Brendon CraigieBrendon Craigie

During the 2008 and 2012 elections, President Obama’s campaign found success leveraging social media to communicate to specific target audiences.

Next year will see the U.S. Presidential election take targeted campaigning to a new level. New technology and in-depth knowledge of target voters will combine to deliver voters with what feels like personalized campaign messages.

This was just one of the insights gathered from our 2016 Trends Report, which offers a global perspective on the trends that will shape the marketing and communications landscape in the year ahead.

O'Dwyer's Nov. '15 Technology PR MagazineThis article is featured in O'Dwyer's Nov. '15 Technology PR Magazine

Talking to our audience one-to-one is the Holy Grail, but it’s impractical in practice. Relying on generalized content that can be tailored to a specific audience is the most effective route for marketers. One of the best ways to do this is by looking at where people live and work.

Great communications campaigns tap into emotional triggers, and our sense of home is one of the most powerful of those. Media organizations are ploughing time and money into creating content which works at a hyperlocal level — chasing the success BuzzFeed enjoys with their “22 things you’ll only know if you come from X” format.

Once we’re creating localized content, it’s only logical to start thinking about how to target people on a local level as well. What does this mean? In 2016 it won’t be enough to A/B test six or seven copy variants and then settle on the message that performs best. We’ll need to create and serve dozens or even hundreds of messages, each of which targets a specific sub-section of our audience. It may not be practical on a mass scale, but the more nuanced and granular our content and distribution techniques become, the more our audiences will feel like we’re talking to them personally.

The focus on hyperlocalized, personalized content is precisely why websites aren’t as important as they used to be. Since the World Wide Web was created, the goal of marketers — whether through advertising, social, SEO or PR — has been to drive our digital audience to our websites and then convert them into a lead or customer.

The Internet of 2016 will be different. We’re already seeing digital native publishers work away from the confines of their website and go to their audience with a very local target segment approach. BuzzFeed now generates 52% of all its views away from its website — through Snapchat, YouTube and Facebook video. Where BuzzFeed leads, the rest of the media industry tend to find themselves reluctantly following.

By sponsoring great content wherever it lives, brands are no longer reliant on display ads and takeovers to generate awareness. Instead they can be associated with genuinely engaging video, imagery and interactives which work on the platforms that our audiences are using.

Giving up a degree of control and relying on outside platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Medium, Amazon or YouTube is an adjustment we’ll come to terms with in 2016. Though embracing completely off-channel campaigns is currently a rarity, we’ll see more marketers working on networks which combine content creation and distribution in one single package.

We’ll also see less reliance on the website as an endpoint — it will become one channel we can use rather than the focal point of every campaign.

In 2016 we’ll see a willingness to hand over distribution of our content to third parties, along with an acceptance that our customers may never visit our websites. Instead, we’ll create campaigns which live and breathe on the channels they’re natural for — without shoehorning in clumsy calls to action or expecting our audience to disrupt their own routine to visit our content.

Of course, we still need to capture leads. That’s where technology comes in. Platforms like Hubspot and Marketo create automated lead generation forms which exist independently to our websites. Embed these forms on your distribution channel of choice and away you go. By automating our lead capture and CRM systems we can focus on what really matters — creating and sharing stories which appeal to our audience.

It also streamlines information flows to give savvy marketers time to address strategy, allowing resources which would otherwise be spent on data management to be focused on making insightful decisions and interpreting nuanced metadata.

While these tools eliminate “Marketing Silos” and optimize budget value, they also disrupt many layers of the traditional marketing mix — design, analytics, SMM, HTML programming — by transforming the range of competences required at different levels. Given the consistent availability of new digital tools, we must work to hone our skills and maintain awareness of new and emerging applications.

As a result, automation in marketing is both a blessing and a threat — we must justify our “human” skill set in the era of robotics, data, and AI technologies. Those who reject the opportunity to use automated tools and prefer to rely exclusively on traditional approaches will be forced to adapt or sacrifice efficiency.

The availability of feature-packed, intelligent, and easy-to-use marketing solutions (many of which do not require considerable investment) will pave the way for numerous disruptors in the delivery of PR services. These new players, many of them microenterprises or individuals, will use the technologies to reduce their largest overhead — talent.

Part of honing your talent and staying sharp is keeping abreast of the hottest trends. View Hotwire’s seventh annual Trends Report.

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Brendon Craigie is Group CEO of Hotwire.