The marketing world changes every year with trends that would take you ahead of your competitors in the eCommerce industry. Every year there are new tools and technologies that emerge as the beneficial ones, fresh approaches are made, new spins are given to the old techniques and the bar of quality raises every single year.
Out of all the kinds of marketing, content marketing is an essential one that can kill your conversions. Want to know more? Go ahead and read this blog. According to CMI & Marketing Profs, in 2018, only 39% of content marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. That number, however, jumps to 65% among top performing organizations. In fact, Content Marketing Institute went on to say that, “58% of marketers reported spending more on content creation in 2018 than in 2017” in their B2B Content Marketing 2019 Report.
Among all these things, you must know that content marketing is here to stay and nothing can explain this better than this report on The Drum that states that this time last year, it was estimated that the content marketing industry would be worth more than $400 billion by 2021.
With 2018 coming to an end within a couple of weeks, you need to armed with the trends that would prevail in content marketing in 2019. This blog will lay down the trends that you must keep an eye on and implement in your content marketing in the coming year.
Live Videos
Video marketing is a lot of worth than you think of. A report by Animoto in 2017 stated that 64% of consumers follow through on a purchase after watching a branded video on Facebook. And the video will only continue to rise in importance, with video predicted to account for 82% of global internet traffic by 2021. In fact, Impact also mentions in one of its blogs that 80% of consumers would happily watch a live video than read a blog.
Picture credit: Impact
It would be great if you invested in live videos and other video marketing strategies in 2019. Optimize your videos to make them engaging, unique and SEO-friendly so that consumers can view them from all devices.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is something that has raised the bar of advertising your brands and products adding credibility to them. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, 59% of marketers intend to increase their influencer marketing budget in the year 2016. Moreover, Marketing Land quotes that the total brand spending is projected to reach $101 billion by 2020.
With the immense popularity of influencer marketers (those icons who have more thousands and lakhs of followers on social media platforms), their prices have gone up. In this case, if you want to enjoy the benefits of taking your products to the larger masses through an influential personality, you can think of investing in Micro Influencers (personalities with about 10k followers) and start your content marketing strategies.
You can invest in influencer marketing because the trends soaring 2019 would certainly take your eCommerce business to a different level.
Picture credit: CrateJoy
Social Media
Well, if you haven’t thought about how you’d use your social media optimization trends for 2019, you should get down to doing that as well. Why? Because social media plays an important role in content marketing as well. Let’s just assume that you’re new to social media and in that case, you can start off with Facebook. According to Pew Research Center, “Facebook remains the most widely used social media platform by a relatively healthy margin: some 68% of U.S. adults are now Facebook users. Other than the video-sharing platform YouTube, none of the other sites or apps measured in this survey are used by more than 40% of Americans.”
Picture credit: Pew Research Center
However, neglecting the other social media platforms would not be a good idea either. As shown in the image above, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, WhatsApp, and other platforms have also emerged as the most useful ones among consumers. While YouTube has been popular for the posting product videos and more, Instagram has come out to be the platform where influencer marketing has been in command. According to We Are Social’s annual Global Digital report, Instagram doesn’t just appeal to Gen Z. In fact, the latest figures show that brands can now reach more than 100 million users over the age of 45 via Instagram ads.
Picture credit: We Are Social
Regardless of who you’re trying to reach, it’s almost a guarantee they’ll use some form of social media, so your content marketing plan should make the most of these platforms. No matter whether you’re targeting using LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat or any other, your content marketing plan should make the most of these platforms.
Voice Search
Have you tried the smart speakers like Alexa and Echo? The consumers are According to ComScore by 2020, 50 percent of all searches will be voice searches. In fact, younger people - your future customers - are far more likely to use voice search. This study, 71% of 18-29-year-olds are using voice assistants compared to just 39% of 44-53-year-olds.
Picture credit: Coredna
The trend is very clear with this data that consumers will be speaking more than typing to Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa in the next year. As you enter 2019, your marketing plan should include efforts to tailor your company’s search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to respond to voice search demands.
Invest in these content marketing trends coming up in the next year and take your business to the next level.
