Content strategists are concerned with the entire process of creating and distributing content. They are the ones that curate what a site or service will put to work to engage its users so they keep coming back for more. New technology is allowing this group of special marketers, also known as content marketers to come up with new ways to engage their customers. The smartest brands are seeking to understand the ways in which their audiences consume their content.
By adopting new techniques, content marketers will be able to stay ahead of their competition. But what are the key trends that you can leap onto to become an even better content strategist? According to experts, these 5 are a sure bet.
1. Virtual Reality
Virtual reality has become very prominent in various fields, including sports, entertainment, and real estate. It would behoove businesses, therefore, to include it as an extra channel of immersion for their consumers and use it to incorporate extra marketing strategies. Many tech giants, like Apple, Sony, and Facebook have made massive leaps of progress in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to the tune of billions of dollars in spending.
These two realities will create plenty of opportunities for marketers to optimize their content. Consider for example, the partnership between PodcastOne and MANDT VR, which has shown how well immersive virtual reality content can radically transform a market that hadn’t been previously tapped.
Consumers can now listen to PodcastOne, but they can also access their favorite stars in a 360-degree view. Their app analytics also allow brands and content strategists to have visibility into how the engagement occurs between their consumers and their ads, which will help them improve their conversions.
2. Artificial Intelligence
We live in an era where most people suffer from content overload. In such a world, AI can make it easier to predict the needs of consumers as far as content is concerned, personalize the content delivered to them, and make overall content curation processes much more productive. Open Influence is one of the companies that are leveraging AI to identify the most engaging influencers via photo content tagging in order to get better insights about how to improve engagement across a range of product categories.
Amazon Rekognition assists Open Influence to index and analyze massive volumes of content and make that content searchable visually. With the power of AI, they can find all the right influencers who will resonate with their campaign objectives and predict what the campaign performance will be as well as monitor it. This makes it easier to come up with ROI and other performance metrics for influencers.
3. Native Advertising
Native advertising will be very important for the future of content strategy. Consumers won’t be able to tell the difference between regular content marketing and more mainstream native advertising because native advertising will become a lot less intrusive and a lot more mature.
In a world where giants like Facebook are implementing some strict advertising policies and consumers are becoming less and less responsive to ads which are poor quality, native advertising will have to become a lot more mature and stop being associated with clickbait. The best native advertising will be the most intelligent that is capable of being scaled up to large distribution methods suitable to the best quality content. The result will be much higher conversion.
4. Livestreaming
A report by Social Bakers, an analytics company with a focus on social media, found that the average video stream will convert to 135% more in terms of organic reach. That is 135% more than photo posts. Viewers overall will spend many times more on live video than they do on on-demand video. Live video streams are therefore becoming the chief driver of online content. By the year 2019, it is estimated that about 80% of internet consumption around the world will be in the form of video content. Live video is therefore becoming invaluable with time.
The reason why livestreaming is so important is that it facilitates very close interactions between content marketers and consumers where the consumers can ask questions in real time and receive responses from content strategists and brand ambassadors. It has a highly interactive nature that makes consumers feel more engaged in a way that isn’t edited. Consumers cannot get this experience with traditional photo posts and blog posts.
5. Influencer Marketing Campaigns
People are much more likely to buy a product if it has been recommended by family, friends, and even strangers that they respect. They will respect these recommendations even more than the recommendations they receive from brands and so-called experts. Online influencers represent those respected and trusted strangers and they form a bridge between consumers and brands. They have worked hard to create large communities consisting of loyal followers who positively respond to their social media posts. The industry is therefore seeing entirely new kinds of engagement as a result. There is a lot of content and so the general trend is to move toward content types that are more relevant and richer, such as colloquial stories.
Conclusion
These are the most inspiring trends that will hijack the development of content strategy for the foreseeable future. As a content strategist, latching onto one or more of them will give you the edge you need to really take off in your industry.
