5 Content Marketing Trends to Look Out For

After explaining how content marketing will never substitute link-building, Niraj Ranjan Rout, Founder of Hiver points towards the upcoming content marketing trends in the industry

As technology progresses and evolves, it leaves no field untouched by its transformations, including marketing. As people are adjusting well to the concept of digital marketing, there are even more revolutionary things headed our way such as Virtual reality.

The key is to be able to quickly adapt your marketing to the changing landscape and the best way to do that is by mentally (maybe even physically) preparing yourself for the oncoming advances in the industry.

Here are a few trends content marketers (or any marketer for that matter) must be aware of:

1. Live stream video will gain more popularity

73% of marketing professionals confirm that video has impacted the marketing results in a very positive way and this trend is certainly going to continue, but what will become even more popular as a trend is the live stream video.

In fact, the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, included live stream video as one the five priorities to shareholders to turn around the ad sales of the company.

Many platforms such as YouTube Live, Facebook Live, and Snapchat have begun implementing the live stream option.

Live video streaming doesn’t allow you to edit the video before uploading it – this level of authenticity is going to be very attractive to the audience. Due to this authenticity of live videos, carefully using strategic high-quality content will become the key for a brand to win this game.

The most established platform for live video right now is definitely Facebook Live, but soon enough this feature will evolve in other platforms as well.

2. Virtual reality will take hold of marketing experiences

The marketing world is just waiting on the edge of its seat for virtual reality to become more feasible. There is no other technology in the world that can drive user experience like VR.

Consider this, you can give the experience of driving a car to a potential customer through VR, and that experience, if good enough, can inspire them to buy the car.

You can use VR to give a demo of your software so that people don’t just see it but they can feel it and understand it. I can’t think of a better way to enhance user experience, can you?! Once VR becomes ubiquitous, it will become a hot new content marketing trend.

Brands with ample financial resources, such as North Face, have already started playing the game of VR marketing. There is one significant advantage of being an early adopter of VR marketing, though – it can be quite an impactful differentiator for your company.

Another important point to note is that you can only design the right experience using VR tech by crafting the right story. As we step further into VR marketing, good content will become more and more crucial.

3. More companies will be offering email Newsletters

Consider this, 83% of B2B marketers use email newsletters for content marketing.

Email marketing is undoubtedly the single most popular form of digital marketing out there. It serves two main purposes:

• It helps in converting your leads into customers by nudging them further in the buyer’s journey.
• It keeps your customers, users, and readers engaged.

Newsletters continue to be the most popular email marketing campaigns that companies are investing in and given that most newsletter subscriptions are self-opt-ins, your pool of audience is going to be highly target-rich, thereby boosting the content ROI.

4. Storytelling will become the key purpose of content

There is so much content out there, too much really, and most of it is boring and promotional. The content that can make an impact is the content that can provide an experience to the users and that’s where storytelling comes in.

In fact, today business storytelling is becoming more and more of a brand strategy, why? Because through storytelling, you don’t just tap into the logical thinking of the people but you also tap into their emotions and feelings.

Storytelling is powerful for two reasons:

• Instead of reporting trends, facts etc. you focus on the implications and consequences of such facts, which adds relatively more value to the readers.
• It gives you the chance to attract audience even if your product or service is boring such as an accounting software program.

Bragging and exaggerating your product features is no longer going to work, not with this generation of users; you need to do so much more than that, you need to give them an emotional reason to want to believe in your product/service.

5. Push advertising will be replaced by Native advertising

Push Videos, for example, are not working anymore as more and more people are relying on ad blockers and find that push advertising disrupts the user experience rather than enhance it.

Native advertising is aimed at giving helpful information to the user using regular content formats such as videos, banner ads etc. It is essentially a form of disguised marketing, where you advertise your brand by fitting right into the format of the host platform.

In native advertising, the promotional content and the usual content are merged and hence, making it difficult for ad-blockers to block out the promotional content.

It is a cost-effective way to market yourself and it allows you to integrate your brand story and values; you can use this quality content to connect with users at a deeper level and reach out to a new audience as well.

Wrapping up

“Our job is to connect to people, to interact with them in a way that leaves them better than we found them; more able to get where they’d like to go.” – Seth Godin

Couldn’t agree more with that quote; I believe that the above trends in marketing will serve the purpose of leaving a customer better than we found them because all these trends will place a profound emphasis on value driven content as opposed to promotional content. Providing such value-packed high-quality content to customers is indeed a meaningful way to practice marketing.