategy, where brands are more interested in engaging the audience rather than simply generating new audience. We expect this trend to become the main performance measurement metric for digital marketing.
Mobile: Installs are passé: Through 2015, a lot of companies have come up with their own mobile apps, and there are also companies that are completely based only on a mobile version. So far, these companies have focused on digital marketing to get app installs as their primary target. However, with more and more companies losing customers to uninstall, we expect the trend to shift to how to use digital marketing to engage existing mobile app users to keep using or spend more.
UI/UX is king: With more and more companies shifting to mobile based, more intuitive designs, we expect UI/UX to be a core focus area in 2016, where more and more companies would be focusing on improving their customer touch points and experience to be able to retain them and not lose out to competitors.
Chirag Shah, Co-founder, Seventynine:
2015 was more of a reach. 2016 will more be of an active e-commerce n transacting users.
More brand money will flow on mobile as a medium with targeting parameters
Focus of B2B companies on Data Management Platforms (DMP)
Top 3 Digital Marketing Trends Industry Experts Expect In 2016 from Digital Vidya
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