Essential Mobile Marketing Trends to Watch in 2016

Every year we see a perceptible shift in marketing trends, be it the emergence of social media marketing or the importance of mobile marketing, each year brings a new trend with it. In the recent few years, marketers have been extremely vigilant about mobile marketing as the budget and spending for mobile advertising and marketing has grown significantly. So let’s get on with the 4 biggest trends that are changing the scene for mobile marketing in 2016.

#1. Mobile Friendly Websites

When Gartner predicted that M-commerce will reach almost 50% of E-commerce revenue by next year (2017), e-commerce companies all over the world started rushing to provide a streamlined shopping experience over desktop and mobile. Customers are choosing only those website builders which offer responsive templates; this speaks volumes about the emergence of mobile-friendly websites. Also, there is an increase in the number of dedicated apps, as 2016 has seen substantial growth in app indexing, i.e. SEO optimization on Google and app store.

Tips for Marketers

• Ensure your company has a responsive website, even better if you can push them for a dedicated app.
• Design a new campaign for promoting mobile-friendly website or app.
• Optimize email marketing by segmenting mobile and desktop users and sending customized emails.

#2. Vertical Video Ads

In the last few years, vertical ads have become quite popular with companies like Burger King running vertical ads on Snapchat. However, the trend now is going to evolve in to vertical video ads, which to be frank has been a sensible shift as rotating the mobile screen every time you want to watch a video is quite annoying.

Tips for Marketers

• Create vertical video content and show only vertical videos to mobile users.
• Adapt old videos to vertical format.
• Use tools like Crop Fill and RVF to optimize your videos.

#3. Social E-commerce Integration

According to Alex Frias of Track Marketing Group, native e-commerce integration on social media websites will be the biggest market disruption. What this means is that users will be able to make purchases from their phone or desktop on a brand’s social media page. Shopify has been offering Facebook Buy Button since a long time which enables Facebook users to buy from Facebook itself and now it has come up with a Twitter Buy Button to add to its offerings. This is a great opportunity for marketers to monetize their social media platforms.

Tips for Marketers

• 60% of social media time is spent on smart phones. So while your customer is scrolling down on Twitter or Facebook, you can trigger their buying instincts with this single buy button.
• It is extremely easy to integrate buy buttons on social media pages, and you as a marketer should be able to drive more sales and generate leads via it.

#4. Mobile Marketing Automation

This is perhaps the most important trend in mobile marketing recently. Mobile marketing automation will be seen at its best with predictive analytics, user behavior testing, email marketing and personalized content will become the mainstays of mobile marketing. Companies will have to evolve in a way that they create different customer personas and then craft different content based on these personas. Even marketing automation providers are taking mobile seriously with more mobile friendly features and dedicated mobile marketing campaign platforms.

Tips for Marketers

• The sooner you adopt marketing automation, the better. Marketing automation software provides valuable intelligence on your customers so you craft better campaigns with more suitable content.
• Best part is it leaves out the guess work out of marketing, so all your campaigns perform better than expected.
• It also helps you save time, which can be better utilized for creating unique content for each persona.

#5. Bonus Trend

No mobile marketing trend prediction is ever complete without mentioning Snapchat. This mobile social media platform is breaking patterns at many levels. If you haven’t cornered the market on Snapchat yet, do it at the earliest.

Tips for Marketers

• Snapchat will soon be coming up with location-based ads, so be prepared to include that in your suite.
• A lot of companies have set aside budget for Snapchat advertising, this is a must do in 2016.
• Snapchat is famous for scavenger hunts, flash sales, contests, etc.; include these in your campaign.

Recap

So let’s do a quick recap of what we learnt about mobile marketing trends for 2016:

• There’s no way one can go on without mobile friendly websites or apps.
• Optimize your videos for viewing in portrait or vertical mode.
• Marketers must focus on creating social commerce campaigns
• Mobile marketing automation is no longer indispensable if you want a competitive edge over others.
• Snapchat is not the future, it is the present of mobile social media.