What are the content marketing trends for 2018?

One of the most effective digital marketing strategies for the small-to-medium and the medium-to-large organisations today is content marketing. With the increasing digital marketing strategies and the adoption of new facets in online marketing, businesses have put some protocols in place to cope up with the rapid developments. Every business needs to be a part of the digital marketing evolution and is participating in the digital revolution.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing focuses on creating content and distributing this information through different channels. The basic motive is still conversions but the approach isn’t promotional. The content helps people to grow interest in the products or the services among the target audience.

What constitutes Content Marketing in 2018?

Content Marketing, as of now, involves three important steps:

Step 1: Content Creation – The content should consist of customized keywords and should have in-depth planning and a comprehensive research.

1. News articles, blog posts, interactive articles, research content, business content, press releases and case studies constitute textual content.
2. Infographics, illustrations, presentations, videos, whitepapers, newsletters, podcasts and images make up the visual content.

Step 2: Content Distribution – The distribution should be through proper channels or the content creation would never be effective. Questions & Answers, forum postings, social media posts and content curations are some of the established ways.

Step 3: Measurement – Measuring the digital marketing campaign is the final step without which the entire thing remains incomplete. You would need to constantly track the monthly reports of traffic and the conversion rates would help to review the present scenario and show the path to a more robust future.

What is the future of content marketing?

While social media posts, news articles and videos have the greatest effects, podcasts and long news articles do not offer many contributions in conversions. Research content, blogs and interactive articles lie somewhere in the middle. Though blog posts are most common today, these other forms of content marketing which have higher reach will take over soon.

The Content Marketing Trends of 2018

The following trends are having effect in the content marketing scenario today.

• Role of AI – Unverified facts, overstuffed keywords and adding bluff sentences would no longer work with the Paraphrasing Algorithm coming from Google or Maluuba’s system of ‘generating questions from the text’ arises. Only the factual, relevant and important content would matter. google’s Algorithm would extract the summaries from content and create snippets for the user. The extracted sentences would contain the user information and the rest of the content gets ignored. The content would be abstracted to easy-to-understand sentences.
• Live Streaming – There are easy-to-use live platforms being offered by many social media sites which could be used for streaming products and service descriptions, tutorials and launch events. Streaming has been growing and that can be seen through the increasing importance of videos these days.
  
• Virtual Reality – Virtual reality is an advancement that is getting a stronghold. Businesses use the feature to showcase premium services and products. The technology is costly at present and is being effectively used in promotions but can be expected to get cheaper and affordable in the future, with more businesses using it.
• Augmented Reality – Augmented reality can be found in online games and there are lots of examples. The games are designed with augmented reality and more and more businesses are taking to them. A majority of the market is optimistic about the future of this trend.
• Email Newsletter – Though email newsletter is an old marketing tool and both B2B and B2C marketers use them to engage users, clients and audiences. This technique has picked up the pace in the recent days and hundreds of billions of emails are being sent and received all over the world each day.

Storytelling – Storytelling is becoming the future of content marketing. The audiences and readers already pack enough information and do not have the patience to read uninteresting content. That is why storytelling is gaining ground these days. Instead of using a boring piece of article, the readers are offered an engaging story that attracts their attention. They are as much as 22 times easier to remember than facts and figures