Today’s post comes from Marketo, a MediaMath partner.
As we ease into 2016, I wanted to pull out the crystal ball and share a few marketing predictions for the year ahead. Here are a few trends I think marketers can anticipate in the upcoming year:
- Optimization efforts and value will be increasingly seen through a cross-channel lens versus spending energy optimizing within a single channel.
- Mar tech and ad tech started coming together in 2015—in 2016 we’ll see an acceleration toward Madtech (see prediction above).
- Ad blocking is driving the need for more relevant and more personalized ads and marketing campaigns.
- There will be an increased interest in first-party data usage by marketers.
- Marketers want visual, easy-to-use, yet powerful, analytics to gain actionable insights on their marketing campaigns, their customers and lifecycles in order to optimize and iterate.
- There will be an increased focus on UI and UX as a strategic differentiator, not just a nice-to-have.
- Large-scale enterprises will deploy marketing automation more and more. The evidence on marketing automation ROI continues to mount as “batch and blast” marketing becomes less effective.
Many of these predictions are focused on the major changes happening within paid media. There are big macro trends driving these changes for marketers—the rapid rise of mobile marketing forcing the adoption of cross-channel marketing; consumers demanding more relevant and personalized marketing that recognizes their preferences and behavior and treats them as individuals; and, lastly, that marketers have increasingly adopted and rely on tools like marketing automation to build a seamless, automated 1:1 unique interaction.