Here is the list of 20 digital marketing trends and predictions for 2016 - Know what's the current trend of SEO, SEM and social media.

1. 20 Digital Marketing Trends
and Predictions for 2016
SEO, SEM & Social Media
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Opinions and predictions are opinions of Bharathi Priya and
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What can you learn from this trends &
predictions white paper?
2015 is going to end and 2016 is nearing. It’s time to prepare 2016 marketing
plans to gear up and arm us to be successful and to cope up with the trends and
demands of the industry. Presenting a marketing plan isn’t easy and it demands
huge efforts - Starting right from sorting out the best practices of your past
successful projects, lessons learnt from un-expected failures, analyzing industry
trends and ending up with compiling a perfect roadmap for the year.
This white paper is intended to educate you about the trends and predictions of
SEO, SEM and social media of 2016.
Video beats written content
With video apps like Vine and Snap Chat emerging, we can clearly predict the
future of visual content. Written content may lose its preference whereas videos
with text transcription work.

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Go completely mobile
With increasing visits from mobile devices and trending transition to mobile
specific websites by shutting down desktop-specific version, we can understand
the shift towards ultimate mobile experience across all the devices.
Voice optimization stands ahead of search
optimization

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People can get their questions solved through digital assistants like Siri or
Google Now in minutes without even typing what they want. Search engine
marketing experts are in an extreme need to optimize the website for spoken
search queries as well.
People love lists and aggregated content
Everyone prefer lists, blogs with numbered subject and aggregated content.
Example spotlight is on “Twitter Moments” that is specifically designed to
aggregate all content on a specific topic and present it to the users as a complete
package.
All Social results appear in Google search

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Google already started experimenting with tweets showing up in search results.
The same behavior is expected to continue with indexing Facebook pages,
LinkedIn shares and so on.
Era of mobile apps
It’s going to be an advent of mobile applications, even prioritized higher than
traditional websites. Optimize your mobile apps for SEO, obtain user’s feedback
and improvise your mobile application accordingly. Deep linking inside the apps
also takes prominence.
Direct answers and structured data

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Search engines like Google already started enhancing user experience by
providing direct answers and personalized search results. It gets improved in the
future and marketing experts have to include necessary structured markups and
optimize their website for Google knowledge graph.
News jacking makes you trending
News jacking, injecting your ideas into the trending stories has the ability to
make you trending. Always watch out for Google trends and Twitter trends and
stay creative enough to build a story about your product or service around that
trending topic.
Spike in social ad spending

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Keyword bids have increased, budget reached the peak and yet the results are
low. To meet out the expected outcome and to match up with competitors,
marketers are supposed to make a drastic shift towards social ads from paid
search advertising.
Automated marketing is ON
Automation is evolving. People tend to automate every marketing activity,
preventing themselves from repetitive jobs. This is the reason why marketing
automation tools like IFTTT, Marketo, Hootsuite and scheduled automatic tweet
posting tools are progressing to a greater extent.
Customer emotion marketing evolution

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Current marketing strategy doesn’t heavily rely on search engine optimization
and keywords. Rather, it works only if we execute it as a personalized approach
to visitors and convert them as customers with an emotional touch.
Local SEO is emerging
Local SEO is given more prominence these days among search engines. Most of
the SEOs already begun to optimize their website for their location with
structured data markups and the trend continues to be growing even in 2016.
Live streaming

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Advent of Facebook live streaming is emerging from its beta. It has an excellent
hope to emerge as a major marketing activity of 2016. Start working on your
webinar scripts, video drafts and tutorial content to get prepared.
Facebook open graph search
We can expect Facebook to pose a greater competition to Google. While Google is
updating its algorithms frequently to bring out personalized results, Facebook is
providing personalized suggestions easily, having all the user’s information in its
pocket.
Bing is strongly competing
Similar to Facebook, there is a huge opportunity for Bing search engine to
emerge as an efficient contender to Google with its recent integration with

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Cortana. It has been building a greater momentum against Google and this is
more likely to continue.
Growth of interactive content
Content that gathers inputs from users, engage them, make them like/dislike or
comment has the greater opportunity to grow in 2016. Pages with largest user
interaction are supposed to rank higher.
Google page rank is dead

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Google page rank is not even a minor factor to gain good rankings. Rather,
ranking factors considered in 2016 are click through rate; impact of paid ads,
knowledge graph and rich snippets.
Can’t predict keyword potential
Keyword search volume in Google adwords planner won’t help you to predict
how much traffic it brings to you. Since knowledge graph results and direct
answers are going to occupy the first position all the time, even result in first
position fails to obtain expected clicks.
Analytics data become a top secret

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Google analytics gradually disclose information provided in Google analytics step
by step. SEO marketers can’t get any keyword data and the little data provided
also becomes less precise.
Entities as keywords
Keywords are not just keywords anymore. Latent Symantec indexing with more
advanced algorithms and more personalized search results continue to emerge
as a major ranking factor in 2016.
About Bharathi Priya:
Bharathi Priya has been a search engine marketing analyst for over 5 years. She
is a notable SEO copywriter, content marketer and social strategist. Analyzing
search engine marketing in a different perspective, she regularly blogs on a
variety of search engine marketing topics and shares all the SEO tips and
experiments at her blog, http://www.bharathipriya.com.
Specialities:
Advanced search engine optimization, search engine marketing, SEO
copywriting, social media marketing & web analytics.
Follow her on Twitter and stay tuned.