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It would be fair to say that content marketing has exploded over the last four years. It is now essential to practically every business with an online presence and helps to establish niches. In this post, we are going to look at the likely ways in which content marketing will evolve over the next year or so. Here is what a report from Martech Advisor said were the biggest trends in content marketing to watch out for.
Push Advertising Will Disappear
Although the adblock apocalypse never arrived, the popularity of advertising online is at a record low. People really dislike things like banners, pop-ups, paid ads, and pop-unders. They are just so annoying, and they really get in the way of navigating a website. As a result, push advertising will slowly fade away and be replaced with native advertising, a form of advertising that seamlessly integrates into the content of a website.
It is fair to say that this trend has been coming for a while, with many sites now starting to use content to directly market products to consumers. We are currently seeing an avalanche of so-called reviews that offer information on different products in the market while pushing the particular product made by the company who has created the content. This year many analysts expect that consumers will take matters into their own hands, blocking more and more adverts and generally reduce the amount of revenue advertisers can generate via traditional means.
Storytelling Is On The Up
Even though content marketing is new, consumers are already getting savvy to the methods used by companies. For customers, there is nothing more annoying than a company that updates its social media and blog in a methodical manner with no particular purpose or narrative behind what it is doing. Studies are highlighting the fact that many audiences are already tiring of the creation of content for content’s sake. The results is that simply blogging or posting posts on social media won’t cut it anymore and companies need to find ways of making their updates more exciting.
One of the changes that we are likely to see as we go forward is an increased focus on telling stories. An increasing number of companies are looking for ways to include their audiences in their own internal conversations, in much the same way that the video game industry includes gamers in the conversations that it holds internally in developer meetings. Human beings love stories: that’s nothing new. According to www.poet.co/poet-media/content-marketing/, the challenge for marketers is to make those stories compelling and, at the same time, still relate back to their core products,
Email Newsletters Aren’t Dead Yet
The death of email marketing has been prophesied for a long time. But in some cases, according to Martech Advisor, email open rates are actually going up.
If your business is planning to release a newsletter, then 2017 might be the perfect year in which to do it. Email open rates, especially among B2B companies, are rising and they can be a powerful way to share with clients information about your products and services. People have been quick to sound sounds the death knell for all sorts of technologies over the last five years, including email marketing, but in this case, it appears that people have been premature in their predictions of demise.
Newsletters are a great way to reach out to new potential clients as well as informing existing customers about what your company is currently doing. The more you can inform your customers, the better.
Virtual Reality Is Taking Off
Virtual reality only arrived last spring. But since then, it has sparked the imagination of commentators, businesses and the media all over the world. Virtual reality promises to be the next great marketing platform, after the Internet, providing users with experiences that simply haven’t been possible on other platforms until now.
For example, the North Face, a company that makes outdoor clothing, already uses virtual reality to market their products to athletes. Virtual reality allows potential clients to trial products in a virtual environment before making a final decision to buy. It is easy, therefore, to imagine all of the different ways that this could benefit online shoppers. Virtual reality is a powerful, yet inexpensive, tool to showcase new products and services in a fully immersive way that simply wasn’t possible in the past says www.forbes.com.
Because of the nature of virtual reality technology, this is the sort of technology that will likely find its way into small businesses shortly. Small businesses that are more agile will be better equipped to take advantage of the very latest in VR technology.
Live Streaming Will Add To Video
When most people think of content marketing, they think about written content. But content, at least according to search engines, is about much more than mere writing. In the past, many companies turned to rich media to satisfy their audiences, producing things like podcasts, infographics, and videos. But now, with the increasing popularity of YouTube live, Facebook Live, and Snapchat, marketers are looking into ways of using live-streaming to increase the exposure of their products online. Live streaming can be used for things like products briefings, tutorials, live tours and product launch events. Live streaming can also be used for up-to-date content blogs, video logs, and podcasts.
Distribution
This year, it is unlikely that we will see a dramatic change in the channels that people are using to consume content. But with that said, there are some major issues currently facing content marketers o these channels.One of those issues is the fact that, on social media, it is becoming more and more difficult to reach people through old-fashioned organic methods. In the future, we may see more companies getting out their checkbooks out in order to pay for content advertising on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In the future, we are also going to see more companies distributing interactive content through their websites and on social media.
