We all know the phrase, content is king. And right now, in marketing teams, this couldn’t be truer. Content marketing is one of the most effective methods of growing audience engagement, developing your brand presence, and driving sales – a mission-critical growth method for most businesses.
Content marketing is also crucial for business storytelling. Without emotion and a differentiated business story to tell, you don’t have a brand - you simply have a commodity, of which is purely consumed based on its price offerings.
However, you should seek to be a brand that is consumed on way of want, with a story that is consistently communicated to generate a more emotional connection with consumers.
In a competitive market, storytelling and emotion are some of the key ways for a business to nurture long-term business-consumer relationships, encouraging repeat users and loyal customers that have developed a sense of trust in the brand.
At Champions UK plc we specialise in creating content marketing strategies for our clients and partners which set them on the path to growth and success. But the world of content marketing is constantly changing as dominant trends come and go. That makes it vital to stay current on what is popular today if you want to remain one step ahead of the competition.
With that in mind, here are six key content marketing trends that you should know for the coming year:
1. Short form video
Any video under 60 seconds is considered short form (around 3 minutes for YouTube). As we are all leading busy lifestyles, these types of videos are ideal for people that want/need to consume content quickly and easily. And for marketers, they are more shareable than longer videos, making them ideal for social media.
2. User generated content (UGC)
This is where information is published that an unpaid contributor provides regarding your business. The information might be a review, a before and after photo, a picture, video, blog post, poll response or comment made through a website or social media platform.
UGC can be incredibly useful, as it can be used as content offering different perspectives of your business and help build trust within your brand.
3. Humanising the content experience
Humanising content means tapping into stories within your marketing and using them to build a relationship with your clients and community.
People have a subconscious desire to relate to others, and that isn't created by chance. It's through personal experience and good storytelling that boosts relatability in a piece of writing or content creation.
4. Repurpose
This is a particularly underrated method of marketing. You will often create vast amounts of content full of advice, offers or information that could connect with your ideal client, but the wording or the pictures used didn’t quite resonate the first time.
Going back to older pieces of content not only saves time by not having to generate fresh content from scratch, but it also gives you more opportunities to keep delivering your message, each time offering it in a different way.
5. Real time engagement
Every study into this space has shown that getting real-time engagement right leads to high engagement, high customer satisfaction and high conversion of sales, and this is the beginning of the era where real time engagement is set to become ‘a standard’. This, for example, will be via apps, websites, video calls and chat bots.
Trends in content marketing move fast and are always shifting the nature of the digital world. Innovation and creative thinking are huge assets to any content marketing approach, and when it comes to generating new content strategies and campaigns, there’s sometimes no such thing as ‘too much’. In fact, to get the best results, it can often be beneficial to be creative and push your limits. After all, if you don’t, your competitors may well just pip you at the post.
6. Conversational messaging
Conversational messaging is going to see a huge increase in 2023. Businesses are finally realising that talking ‘at’ their customers, instead of ‘to’ them, is no longer going to cut it if they want to continue building trust and loyalty.
Consumers have been pushing for more ‘real-time’ conversations for a long time, and 2023 marks the beginning of more meaningful and personable business-consumer conversations. Consumers want to be the ones who initiate conversations. They also want to feel as if communication is truly going both ways, and that their voices are being heard.
Conversational messaging between brands and consumers on preferred channels, combining the personalised care of in-person experiences with the accessibility of e-commerce, will be a gamer changer in the digital world and will become the ‘norm’ sooner than we think.
Through content marketing, businesses can create a story with emotive, and therefore lucrative, outcomes.
For this story to be successful, it should be differentiated – once you have the “what you are” and “why are you different”, you need high frequency and consistent touchpoints in order to communicate this effectively and successfully.
The only way this can fail to drive sales is if it doesn’t say anything meaningful or impactful to consumers, or the business is not invested in multichannel touchpoints, so remember to apply the logic of frequency and consistency to generate results with your content.