8 Content marketing trends to expect 2019
Successful content strategies take a lot of research, planning and hard work. Although the results can appear to be magical, the work that goes behind the scenes is not. It would be unwise to think that the way people responded to content a couple of years ago would be the same way they would this year. A lot has changed between then and now, and much more will change in the course of the year. That’s why a good content strategy requires constant monitoring of the online trends. Business owners need to be alert, anticipate future changes and measure the impact these changes might have on their business. These trends can be expected in 2019.
1. More strategic marketing content for audience engagement
Trends show that businesses should pay more attention to creating content that will enable their target audience to engage with their brand. This will involve investing time and resources in acquiring the right data about their target audience to create content tailored to their interests and activities. This way, brands will be able to tap the emotional buttons responsible for a quick purchase.
This would be impossible if brands are not pushing out content that would get their target audience to engage with them. They should also seek expert services from a content marketing agency when creating content that will engage their target audience across the distribution channels frequently used. Content will have to be very strategic for the marketing platform chosen, and it will be very personalized to the interest of the target audience.
2. Increase in remarketing
Content remarketing is a smart way to encourage a target audience to completely consume all the information shared, especially those that emphasize something important that needs to be hammered well in the minds of potential customers. Brands that have seen good results from previously marketed content, or content that performed well organically, would want to remarket it. The idea behind this is to fully maximize the traffic, engagement, leads or conversions that such content can yield. With this, the business will get more value for their content marketing efforts.
3. Increase in customer feedback
Feedback is an integral aspect of marketing and many more businesses marketing their content online would be looking forward to getting feedback that can help improve their overall content marketing strategy. This is primarily for brands that create their content from scratch – original not copied content. Businesses that create content around solving the day-to-day problems of their target audience while creatively weaving their own brand story are going to be looking forward to the feedback that will show they are adding value to their customers.
4. Content marketing will spread to customer service
Customer service is an integral aspect of any business. Brands invest a lot of time to time and resources creating the best customer service strategy. This year many businesses will focus on creating the right content to address all customer related issues in a bid to serve their needs; showing and telling how best customers can use their products or services as well as market the brand and its products or services. This would strengthen the bond between the customer and the brand.
5. Micro-influencers on the rise
Micro-influencers will be on the rise as brands keep seeking connections. It can sometimes be hard for businesses to pick an influencer who can partner with their brand to achieve its overall marketing goal. Many brands will turn to micro-influencers to help them achieve this. Working with micro-influencers will allow such them to focus on the long-term impact of such partnership rather than on the one-time benefits they can get. This would imply looking for a win-win partnership outcome that would benefit the target audience of the micro-influencers that is also a part of the brand’s target market.
6. Voice-enabled devices on the rise
We saw a rise in the use of voice-enabled devices like Google Home, Apple Homepod and Alexa by Amazon and others. The implication of this is that people will gradually shift to these voice-enabled personal assistants to carry out their day-to-day online activities with their mobile devices. So people will spend less time typing and more time talking to their phones to carry out or remind them about important activities. Brands and marketers would have to invest in carrying out more research on how best to market their content through by extending their marketing focus to their target audience who use voice search on search engines.
7. Video marketing will become more competitive
Millennials easily gravitate towards visual content rather than text with the reason being that their attention span on the internet is very short. Marketing platforms, especially social media giants like Facebook and Instagram are quick to warn advertisers that content with no text would perform better, which indeed is the reality of the time that we live in. It is therefore not a surprise that Instagram invested a lot into creating its own video content sharing platform, called IGTV, which is now competing with the likes of YouTube.
8. Increase in the use of data
To drive effective content marketing, there will be a rise in the use of data. What exactly is the point of creating content that no one needs or one that someone has already created before? Such content only becomes irrelevant, redundant and irritatingly repetitive. Brands will have to work extra hard to create data-driven content. With this, it would be impossible to run out of content marketing ideas because they will be working with accurate real-time data about their target audience. This implies that brands would be able to focus more on creating meaningful and timely content that their target audience will find Here are a few content marketing trends to expect in 2019.
relevant to them. Ultimately, these types of content that have the tendency to go viral.