Adams & Knight Marketing Blog
POSTED BY: Karen Belletsky

3 content marketing trends you can’t ignore

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Don’t look now but content marketing is evolving. Again.

Or is it . . . still?

For such a relatively new discipline, content marketing certainly elbowed its way to the top of every marketer’s must-do list in recent years as the latest and greatest way to get exposure, engagement and more importantly, customers, for their brand.

But keeping up with all the ways you can (and should) create, share and measure content with your targets can be confounding. Not only do content managers have to make sure their content is valuable for their key audiences, they have to serve it up in the most easily consumable ways possible. Using the most convenient and widely accepted platforms and technology. And all those ways just keep growing and growing and changing and changing…

Here are a few trends content marketers can’t simply ignore: 

Greater opportunity for visual animation. No need (or excuse, really) to limit visual content to stock photos or static images. More tools are out there now to help create a visual “experience” for a brand. Formats like cinemagraphs (or animated .gifs) allow you to bring your images to life by allowing for a segment of them to be animated. Let’s not forget, too, that every cell phone has a camera and video recorder to let content marketers film moment-by-moment to further broaden how they tell brand stories. And posting those videos on just about every social platform has gotten markedly easier. In addition, the ability to see animated .gifs in newsfeeds was added to Facebook earlier this year.

More platforms to share visuals. Have you noticed there’s more in the news about . . . Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat? Well, that’s not all too surprising considering that these photo-sharing, visually oriented social channels now boast hundreds of millions of users. Instagram, for example, has 400 million users alone, surpassing the number of people on Twitter. The user base for Snapchat and Pinterest is nothing to sneeze at either, each with over 100 million users.

There’s also Periscope, the mobile app from Twitter that allow users to live stream in-the-moment videos through cell phones. In its first 10 days of existence this summer, it garnered more than 1 million users. (Source: Tech Crunch)

If visual content weren’t so important, would there really have been such a surge in all of these platforms? The trick for content marketers is not to ignore these channels, but rather embrace the uniqueness of each one . . . and then maximize the channel(s) which are best for sharing their brand of content.

Increased reality for VR. The availability and expected launch of several virtual reality (VR) devices in 2016 shows how important total immersion in the visual experience is becoming. And please, don’t just think gaming. VR is already being tapped for use in several industries, including: education, sports, healthcare and travel. And, looking a bit further down the road, as VR arrives on the Internet and gets woven into social, marketers will have to visualize the next generation of content. Not to mention new ways to serve advertisingmedia and communication needs so that their clients and prospects can truly experience new products and services… from wherever they’re sitting (or standing).

Ultimately, these three trends show that it’s not enough for content to be simply relevant or frequent. Quality is also key . . . and will play a huge role in the success of any piece of content, whether it’s a tweet, blog post or video. The same way media publications rely on the best and/or most interesting content to drive subscribers, brands need to take the same approach towards developing their content.  

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