The ‘new normal’ has completely changed our perception of content marketing. With people working remotely, brands jumping into the race of going digital, and a ton of irrelevant content constantly bombarding your audience’s screens, it’s time to take content creation for your brand in a different direction.
Creating content that adds value for your audience and retains their loyalty should be your brand’s aim. While leveraging trends is one of the most crucial aspects, make sure to check whether a trend resonates with your brand ideology. As the audience continues to get smarter and more vocal about the brands they wish to associate themselves with, the mistake of choosing a wrong trend can cost your brand a lot.
Here are four content marketing trends that can help you highlight your brand’s message and convey it to your audience in a way that maximises its reach:
1. Personalised Content
You need to connect with your audience at an emotional level along with communicating facts about the products. Personalisation relies on gathering user-specific data like preferences, priorities, interests and goals, which help your brand present the best product to your audience, one they cannot resist.
For instance, brands like Zivame use personality profiles to sell their products. It offers a bra fit test to find the right bra size and a ‘Fit Code’ that help find correct measurements. It also recommends different styles that are uniquely suited to body profiles. Such add-ons point the users in the right direction and give them the products they’d really want to purchase, making their decisions quick and retaining their interest for the future.
Many brands also deliver personalised communication to their audience. For example, once you subscribe or make a purchase from any brand, you receive communication (emails, messages, offer notifications, etc.) from their end, notifying you about their latest offerings. In most cases, such communication is constructed per your preferences and previous interactions with the brand.
2. Interactive Content
The short attention span of online users usually leaves brands with a small window to communicate their messages. Interactive content is a method that is currently employed by many brands to communicate with their audience so as to leave a lasting impression on them. By introducing new content formats like quizzes, polls, and surveys into the content strategy, brands have managed to improve user participation and drive results.
One of the biggest practitioners of this ideology are social media platforms. They aggressively find ways in which they can interact with their audience to retain them. For instance, Instagram even offers templates for increasing interaction on stories, eradicating the need for any editing software. Similarly, LinkedIn now gives users the option to create stories on their profile, joining the bandwagon after Twitter released a similar feature called Fleet.
BuzzFeed is a classic example of a brand that engages users with quizzes related to pop culture, music, books, and various other interesting topics. Armed with a catchy headline, these quizzes bring in a large number of people, most likely to complete or engage with more than one quiz, once they get started. Since pop culture references are the buzz (pun intended) among the millennial crowd, the participation in their quizzes remains high.
3. Influencer Marketing
The idea of a celebrity endorsing a brand has taken content marketing by storm, especially when these celebrities are closer to the common audience and can influence their decisions. Influencers - or rather, content creators - at this point have been successful in amassing a loyal audience base who are sure to consume their content without fail. As they receive instant validation and gratification from them, people engage with influencers often. People also see influencers as connoisseurs of quality and are more likely to hold a brand in high esteem if they see an influencer using or endorsing the advertised product.
Taco Bell’s campaign #MakePotatoGreatAgain strikes the right chord with respect to influencer marketing. To introduce their new combo, Taco Bell’s campaign starred comedian Tanmay Bhatt. He tweeted short clips in his classic humorous way. The hashtag was a buzz among other Twitteratis and received 24,522,245 similar impressions.
4. AI-Powered Content
Google’s algorithm RankBrain has been observing user patterns since its inception. Based on user history, it has become more adept in managing user preferences. Observing user behaviour helps marketers in identifying a correct chain of keywords and helps in conducting detailed topic research, which pushes their content accordingly, to the feed of their target audience.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can also be carried out using analytics and other tools to refine your website’s content. Pay attention to evergreen and trending keywords. Optimising meta descriptions in articles goes a long way in generating traffic. All the targeted words that are searched for will become bold in the description and will show all the relevant articles that the user was searching for.
As a brand, it is necessary to keep your brand message empathetic and relatable to retain your audiences right from the get go. With digital content marketing, it has become imperative for brands to keep a tab on the tools and techniques that can help make their marketing strategy better. From tracking trends to addressing user needs, the various facets that sprout from understanding the need to add value to your content is definitely a lesson to remember. In a nutshell, with more digitisation, brands will have to understand, prioritise and invest in new methods that add value to their content.