We all know Mobile has been gaining more and more traction in the consumer market with no shot of slowing down. Your business must get ahead of the curve for 2016 in order to remain competitive. Follow these possible mobile marketing trends for 2016 and watch how you connect with your customers more than ever.
What’s to come for mobile marketing in 2016
Mobile Beacons Will Roll Out in Earnest
For small businesses who have brick-and-mortar locations, location marketing is going to be a game changer through beacons for 2016. Facebook is already rolling out their Bluetooth beacons to businesses to shoot out promotional messages and alerts to fans when they’re within range, serving a dual-purpose of next-level customer service and real-time mobile marketing. While the hurdle is that the user would have to have location services and Bluetooth connectivity switched on within their mobile devices, the possibilities are endless when it comes to marketing through beacons.
Mobile-Friendly Websites and SEO Will Be Even More-Crucial Marketing Tools
In 2016, small businesses will have to dedicate more time and resources to build mobile marketing into their branding. Google has new Mobile Optimization Guidelines, which means not having a website with a responsive [mobile] design can seriously hurt your ranking on SEO, even making it so you don’t get listed when someone is searching from a mobile device.
Millennials Driving a Mobile Mentality for Small Businesses in 2016
The increasing influence of the millennial generation — a group that prefers quick, immediate interactions via mobile devices — is expected to significantly impact the way small businesses approach customer engagement in 2016. Service businesses in particular must be able to effectively cater to this mobile customer or risk losing the important repeat business they need to keep their organization afloat.
Don’t Just Be Mobile-Friendly — Embrace Accelerated Mobile
A big trend for business owners in 2015 was to make your website mobile-friendly, as Google was requiring it to rank in their mobile searches back in April. The new trend for 2016 will be … having even faster page-load times, which Google is calling the project Accelerated Mobile Pages.
This is an exciting time for mobile and internet marketing. Nobody knows what the next big social media platform will be, or what the cool new phone features will be, we can only guess. As far as things are right now, it’s a pretty safe bet to follow these trends for 2016 and connect with your customers!