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5 Digital Marketing Trends for 2016

As the attention given to traditional television advertising dwindles, the opportunities for businesses to make money online has increased. Each year, new innovations create ways for companies to get their marketing efforts in front of consumers, and 2016 will continue that trend. We’ve checked out some of the most intriguing options and gathered five interesting candidates that may help you boost your company’s bottom line.

Social Ads

Research shows that more than 75 percent of the American population uses at least one social media platform each day. That means digital marketing efforts in 2016 will increasingly be focused on advertisements on social media sites. However, businesses should spend some time figuring out the best social option. If your main customers are other businesses, you can have more success on Facebook than you would on Pinterest. Visual products might be best on Instagram or Pinterest, but advertising dollars for media products could fare better on Twitter. Don’t forget a call to action on any social media ad you create.

Personalized PPC

Pay-per-click advertising has been popular for several years, but digital marketing professionals are looking for ways to increase their efficacy. One way to maximize this advertising spend is with customer personalization. This goes beyond showing ads for products that online users recently searched for. Now, businesses can upload their contact lists, such as their email newsletter recipients, and Google and social media platforms will target advertising directly to those people.

Video Content

If photos are better at attracting website visitors than text, videos can be even more powerful. Not only can they make a business seem more personable by putting faces to the corporate name, they also can work as advertising to create brand loyalty. The video screen can include a call to action at the bottom that remains throughout the video’s air time, or customers can be shown an ad before the video begins.

Native Advertising

Technology that blocks ads is the bane of digital marketing professionals. As such, they’ve come up with different ways of embedding sales pitches into website content. This native advertising works as both content and calls to action that fit seamlessly onto the page, so ad-blocking applications ignore it. If the information that contains the native ads is helpful and convincing to site visitors, they are likely to trust it even if they catch a whiff of its promotional nature.

Podcast Advertising

Podcasts are a decade old, of course, but their popularity received a huge boost in 2015 with the buzz around the “Serial” program from NPR. Many consumers report that they listen to podcasts on a regular basis, so you can expect advertisements during the programs to increase in 2016.Advertising efforts can be targeted directly to the likely audience of the podcast.

If you plan to up the ante on your digital marketing in 2016, any of these five trends are worth investigating. Take the time to experiment and find out what works for your business. You just might find a niche that will resonate with consumers and lead to increased revenue.