Digital marketing in 2015 extended through many improved trends, methodologies and strategies, leading to enhancement of this world of marketing. This year was inclined towards improvising the trends, features and practices that were already being used by the digital marketers; however the impacts were significant. Trends like mobile-responsiveness, live blogging, video/audio content, paid social and many other trends highly transformed the face of digital marketing this year.Let’s take a quick look at all the major happenings of the digital marketing world in 2015, along with a quick sneak-peek into the 2016 forecast:

Search Engine Optimization

“Predictions were unexpected and so were the results”
– Vikas Godara

2015 has been a year for the SEO world with many transformations that stirred the digital world. So, if you want to know about all the happenings of SEO in the year 2015, here we bring a quick look at the major undertakings.

On the occasion of New Year, Google gifted the marketers with a new update that rolled out on January 14^th when it announced that Google News will crawl and index the images hosted off the domain name. Unfortunately, there was a 63% decrease in image search referrals after this update. Although, it wasn’t a good start for the marketers, it proved to be GREAT for Google. Not only Google modified its logo design, but also gained back the position of being the ‘default browser’ in Firefox after Yahoo lost its share with Firefox. To help users recover their lost/deleted data, Google Analytics came up with a new update, ‘Trash Can’ that now allows users to recollect their data, views, properties and accounts within 35 days of deletion. By the end of the month, Google launched yet another update announcing its support for the crawlers with locale-adaptive web pages.

In the month of February, Google made many announcements, back-to-back based on several new services like providing statistics and error via email, a few improvements in its Webmaster Tool for better feedback and testing and Blocked Resources Report to help webmasters discover blocked images, CSS and Javascript.

The month of April came up bringing BIG for the marketers when Google announced its Mobile-friendly update on 21^st April 2015. Mobilegeddon, as the name given to the update rolled out to give a ranking boost to the mobile-responsive websites and asking others to take over the same. The changes that took place after a week of the release impacted on the non-mobile friendly websites that was measured to about 0.21 positions on an average.

Another month of the year approached Google to make some more changes by adding new analytics report in its Webmasters Tools and removing the Reading Level Search Filter.

It appeared like Google utilized the month of May for its own updations and this time it came up with changes in its results – the ‘Quality Update’ for better search results. And the month ended with renaming of Google’s webmaster tool to Google Search Console.

The beginning of August brought the official launch of the Google’s Search Console API and the new image search filter button for mobile!

1^st September 2015 came up as a day of changes as several changes rolled out on the same day including the updated look of Google with a newly designed logo, icon and animated dots, removal of the legacy search queries report from the search console, increase in the height of Google Search Box and an addition of the site URL in the knowledge graph box. Google ended up with changing the language and action buttons quietly in the Google Search Console and set it to ‘Temporarily Hide.’

Yet another updation in Google’s functionality that grabbed the attention of its users was the launch of a new format for the site links on the mobile search results they are now expandable to offer more options.

The month of October celebrated the birth of RankBrain, the artificial intelligence designed to handle a large portion of Google search queries. Google also added a new feature in the Fetch and Render tool to show the severity of Blocked content. In order to communicate to Google, it launched new Live Blogging feature for its publishers.

Google summed up by releasing its full version (160 paged) of its search quality raters guidelines to help them understand the search results are tested.

SEO in 2016

As the industry is approaching towards 2016, it is expected to have the following changes in the SEO world in 2016: In the New Year, it is imperative for the companies to build mobile-friendly websites as Mobile devices are ruling the world and Mobile Apps making people’s life easier. Searching will turn to semantic search to provide the users with more meaningful search results by understanding and assessing the search phrase. 2016 will be the year of Voice SEO with more and more addition of audio files into the websites enabling the users to hear more information about a particular listing. Local SEO will gain more importance in 2016 to help the webmasters find their audience in a sea of other results. Moreover, Penguin is likely to become real-time in 2016.

Social Media Optimization

“Social Media will have a fantastic year ahead with emphasis on Video Optimization, Data privacy, ‘Instant Articles’ and Pinterest’s visual search.”
– Rupali Goyal

Social media has greatly progressed in the year 2015. Whether it’s the popular social media site Facebook or Twitter or the video-sharing service Instagram, each one of them have grown rapidly this year with so many big and small undertakings.

Facebook debuted Reactions—a new extension of the Like button. Facebook also launched Calls to Action for Pages and added new features in Facebook Ads. Google and Twitter reached an agreement for Google to start indexing tweets again after granting access to its firehose. Pinterest announced further improvement on Guided Search in January whereby people were to see pins tailored according to gender. YouTube announced that it wants marketers to limit their Sponsorship deals; Facebook launched its new app, “At Work” to expand the US firms’ presence with companies and other workplaces. Also, the professional social media platform LinkedIn introduced a new feature, commercial search limit and even added a “Your Updates” page after refreshing its Home Page. The new feature of Snapchat, “Discover” released this year is said to be the game changer. Twitter finally added its long awaited features, group messaging and video.

Facebook modified its News feed Algorithm once again. Pinterest now allows users to schedule & manage Pinterest Pins with Buffer. LinkedIn announced that it is finally closing its 3rd party API. Live streaming mobile apps, periscope and Meerkat stirred the world with tremendous popularity within 10 days of their launch. Facebook also added a new safety feature, ‘I’m safe’ to notify people around about user’s safety. And, Twitter launched its new app ‘Highlights’ in April.

Social Media in 2016

In 2016, there will be a major shift of content marketing from SEO to SMO. Companies will focus more on ‘Live Streaming’ in the next year. Facebook will continue to dominate, but its audience will be older. Digital marketing practices will rise on newer social media sites. Social Media advertising will increase greatly in 2016 with better offer deals or promotions. And there would be more employee advocacy campaigns.

Content Marketing

“From generating ROI to actionable marketing, content was and will continue to be the KING!”
– Kamini Vyas and Neha Insan

Digital Marketing in 2015 revolved around content. Marketers emphasized more on relevant, interactive and engaging content to promote their business. More companies started using content marketing as the prime tool for brand awareness. Business focused more on various KPI (key performance indicator) for measuring and evaluating ROI and performance. Visualization was on the top in 2015 with marketers emphasizing more on using video content for brand promotion. Moreover, content marketing was no more about reach; instead it focused more on IMPACT. 2015 was the also the year of mobile marketing even in terms of content. While content was the king (and still it is), content syndication proved to be the Queen in 2015.

Content in 2016

With a speedy increase in the popularity of content marketing, marketers will come up with several innovative and influential content strategies, such as aggregated content through complex softwares, creating long-form content, more visual options and definitely emergence of more interactive content. It is also expected that in 2016 robotic algorithms will threaten freelancers globally, and social media will provide new publishing options for content. The content will revolve around reality, i.e., actual data. Distribution of the content will rise in value, shift from ‘me’ marketing to ‘you’ marketing through Ad blocks for building brand value and SEO budgets will focus most on creating Valuable Content.

Website Designing

“The innovative technologies in 2016 will lead your business to a new HORIZON”
– Surinder Kumar

Being a significant part of Digital Marketing, constant upgradation and evolutions are crucial for Website Design. After all, it’s the first thing where your customer meets you. Although, 2015 didn’t come up so well for the designing world, yet a few major updates happened that are proving to be a big stir in website and app designing industry.

The year 2015 came up with a new version of the popular free responsive website maker, MOBIRISE. Mobirise v1.8 features several new and significant tools including the new “Article” blocks with many text, image and video elements, new ‘footer’ blocks with Google Map image, new ‘Publish’ window, extended toolbar for text editor, new floating ‘Block Parameters’ panel and internal optimization and code clean up.

Similarly Bootstrap, a powerful mobile first front-end web development framework launched its Bootstrap version 4 on the occasion of its fourth anniversary. With ton of major changes like improved grid system, flexbox support, new customization options, consolidation of HTML resets into a new module, Reboot, all new JavaScript Plugins, improved placement of tooltips and popovers and documentation.

The leading all-in-one publishing and e-commerce platform Squarespace announced SqaureSpace7, which featured new cover page builder and integration with Getty images and Google Apps, simplified site editing controls, 15 new category-specific templates, and much more.

Known to be the best version of Foundation till date, Zurb Foundation, a reputed product design company launched its 6^th version successfully this November. Faster, flexible and more versatile, this new version is designed with 50% code reduction, style overrides, customizable Sass Grid, Motion UI and Zurb Development Stack.

Website Development

“Laravel, YII and other frameworks: Paramount of web development in 2016”
– Rajan Bansal

Year 2015 proved to be average for the website developers. With a few regular updates, nothing stimulated the development market.

In August, several new features were added to Facebook’s Graph API Explorer allowing them to authenticate, make API requests and debug. Two months later, in October, Pinterest announced the launch of its developer SANDBOX that enables any developer to access its API and build apps and integrations. After so many speculations and predictions, PHP finally released PHP7 on December 3 this year. Features like phpng for improves performance, backward incompatible changes, scalar type hints and return types and combined comparison operators, PHP7 is all set to take development to next level. Moreover, the company also released PHP 7.0.1 – a successor upgrade of PHP 7 with a few bug fixes in the previous release.

Business Development

“Current Online Marketing trends will turn any business into Next big thing.”
– Ritu Saini

A significant shift was seen in the year 2015 in the Business development world. Now, clients are more inclined towards ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) over ROI (Return on Investment). Earlier, marketing revolved around ROI where clients considered investing on their projects as a whole.  This scenario has completely changed now. With a better of the different aspects of Digital Marketing including SEO, SMO, Content, Design, Development, PPC, etc., clients today try to meet ROMI from individual aspects of their project. ROMI is a metric used to measure the overall effectiveness of a marketing campaign to help marketers make better decisions about allocating future investments.

In addition to this thriving change in the business development, other trends that ruled the marketing world in 2015 were personalized data driven marketing (relationship building), better analytical tools for measuring the success of campaigns, more focus on user-generated content and broader marketing discipline with social media.

Business Development in 2016

Experts say that the year 2016 will be the year of making smart choices – smart in terms of channels, objectives, research, planning and initiatives. Plus, it is expected that while 2015 was the year of abundance, 2016 will be for reinventing online marketing. Marketers will want to innovate and reinvent their online marketing strategies to beat the saturation caused due to abundance. Online marketing will be now focused on ‘buy versus build strategy’. Above all, 2016 will give rise to influencer marketing where brands will market by working with real people to create more influence on the people.

I hope this article will be beneficial for you and guide you through your business. If you want to share any update or your views, feel free to share with us in the comment box below.

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