Gone are the days when you had to tirelessly pursue your customers in the hope of marketing your product to them and with the hopeful upshot of closing the deal. But today inbound marketing has changed the rules of the game forever. It is more about your customers making an attempt to know your business or product better due to some very smart inbound marketing strategies deployed by you. Learn what are the inbound marketing trends that will get heightened attention and inordinate proportion of resources from top management in 2016.

Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is one of the most sought-after positions in any company for the sheer amount of responsibility and outlook that they assume. So it is only logical to look at some highly effective inbound marketing trends that will be trending in 2016 and beyond.

# Content marketing rules the roost

The content pollution over the Internet notwithstanding, quality content still has takers and people actually go to great lengths in order to find content that makes a real difference to their lives. Another important phenomenon that is rapidly taking the online world by storm is user-generated content. When it comes to user reviews and comments about any product, service or brand we find people place a special emphasis when someone they know comments on social media channels.

Thus it is only worthwhile for brands to encourage active user participation and all efforts have to be made for users to post their reviews and brands need to reply and provide solutions to any queries or to assuage customer anxieties.

Interactive content is also gaining rapid groundswell. The art of storytelling is being reinvented in this digital age much to the delight of customers. It is not just about text but more about rich media attributes like images, videos, audio, slideshow, graphics, animation, and so on. This lets users to immerse themselves in the content and also to embark on a journey of discovery and interact with content in their own favourable manner.

# Marketing automation takes center stage

Staying on top of all your marketing channels and the all important customer touchpoints is easier said than done. This is where marketing automation software can bring the much needed clarity and efficiency to all your digital marketing campaigns. Technology can be put to use in order to gain valuable insights on what does or doesn’t work for your brand.

Today regardless of industry vertical or business type it is crucial that enterprises will have to seamlessly straddle the various customer touchpoints like social, email, blog, website and so on. It is important to monitor each channel and find out the efficacy or each channel, room for improvement and such other things. All this can get overwhelming for humans and this is where technology can step in and make the much needed difference. It is also possible to make smart decisions using marketing automation technology.

# Integrated marketing is the need of the hour

Your marketing strategies can no longer work in silos. It is all about a comprehensive strategy to gain more leads and more revenues that helps any brand at the end of the day. So this inevitably includes sales too. Thus marketing and sales no longer can stay at arm’s length but have to work in coordination to meet the larger goals of the organization. Much of the brands that have aligned the sales and marketing teams to work seamlessly have seen increased growth of revenue. It is more about sharing the same ideas, customer personas and helping each other out.