A new year has started and with it comes the new opportunities and possibilities to do more. There are resolutions to be kept, diets to be followed, exercise to be done and what not. Once we all move past these, that’s when the actual year will begin. The reality will finally sink in, and with it, we will start focusing on what actually happens with a new year. A new year means new trends to notice. These trends happen in social media, fashion and almost every other human aspect. Being a content writer myself and working in a firm that provides content writing services, I would like to talk more about the trends in content marketing as talking about fashion trends can be a little awkward for me.
Content Marketing
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1. Increase in Influencer Content Marketing
Influencer marketing is an old trend. In this type of marketing, businesses take help of an online influencer, or in other words, an online celebrity to create content that promotes their product or service. This content could be blogs, social media posts, videos, etc. In 2019, influencer marketing is going to sustain and continue to be used widely by businesses. With 71% consumers likely to purchase based on social media reference and 70% teens trusting YouTube influencers, influencer marketing can actually work for you. Also, with a large number of people opting for ad blockers in their devices, influencer marketing holds a better chance of reaching the target audience than your well planned paid ads.
A major change in the influencer marketing that you can expect in the year 2019 is the trend of intensifying the level of research. What I mean here is that instead of just endorsing a product, influencers will now be expected to provide in-depth reviews and analysis of the products or services that they are endorsing. This type of influencer marketing will include ‘how to use’ videos, comprehensive interviews and sometimes even a direct interview with the product owner themselves.
2. More Transparent Content Marketing
Content marketing has seen different trends from the time of initiation. One major trend that soon caught on was the idea of discreetly including the brand of the business within a general content to promote it. This was done with the help of indirect blogs in which the problems of the target audience are addressed, and then the brand is subtly introduced as the solution. But that will not be the case in the year 2019. People are now more aware of the kind of content that is being fed to them, and if they sense such indirect tactics, they may not actually read or trust your content. Now what people want is complete transparency. They do not want brands to beat around the bush, they want brands to instead directly provide authentic content and give the target audience exactly what they want. With 2019 started, the more transparency in your content, the more people will trust you as a brand. For example, instead of enlisting only the features of your product, give readers a little more in-depth background of how it is manufactured.
3. Growth of Interactive Content Marketing
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Technology is innovating drastically. Every month, you get to hear about a new inclusion in the existing technology which enhances the user experience. There are two particular aspects to this technology that will be highly dominating in the year 2019. Voice searched content and smart interactive content (AI-generated virtual assistants).
Let us first take a look at voice searched content. We all are well aware of search engines providing the option of directly doing a search by verbally asking questions to them. Content creators need to be smart to make this technology work for them. Just imagine if your target audience is searching for solutions via voice search and your content is not voice search friendly, how will you reach them? You may have mastered the art of making your content SEO-friendly, but now you need to master the techniques to make your content voice search friendly as well because it is an emerging trend.
The next aspect is the smart interactive content or the AI-generated virtual assistants that are doing the search on the user’s behalf. It’s 2019, who does not know Siri or Alexa! These are virtual assistants that follow the command of the user and accordingly perform searches for the user. At the end of the day, these are virtual assistants, and they can only do as much as their understanding enables them to. To capture the attention of such assistant-using target audience, you need to make your content language more verbal and conversational in order for it to rank on the spoken searches of the users.
4. Increase in Popularity of Multimedia Content Marketing
Content marketing is no more about simply writing blogs. Today people are more eager to hear and watch apart from reading. Video-based content has taken over. More and more people are watching videos online. Audio-based content is also quite popular among the masses with more and more people listening to podcasts while they travel or when they relax. This means that content marketers really need to up their game if they want to continue creating an impact in this year.
5. Need for Quick Content Marketing
We are becoming the impatient lot as the years are passing by. This has reflected majorly through the technological trends. Our needs are now dependent on micro-moments. Micro-moment is a phenomenon in which a person looks for quick fulfillment of a need, an answer to a quick question or a short video to learn something. Again, your blog or video can get featured in such types of content only if you optimize your content to rank on keywords that are generally used in such micro-moments. You need to focus on making your content simple and easy to match the verbal language of the user and directly answer to the user’s question. Also, you need to have a content type that is easy to comprehend for the search engines. For example, in case of quick queries, an FAQ page or a short video with a brief description would rank better than a detailed 1000 words blog.
The New Year is here, and you will have to sit with your marketing team to create new strategies to stay updated and competitive this year. Consider using these new trends to increase the chances of reaching out to your target audience more effectively than ever before. For more ideas on content marketing and to avail content writing services, just give us a call!