In 2015, there was a massive shift onto mobile platforms. Additionally, marketers were able to weather the rise of ad blocking. Industry experts all agree that social media marketing, personalization and augmented reality will be where digital marketing moves into. The CEO of digital marketing agency, iQuanti, Sastry Rachakonda, is one of 16 industry experts who gave his insight on where he believes digital marketing is heading in 2016.
He opines that we’re just scratching the surface on the power of social media marketing and believes that “2015 has been the year when social media advertising really took off. It made the transition from being a loosely defined “brand” play to a serious channel with good targeting capabilities that could meet core marketing objectives. In 2016, Facebook will lead the pack. It is best positioned to beat Google as the world’s largest advertiser eventually. We do not search for a vast majority of our purchases and [when we do] search, our minds are often already made up. Social can play an instrumental role mid-funnel in helping define our preferences, and with better data capabilities, help track all the way to purchase. It can also help build a much better relationship with existing clients using social data and internal data in conjunction.”
If social media is to play an instrumental role while consumers are in their consideration set, it will be interesting to see how organizations adjust their digital marketing strategies to help define preferences, and track customers all the way till purchase.
