Throughout January and February we’ve been busy planning campaigns for the upcoming year with a massive focus on digital. It got us thinking, what will the rest of 2016 hold for digital?

Digital innovation is showing no signs of slowing and ultimately this gives us more opportunity to innovate and create in the digital space.

So where are these opportunities?

Streaming media

Video and animated content will become the common medium in 2016. As 4G networks and WiFi give smartphones the capacity to consume, produce and share video content, brands should take advantage to help reach their audience across all channels.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn all now allow you to play video from within your newsfeed. Not to mention YouTube still being the second most searched site on the web (after Google – of course!).

Twitter 10,000 limit in Q1

With Jack Dorsey back at the helm at Twitter it wouldn’t be long to see him making significant changes.

After identifying that people were taking screenshots of WhatsApp messages on their mobile phones and posting to Twitter as pictures, Twitter identified that a limit of 140 characters just wouldn’t cut it.

Twitter excels at sieving through comments and content using their search feature and it must have been frustrating for them to see their users posting pictures of words they couldn’t index.

With blogging taking a back seat to video content, infographics and rich media content, Twitter could move into that space treasuring the written word over other content formats.

Isn’t that what Tumblr is for? We’ll see. Our gut feeling is it could be a game changer for 2016.

In the SEO world…Things are changing too

Could this be the year Google finally says goodbye to link metrics. (not likely).

2015 showed Google search dominance maintain at 90% with 9 out of 10 searches being conducted through Google.

This isn’t likely to change in 2016. What is likely is for content marketing to be made available to smaller businesses not just those with gigantic marketing budgets.

Sites such as BuzzSumo and Quicksprout will give smaller businesses the ability to develop their content marketing strategy to help improve reach and rankings.

We also expect Google to announce a drop in click through rate percentages for organic traffic as PPC takes up more room in your search results.

This just leaves paid channels…

Display and social ads soared last year with companies like Taboola doing really well in promoted content marketing.

This will continue in 2016, with remarketing, context and personalisation coming to the forefront. Have you ever noticed Amazon email you about the products you were looking at and sometimes products you were simply thinking about? The latter will happen more frequently.

Personalisation will be rolling through email comms, display ads, website visits social media content and more.

In summary, being smarter in 2016 is probably the best way forward, if you can personalise your communication to your clients, do it. If you can improve user experience through dynamic content, do that too. If you can create rich media to replace a blog and invest more in content marketing, you won’t put a foot wrong.