The prediction season started and the business forecasting is essential. Small business owners started focusing on their own marketing plan; Therefore, here are some predictions for what the top trends will be in the coming year and how these trends are useful for your small business.
Search
Search Engines Competition will increase. It’s clear that Google, Yahoo, and Bing have been in the top search engines forever. Google company executives said that number of searches is increasing day by day. But the big search engines will get some added competition because of the social media usage.
Social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, etc are expanding their search capabilities or getting ready to do so. Also, Google indexes public tweets on Twitter. It’s happy news for the small businesses which has been making good use of social media marketing already, and bad news for those who haven’t.
Social media has become the noise by which small businesses can live or die. If the startup or small businesses increase their review on social media, potential customers may be able to find those businesses in 2016. If some companies have worse feedback, negative reviews crowding cyberspace, social network search capabilities, etc won’t help the overall marketing efforts.
The number of customers using social media is increasing day by day. People have the ability to make purchases, talk about what they bought, and comment on the seller through social media.
Mobile
Mobile is just getting wider and viral. Mobile devices are everywhere and the saturation of mobile is amazing, and it’s still growing. Researches show that mobile use now accounts for more than half of the total time people spend on digital devices. According to the data from the Global Web Index, 80% of internet searches are done with mobile phones. Also, 60 % of all email in the US is now read on smartphones. Moreover, Google studies state that in 2015 mobile internet traffic exceeded desktop traffic.
All these clearly mean that for the small business, the website they have for the brand should be responsive (mobile friendly) one and need to offer a mobile app to allow customers to easily access the products and services from their favorite mobile devices. Also need to plan mobile-friendly email marketing campaigns so that the mobile users can access the marketing emails with a smaller screen, so it’s important that each email should be concise, simple and easy to read.
Apps
Different studies leads to the idea that apps will one day soon overtake mobile-responsive websites. Be aware that the apps have all the functionality of mobile-friendly websites, but they streamline user access. Here the app users don’t need to type a search into a browser to begin communication with a brand. App indexing will results in more opportunities for sure. The main advantage of apps for users is easy to see.
If Google index the apps, then the app appears in Google search results and customers automatically see an install prompt for the app. App indexing improve visibility as wells as gradually increases the number of mobile users who actually download and use the app.
Automation
Marketing automation increase the benefit to whole marketing program and make the budget more effective. Email automation tools allow users to spend less time and money like creating and distributing emails, and more on creating quality, engaging content to go in those emails. Automation helps to create and schedule emails, automate social media posting, track open and response rates, and even calculate conversions in an easier and fastest way. Automation can allow small businesses whose marketing departments are too small to achieve more without increasing budgets.
Pop-ups
Pop-ups are the windows that appear on a website when customers have been on it for a certain amount of time, or when they float the mouse icon over a specific portion of the site, such as the browser bar. Pop-ups are most likely to elicit annoyance from online users, but the data says otherwise. Studies show that lightbox pop-ups can be an effective way to solicit email addresses from web users.
If a user is already on the way to leaving the page nothing will lose by stalling them a few seconds more with a pop-up that asks them to enter their email address, so its required to consider timing. Lightboxes also offers convenience to consumers who go to the website looking for the opportunity to sign up to receive emails about deals and specials will easily find where to type in their information. Lightbox puts it front and center while often email sign-up buttons are tucked away in corners of the page which are not clearly visible to the customers.
These trends all are the result of different studies. The small business can lay the groundwork for continued growth in 2016 by making use of these digital marketing trends to create consumer interest and loyalty to the business or services.