In 20 years of working in the U.S. Hispanic market, I've had a front-row seat, watching as marketers have taken notice and, subsequently, put their money where the opportunity is. But since marketers tend to have short attention spans, I'm afraid that some Hispanic consumers are getting lost in the Madison Avenue shuffle.

In an era of social media dominance, it comes as no surprise that visual content reigns supreme. The Latina social influencer community, in particular, distinctly prefer visual platforms like Snapchat, Instagram and Pinterest. Why? The top Latina influencers tend to cover beauty, fashion and travel categories, making visual content key when crafting their stories. In fact, Hispanic Pinterest users increased to 21% in 2014, up from 18% the year before but is still a developing platform for Latinas and nearly 34% of Hispanics use Instagram, compared to 21% of white adult Internet users.

As I reflected on 2016 goals for our multicultural division, I was trying to think through the process of listing what we did well and what we could have done better to put a report and strategic plan together for senior leadership meetings. Perhaps the most important component of these plans was highlighting our most valuable resource: people.

As we ease into a new year, we marketers are enthusiastically looking forward to seeing our 2016 marketing plans in action. Marketers who included online Hispanics in their plans should be rewarded by a large, growing audience which engages and transacts predominantly on smartphones. Those marketers who are not engaging digital Hispanics may want to look for ways to add them to this year's plan now.

As we begin 2016, we anticipate what the New Year has in store for our industry. I have never been afraid of making predictions, but I think 2016 will be unpredictable. So I'll instead highlight important stories and trends to track.

How will a dramatic decrease in workers support this massive, increased aged population? This forecast is not just for countries like Japan and Germany where we've been expecting it, but also for countries like China and Brazil.