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Keep it simple: The only marketing trend for 2016 you need to know

Milena Regos
Social Media Savvy
The most important trend for small business: Keep things simple and treat your customers with respect.
Getty Images | iStockphoto

Marketing Trends. They remind me of New Year’s Resolutions. We read them at the end of the year, decide which ones we are going to explore more of, and then forget about them a couple of months later, continuing business as usual.

I have read a few marketing trends this year for the sake of staying on top of what I do. Google returned 137 million searches for “marketing trends 2016.”

Virtually every reputable marketing website has their own version of what’s to come in 2016. Here are a few worth mentioning:



Email Marketing

We have done a full circle on the email marketing side. We almost forgot about it with the rise of social networks. Now, it’s time to put more emphasis on email marketing again.



Yes, make sure that you have your own email database. Yes, make the messages personalized. Customize your offers. Ideally, use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system to be able to track your customers’ behavior, analyze their needs and make them an appropriate offer.

It all sounds good. But for a small business, that’s a full time job. Despite committing to improving your email marketing and investing in a CRM in 2016 most small business marketers will continue to send their email newsletters to their entire database.

Content marketing

This is another trend that carried over from last year. Content marketing will continue to fuel your social channels. Yet, we are exhausted from constantly trying to produce more content: videos, blog posts, images, interviews, contests.

Mark Shaefer, a leading social media marketer wrote about content marketing, not being a sustainable marketing strategy: “Depending on the study you read, web-based content is doubling every 9 to 24 months.”

He continues further to coin the term “Content Shock” as, “the emerging marketing epoch defined when exponentially increasing volumes of content intersect our human capacity to consume it.”

We simply won’t have enough time in the day to consume all the content we want despite companies paying to do so.

According to Nielsen and other sources, the amount of content we consume on a daily basis has grown from two hours a day in the 1920s to nearly 11 hours per day today.

Think about it. No wonder there is more and more discussions about unplugging and taking tech time off. Our brains simply can’t process all the information.

Social Shopping

Brands will continue to explore further social channels for their shopping options. From Instagram’s “Shop Now” feature to Pinterest’s “Buyable Pins,” customers will shop from their favorite social channels and brands will increase their ecommerce revenues.

There are many other trends worth mentioning, like the increase of mobile, The Internet of Things, personalization, relationship marketing, search engines returning more than just pages, big data, etc.

But the most important trend in my mind is: Keep things simple and treat your customers with respect. The rest are just marketing tactics that will continue to evolve with time.

Win your customers hearts and loyalty and you will have them for life.

Milena Regos is principal and founder of Out&About Marketing, an Incline Village-based digital marketing and social media consulting firm. She can be reached for comment at milena@outandaboutmarketing.com. the post “The only marketing trend for 2016 you need to know” first appeared on Out&About Marketing.


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