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3 predictions for online marketing in 2016

iron-man-704046_1280Happy holidays, readers!  If you’re here visiting from a global fortune 500 company you may already know some of these predictions because, until now, only enterprises could hitherto afford to innovate and integrate the sort of services and application development required to go from the standard WordPress + Google Analytics + Google AdWords + MailChimp + Facebook set up that most SMBs are rocking for their web presence and online marketing.

1) Adaptive Websites

robotic-29431_1280I thought I was pretty clever when I realized that you can use regular expressions (regex) to do global search and replace across an entire website with either direct access to your back-end relational database or via a convenient plugin. Before that, we did it all by hand, which is pretty crazy since most websites currently running even the smallest company brand is database-backed! Even the freebie open source MySQL is actually capable of amazing things. So, there’s amazing things you can do with just the setup you probably already have running your WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and even your Plone site.

There’s more! Yes, you know it’s true: the more you leverage the power of your database by adding plugins the impossibly slower and unresponsive you website will be — Google hates that! So, the good news is that an entire industry of intermediary services have been developed to act like a value-added useful buffer between your under-powered and affordable web hosting package both your visitors and, more importantly, Google.

robot-312208_1280You might be familiar with Zemanta‘s Editorial Assistant and Related Posts, a couple very useful WordPress plugins, but there are also some powerful services that can live between your blog and their browsers. Tools like RevealedContext and SoloSegment easily allow you to add very sophisticated functionality by taking the mature functionality of the Content Delivery Network (CDN), which is known for acting as a globally-distributed cache for your site, and then actually interceding and adding value and functionality without ever needing to touch your website.

The prices are coming down and it’s always nicer to outsource the functionality of your website to a service that’s always keeping up with the trends and constantly making smart updates and decisions on your behalf while you just need to keep your brochureware website current and updated with content while these services take care of everything else: the who, when, where, why, and how. It’s amazing stuff.

And, guess what? A lot of it’s free, some of it’s cheap, and a lot of the best solutions make more sense then ever. And the free ones? Well, they’re probably making all their money from slurping, analyzing, using, and selling your site’s real data — it just might be worth it for you. Want to learn  more? Pre-order Outside-In Marketing by James Mathewson and Mike Moran

Don’t worry: until now, none of your competitors have been as data-driven or nearly as adaptive or reactive as is currently even more than possible — but as of 2016, things are going to get mighty competitive as prices lower, things become easier and cheaper to implement, resource-wise, and then actually follow-up and use, every day.

2) Programmatic Advertising for Ad Arbitrage

Until now, advertising has been a real challenge: aren’t we all over-spending? Don’t you feel like no matter what you do you’re getting soaked? Well, it’s impossible. All the best keyword strings have already been taken. And, if you spend some time experimenting, there’s a lot of associated risk. It’s just like investing in the stock market: brokerages and agencies always have the advantages; and, high-revenue corporations can just absorb some bad decisions as part of a larger plan (which is, they can afford to make bad decisions).

Services like Clickagy use all the big data they’re slurping up from everywhere, both real time and historical, to allow you to let their service do the same thing you and I have been doing mostly by hand by Keyword Planner, WordStream, and MOZ but real-time, dynamically, and whereas I might work across 10-100 keyword phrases, programmatic marketing can scale to an active keyword list in the thousands that adapts according to affordability, in order to avoid click fraud, and then follow all those ads all the way through to conversions and sales.

Things are evolving, prices are still very high, and the advertising industry is super-pissed that there’s now a technology that’ll pretty much cut them out of their lucrative ad-spend-dependent high-life, chopping out the highly-profitable click-fraud-fueled revenue, and the process isn’t as automated and B2C as it’ll become sooner than later, but if a programmatic advertising does its job right, advertising costs could easily be a quarter of what you’re used to and click fraud could easily become a thing of the past.

Keep your eyes on programmatic ad buying in 2016.

3) Marketing Automation Software (MAS) for the Rest of Us

Until now, marketing automation software has only been accessible, affordable, and viable to enterprises.  Until recently, the buy-in started at $2,000/month and the sky was the limit. In the world of free, even SalesFusion’s $500/month has been too dear in a world where it seems like you can get everything for free.

Because SMBs have historically been so cheap and because marketing automation platforms have historically done a terrible job of explaining what they can do and why automating your marketing and sales process is no longer optional and nice to have, it’s the only real way one can both optimize one’s time in a world where marketing, sales, content, direct marketing, email marketing, reporting, and remembering anniversaries and birthdays aren’t even remotely in your core competencies. I know for me, my core competencies are social media marketing,  digital PR, influencer outreach and engagement, reputation management, and wikipedia curation services.

Well, you know how it is, right? The cobbler’s company has no shoes, if you will. But if you think about all the things you do every day by cobbling together a hundred different disparate services, having all of those solutions packaged together into one integrated soup-to-nuts data-driven platform is finally something you’ll no longer be able to ignore in 2016.

Happy 2016

I wish you and your family an amazing rest of 2015, your holiday season, and an incredible 2016, from me and the Gerris and Biznology family.

What have I missed in terms of what’s coming down the pike and important in 2016? Pop them into the comments or let me know on Facebook or Twitter.

Good luck and go git ’em, tiger!

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Chris Abraham

Chris Abraham, digital strategist and technologist, is a leading expert in digital: search engine optimization (SEO), online relationship management (ORM), Internet privacy, Wikipedia curationsocial media strategy, and online public relations with a focus on blogger outreachinfluencer engagement, and Internet crisis response, with the digital PR and social media marketing agency Gerris digital. [Feel free to self-schedule a 15-minute call, a 30-minute call, or a 60-minute call with me] A pioneer in online social networks and publishing, with a natural facility for anticipating the next big thing, Chris is an Internet analyst, web strategy consultant and adviser to the industries' leading firms. Chris Abraham specializes in web technologies, including content marketing, online collaboration, blogging, and consumer generated media.  Chris Abraham was named a Top 50 Social Media Power Influencer by Forbes, #1 PR2.0 Influencer by Traackr, and top-10 social media influencers by Marketwire; and, for what it’s worth, Chris has a Klout of 79 the last time he looked. Chris Abraham started doing web development back in 1994, SEO in 1998, blogging in 1999, influencer engagement in 2003, social media strategy in 2005, blogger outreach in 2006, and Wikipedia curation in 2007. Feel free to self-schedule a 15-minute call, a 30-minute call, or a 60-minute call. If you want to know the services that Chris offers check out Services If you want to work with Chris use the Contact Form You're welcome to follow me via Social Media You can learn more about Chris over in About Chris writes a lot so check out the Blog Chris offers webinars so check Events

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