As the year comes to a close, prognosticators of all stripes have taken to their keyboards to write up their predictions for 2016. We’ve sifted through the analyses and selected the most intriguing, well-reasoned ideas for trends to watch in the coming year, from emails that look good on every device to personal digital assistants that live in your smartphone.
1. Digital marketing will no longer be a niche. For decades, marketing professionals have often divided their expertise into silos: branding, content marketing, direct advertising, digital marketing. But Michael Schinelli, the CMO of the University of North Carolina’s business school, predicts that digital marketing will no longer be seen as just another speciality. Instead, as marketing increasingly becomes digitized, digital marketing will simply become marketing as we know it. He argues marketers need to adapt to a world where commerce flows all the time and ad campaigns don’t simply begin and end at will. [Read more at Forbes]
2. Emails will finally display correctly across devices. In the web design world, responsive design has become firmly established as best practice across the Internet. But that change has been slower to take root in email, which is hamstrung by multiple formats and complicated code. But email marketer Chad White predicts that 2016 will be the year that email, too, joins the responsive revolution, allowing marketers to fully take advantage of email design across platforms—especially mobile, where the majority of users are expected to check email accounts next year. [Read more at Marketing Land]
3. Personalized digital concierges will become standard. With the advent of Siri, the idea of asking your phone a question and expecting a competent answer is no longer so strange. Kevin Getch of web design firm Webfor expects we’ll see a lot more digital assistants come to the fore in 2016, which means marketers, too, will need to learn how to reach new audiences through these platforms. The day when products and services can be ordered through a friendly digital assistant aren’t so far off, it seems. [Read more at Mashable]
4. The cookie will crumble. Websites have traditionally used cookies to track user behavior, but that metric is outdated and doesn’t play well with many current websites, according to Ran Ben-Yair, CEO of Ubimo, a mobile advertising firm. With more and more users moving towards mobile, cookies aren’t able to track much user behavior that takes place on the mobile web, which means advertisers and marketers aren’t equipped to see how well their mobile campaigns are doing. This means new metrics will rise to take their place, enabling more precise tracking of just how well campaigns are doing on mobile platforms. [Read more at CIO.com]
