Happy New Year! We hope your week has started on a high note! As it’s time to think ahead, we at The Practice were keen to share our top digital predictions for 2016- and we’d love to hear yours too.

Up there with our hopes for the new year, we’d love to see brands and marketers experimenting with different social media channels. And in 2016, we won’t be able to ignore the fact that 2015’s new platforms such as Periscope and Meerkat will be lucrative tools. It’s no surprise that video is arguably the most important medium for brands at the moment, and so leveraging live-streaming apps is one of the best ways to support a visual campaign. For capturing insightful, of the moment, and temporary footage, these apps both offer a great way to create a “raw” feel, and since Periscope, for instance, is already integrated with Twitter, brands need not worry about building an entirely new set a followers to showcase their streams. And with Periscope alone boasting in excess of 10 million users, the possibilities are huge for brands looking to improve customer interaction, work on their story telling, and find new ways to run competitions. And to add to this, prioritising visual content as a whole, whether through live-streaming apps, native video, and embeds on your brand’s home page and product pages, will be crucial for the coming year.

When it comes to mobile, the past year has once again shown some great results from in-app advertising, with analysts at eMarketer now predicting that mobile ad spend will exceed $100 billion by the end of 2016. But we believe that irritating pop-up notifications and banner ads will soon become a thing of the past, as advertisers adopt more sophisticated practices such as Deep Linking. We envisage marketers responding to consumer needs by using tried and tested methods such as push notifications, but in conjunction with having these contain links to direct users to specific pages within their apps. This will result in a seamless experience for the user, enabling personalisation and conversion. Besides a more sophisticated approach to mobile marketing, we also imagine that a greater number of brands will start to embrace further opportunities such as Instagram’s and Snapchat’s advertising capabilities when they fully launch.

We predict that data-driven marketing will continue to grow rapidly in 2016, but this of course makes targeting all the more challenging and time consuming. That’s where marketing automation comes in, which we feel will be even more essential this coming year, as brands start to have tighter reign over their marketing funnel. Already, 59% of the world’s top B2B companies have adopted this practice to track and generate leads.  With this in mind, automation platforms will soon become the norm, being used to schedule consumer emails and social media posts, and segment audiences. And with customer information in one place, brands will be able to use this to their advantage, for successful retargeting and conversion campaigns.

Finally, might 2016 be the year in which more of the world gains access to the Internet? It may be hard to imagine, but there are still around 4 million people around the world who aren’t online. This is where we see Google’s Balloon initiative, Project Loon, coming into effect, with wireless Internet provided via the use of high altitude balloons. Google has been working on this task over the past couple of years, as has Facebook on a separate project, with their solar powered drones for beaming Internet onto remote areas. So far, both have been in the testing stages, with Google last year signing agreements with Sri Lanka and India to provide a connectivity network, while Facebook has launched and tested its primary drone, Aquila.

What do you think of our top digital predictions for 2016? Which areas do you think will be big talking points this year? We’d love to hear your thoughts, so please tweet to us @PracticeDigital and share your comments on our Facebook page.