Some of this year’s trends for content marketing involved content promotion, storytelling, episodic content, influence, fringe social media platforms, and technology. While the importance of these trends continues to rise, here are some emerging elements anyone in the content marketing industry should watch out for and use in the coming year.
Live stream video
Nowadays, people demand authentic content or something that feels genuine, all while being available for consumption on a 24-7 basis. With these demands from users and potential clients, doing a live video is the right step for your company to provide real and up-to-date content.
People within the digital marketing industry know that video marketing is a highly effective approach to engaging customers and eventually influencing their purchasing decisions. And with continued technological advancements that we witness every year, online marketing through videos has assumed various formats. Some of these are webinars, video testimonials, easy-to-share clips that online users make through social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, 360-degree videos, and soundless autoplay videos as well as live videos, with both kinds popular among users on Facebook.
Most major social media channels are now turning to and aiming at perfecting their live stream efficiency to stay at the frontlines of digital engagement and marketing or to get ahead of their competition. Innovations and developments from the different social media platforms are also rolling out. Some of these integrate live video with broadcasting demands while some add the ever popular live video filters to draw the interests of consumers better and to influence greater interaction among users. For next year, we will see the transition of live videos from being an inventive craze to a mainstream content marketing approach.
Today, many kinds of businesses offering services perhaps ranging from retail to outsourcing contact support to VA lending are venturing toward digital, specifically content, marketing. Many content marketers have focused more on acquiring audiences and traffic from potential clients. However, much of the work is focused anywhere but on retention. This coming 2017, content marketing must shift attention to propelling growth within already existing audiences. This means that marketers must also prioritize measuring the number of active users on a daily and weekly basis to gauge and better capture a consistent engagement before the conversion happens. Rather than just bringing traffic to a particular blog post, content strategists must also look for ways to convince the audience to subscribe and visit on a regular basis.
Market engagement through storytelling
While direct advertising still works today, sometimes it is no longer enough to convince potential consumers to take that extra step that will have favorable and tangible results on your end. And more often than not, branded content brings dull pitches for their products and services. To capture and hold your market’s attention, and achieve consistent customer engagement, try delivering a good story to describe your product and what customers can expect from it.
People in the marketing industry now consider storytelling as the next key brand strategy. So how can businesses and brands effectively use storytelling? The first, and most important, the step is to do away with direct advertising that borders on bragging and promising great things. Instead, tell people about your brand’s story.
The advertising technique commonly used before has been all about lifting brands to a pedestal and making promises to consumers. However, many people from the generation of Millennials and those from Generation Z are no longer as receptive to such advertising as before. Often, they have adverse reactions to content that blatantly brags about a product and promising things the products will more than likely not keep. And so, the smart move for businesses, brands, and content marketers is to share stories and firsthand accounts of customer experience. Doing so will keep this new generation of the market from having negative reactions to your brand. Storytelling will also provide the new market with reliable accounts of the products’ performances. This up-and-coming advertising technique is a powerful method of getting the attention of your target clients since people are naturally drawn to something new and much more relatable.
Compromising quality with quantity
Marketers have agreed that quality is more influential than quantity. In the past few years, more and more brands have been joining the content marketing craze. And unfortunately, the content marketing industry, as evident in blog posts, is beginning to experience an overload and overlap in the topics covered. What content marketers need to do is to be innovative and ready to provide alternative content to prevent repetitive content. Coming up with quality content that can educate and relate well with consumers will be more crucial in the following year.
Employing virtual reality
Again, content marketing is about garnering consistent customer engagement that will yield tangible results. Including the innovative technology that is virtual reality is, at present, engaging enough to differentiate your business or brand from the competition.
VR is a rising marketing tool that many big brands are recently using to build consumer interest. As a tool for optimizing one’s marketing strategy, VR offers a distinct way of providing content. To some extent, it combines storytelling and video use to engage customers consistently without compromising quality.
And if your business or brand is targeting potential clients from the market group composed of Millennials and the generation Z, VR is a creative and efficient way of building their trust. One reason for this is that a majority of today’s market, which is composed mostly of Millennials, prefer to spend on experience over material things. That means that using virtual reality enables marketers and business owners to sell products by offering an opportunity to experience it first instead of going with the traditional hard selling technique.
Content marketers and business owners should also take advantage of virtual reality in the coming years since it is a platform that does not only tell a story, but it also pulls people to take part in that narrative. People will no longer be bombarded with monologues. Instead, the VR approach invites the inclusion of prospect customers.
Takeaway
Content marketing is as dynamic as ever and in the next year, there are a few trends we can expect to happen in the industry. Marketers and consumers will expect greater use of virtual reality and live stream videos. On business owners’ end, there will be a need for consistent engagement, which can happen with storytelling becoming a more efficient marketing tool. However, there is also a risk in compromising quality with an overlapping of content topics.
