Digital Disruption Trends for 2016

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2016 is going to see a more aggressive continuation of digital disruption. What do I mean by this? We'll notice social CRM, marketing automation, conversion rate optimization and IoT marketing applications continue to evolve and push the boundaries. 

We'll see a continuation in the evolution of mobile marketing, wearable tech and the beginning of virtual reality enter the mainstream market. 

I'm calling it, 2016 will be the Year of Apps

In 2016, more enterprises will have dedicated apps, as Google will start app indexing. SaaS and more personalization of the customer experience will become the norm. Dedicated apps will also ensure better gamification layers for brands wanting positive interaction and engagement form brand advocates and their top 5% customer. 2015 saw User Generated Content strategies become mainstream, 2016 will see the apps that automate promotions around them. 

Apps will noticeably be more powerful and be able to offer more. Apps will start to visibly begin to replace mobile-optimized websites as the transition to mobile continues. History will say, "2016 was the year apps become so popular and more intelligent" that it started to make websites and landing pages less important to engagement. More first points of contact will begin to occur on apps. Business owners will need to change their perspective accordingly. 

Mobile immersion and algorithmic content distribution will continue their "invisible" growth. It will therefore, be more important than ever for your company to have top algorithms and top design strategies for the human interface to your products. This means some degree of personalization, automation and more emphasis on the human experience. 

Trends of 2016 

• Desktop traffic will continue to diminish, making mobile-optimization, responsive design and the emphasis on cloud SaaS, mobile apps, and BLE sensors interacting with apps continue to increase. 
• Content marketing will continue to evolve, moving more in the direction of video advertising and video content with SMS becoming more dominant over traditional social media (where News is becoming more prevalent). 
• Relationship marketing will become more important, that includes more brand loyalty and long-term strategies to improve the profitability of the top 15% of customers. This helps companies develop strong, emotional customer connections to their brands that drive word-of-mouth promotions and lead generation.
• Location based strategies, in-store optimiztion, BLE sensors, smart spaces, mobile-iBeacon use of predictive analytics, and POS-displays will all become more common, contrasting with the continued rise of Ecommerce and closing of brick-and-mortar retail. This will create an interesting dichotomy and the sense that society is continuing to move into the virtual world. 
• Millennials will crave the 360-degree story-telling of Oculus Rift and the hype of VR will start up again. The VR train could be a bit like what iBeacons were for Retail in 2014, but with more hype and scope for application. 
• SMS will continue to become more more important and slowly disrupt both traditional social media and Email, as a hybrid real-time alternative for both. We saw this in 2015, with the Snapchat phenomena, and targeting iGen should start there, and not on Instagram. Some refer to this trend as "ephemeral" marketing. 
• Search will continue to move to a beyond google mindset, in that search via social media like YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter will continue to increase. Search for people could change as well with Yelp for social like initatives like peeple app. Searching apps, is forseen to eventually be a disruptor on how search will operate, as we change from a desktop (website) model to apps (interactive engagement) model. 
• Wearable tech penetration should increase to about 20% in some places by the end of 2016, creating a personalization trend for IoT, device recognition and improved customer experience and automatization of service to take place. This includes mobile payment becoming more the norm. 
• (IPAs) Intelligent personal assistants (hello Siri!), also called virtual assistants will get an upgrade and have better algorithms that are better able to customize your interface with the mobile world and access to information online. More voice commands, more interaction and easier tools to organize ourselves. (Cheers Cortana!). Meet you guys at conversational search and immediate answers  (no need to always be at your computer to get answers in 2017). 

We can say 90% of the world’s data will be created next year. By 2020, we can say 90% of the data was created a second ago. That’s how fast data is moving.

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Michael Spencer helps companies improve their content marketing, blogs, social media & video marketing initiatives. If you are a startup or smallbizz you may want to outsource some of your digital marketing needs. 

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