There obviously will be a lot of talk as regards what to expect – either as a digital entrepreneur or a brand with an eye for digital engagement. Here are our observations:

Online Monitoring: 2016 will spark the rise of online monitoring in Nigeria. As a brand, you are constantly looking to spend less and gain optimal value from campaigns. This further buttresses why online PR is very important. It’s becoming glaring that understanding what your customers say about you and where they say it solves about 50% of your brand issues. It’s an outright win. You save costs by taking out the unnecessary spends and focus on what and where will get you more conversion. Nowadays, customers do not tell you if they have an issue with your product, they tell their friends – who could also have been ‘potential customers’.

As brands get more conscious about their spending (especially with the economic issues facing the country), it will become necessary to rely on in-depth brand analysis more often. With the CyberSurfer, brand keywords and sentiments are recorded. CyberSurfer gives the much needed in-depth study into what customers actually say about your brand. View the study on Alomo Bitters here.

E-Commerce: With e-giants such as Jumia and Konga becoming household names in the e-commerce space, and the arrival of Yudala in 2015, it is very certain that e-commerce is on a rise in Nigeria. If these brands aren’t getting the needed responses, they won’t be investing so much in operation of their e-commerce business.

You probably should take a look at e-commerce in Nigeria if you want to start off a business. But remember, it’s a capital intensive business and requires a lot of investment.

Online Video: It’s been on a steady increase since 2014. Instagram has contributed to it’s rise. Like we say – If a picture tells a thousand words, a video tells an entire story. Videos pass across more information than text and pictures. Short online video clips are in vogue. If you haven’t caught the vibe as a brand, you might just play catch up soon. It’s no co-incidence that How-To searches on Youtube continue to grow by 70% year on year. For Facebook, you must have noticed that your timeline has been overtaken by short video clips – which now auto-play when you scroll. This means that Facebook’s algorithm now favors video content over text and image content.

Creative Digital Campaigns: With 2015 marking the lowest attention span of online users, no online user is interested in brand messages. If your brand has a huge budget for digital campaigns, you just might not get as much output and response from the online community if you solely focus on buzz and brand messages. The idea is to creatively tie your brand to interesting conversations.

Your top of the funnel content must be intellectually divorced from your product but emotionally wed to it. – Joe Chernov – the VP of Marketing, Hubspot

Simply put, if you want to capture this Nigerian audience, provide interesting content and leave out your brand messages. A perfect example – Pepsi’s Long Throat Bottle Campaign. We will see more of these campaigns this year.

In conclusion, we foresee a dip in digital spend for brands. This is not a bad thing but brands will adopt prudent digital spending. Unnecessary campaigns are bound to reduce and more creative campaigns will spring up. This leaves the challenge for Digital agencies to show how much value they can offer and affect the bottom-line of brands that they work for.

http://digicraft.ng/2016-digital-trends-brands/