The year 2016 is already upon us. In numerology, 16 comes to its formation with the fusion of the number 1 (indicates leadership and frontwards movement) and the number 6 (indicates dominating and being powerful); therefore, 16 turns out as the fusion of leadership and frontwards push for brands to gain a dominating or ruling position.

As far as the modern-day competitive market is concerned, it’s been stated that there are three categories of marketers: those who make things happen, those who let things happen, and those who ponder what happened. It’s hard to decide which one is going to strive through the formidable challenges of online marketing trends changing every day. But, following the 11 critical trends given below will strengthen your marketing strategy to be dominating over other competitors in 2016:

1)Individual Preferences: The customers today are craving and expecting much more customized and personalized solutions – be it products, services or even experiences. This trend will be stimulated by…

2)Intensified Human Technology: Be it digital media or mobile – the sense of empowerment and probability for individual customers will be boosted significantly.

3)Real-Time Brand Engagement: Awareness is a major consideration. Marketers will evaluate the brand engagement on the basis of how well their brand is perceived against the ideal ones of the similar category, rather than resting on “Likes” or simply try to take advantage of imagery.

4)Increasing Costumers’ Expectations: The brand’s ability to get an exact measure of segmented and continuously-growing emotional expectations of the customers will offer potential advantages in terms of engagement, merriment and profit-making.

5)Real-Time will become Real Significant: The customers’ expectations for real-time have increased, covering many brands and are expected to expand through the areas of product or stock availability, delivery and customer assistance. All these factors are considered as the prominent influencers for the decisions of making a purchase.

6)Brand Uniqueness is still important: Magnified customer expectations will be tagged along with improved acknowledgement of product and services as pieces of merchandise. Brands will need to more specific and ‘stand for something’ more relevant, meaningful and important for customers. And, don’t ever forget that…

7)Content is King: If you really want to enhance engagement with the smarter, highly-expecting customers, you should also become smarter – keeping in consideration their emotional values attached to the category-specific things that they can utilize and own.

8)Brands will become Emotional: Successful brands will go an extra mile to determine the emotional values in the certain categories in which they will be competing and utilise them as a base for the thoughtful deployment, differentiation, and unique storytelling.

9)Non-Fictitious Storytelling: Storytelling is okay until the time the brand stories are actually reflecting their brand values and categories reality, and actually meeting customers’ criteria of trustworthiness, otherwise you will be simply entertaining the audience without actually fostering them to engage.

10)Online Authenticity: As the ‘Internet of Things is getting mature, consumers expectations will tend to grow higher in terms of security for their private purchase data. This will often serve for building confidence among the online resources and the brands that use them.

11)Going Specific: This implies that content marketing will tend to grow as a specification in itself while tools like GPS with Digital Platform will boost placement and answer concerns of the native advertising, advanced delivery platforms, and short span of consumer attention. The analysis will be no more limited to the count of views, likes and shares and will take brand engagement into the consideration.

It is an undeniable fact that marketers need to face new challenges with every passing day. But, abiding by the old saying – if you really want to do something new, you will have to stop doing something that you were doing earlier. These 11 trends will give the brands an opportunity to give up on old habits and adapt brand new techniques of brand engagement, advanced business models, modern technologies, and beneficial opportunities for the forthcoming year.

Author Bio

Kristy Bernales is experienced Melbourne web designer at WDX (http://www.webdesignxperts.com.au), residing in Victoria, Australia. She is a detail-oriented individual gifted with creative sense. Adventurous sports and soft music tracks often serve as boosting agents to her! To know more about her follow on @kristyberales