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Content marketing has flourished over the years and the reason behind this is simple – people don’t want to be bombarded with banners, ads, posters and social media that is completely irrelevant to them. No one likes having their inbox filled to the brim with unwanted content.
What people want is engaging, relevant content that will be useful to them and have a positive impact on them.
Craig Davis, the former Chief Creative Officer at marketing communications firm J. Walter Thompson, said it best – “We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in”
Live Video
One aspect of content marketing is live video. Everyone seems to be jumping onto this trend at the moment and it seems that the Facebook live video option gets 135% more organic reach than images. According to Facebook their users spend 3X more time watching videos and live content now. This indicates to me that the rise in engagement with live videos and general videos is very pronounced and it would be silly not to join in and grab some of this attention. So take advantage of this tool before your competitors do!
Creating a short video means conveying real human connection and engagement, however I understand that being in front of a camera can be terrifying. Try to see this as a positive, and don’t be afraid to let people know you’re not a film star and you’ll come across as authentic and real, which is what people like.
While videos are extremely engaging and interactive there is another kind of visual interactivity available that will push you to the top and grab your audiences attention – Virtual Reality.
This tool will allow consumer advertising and marketing to change completely, as customers will be able to really engage with this exciting new way of observing products. An example of this is the image displayed below, as you can see this tool is allowing the user to choose an area of space in their home to place a particular piece of furniture to see how it looks in the space before buying it all from their mobile phone.
Off Screen Content (talking robots)
Have you heard your friends talking to a box in the corner of the room asking it questions? Yeah, there’s these things that are stationary encyclopaedia robots that talk to you and understand you. Absolutely remarkable right! Well this tool could be extremely beneficial, take Apples, Siri for instance, where you speak to Siri and it responds with an answer, providing customers with call and response.
We feel this type of content is still emerging and it has a long way to go before it will get past the frustrating inconsistency of A) understanding what you are really saying and B) delivering the answer you want. This type of content marketing is however the future and as voice recognition technology grows, so will consuming buying.
In conclusion, all of the trends I’ve mentioned are still in progress and still have room to improve, so don’t be surprised when these trends go through the roof in popularity, but don’t worry you’ve got time to jump in. The content marketing bandwagon will still be a rolling.