Top content marketing trends to expect in 2018

Content Marketing is a challenging task. Stimulating interest in a brand’s offering without explicitly promoting the brand is an arduous assignment. But, does it work? If you’ve got doubts, then consider this fact:

“Content marketing was rated as the most important technique for driving incremental sales in 2017, according to Smart Insights.”

Moreover, Content marketing has been the foundation of success for brands in many niches and business models. But, one of the key ingredients of content marketing initiative is experimentation, and the progress in technology is revolutionizing it at a rapid pace. 

Be it creation, distribution or consumption of content, it’s the new technology that is constantly forcing brands to rethink on existing ways to optimize its utility. For instance, few years no one used their phone to make a buying decision and newspapers were the major sources of daily news. Today, from shopping to our daily dose of entertainment and news, it’s our smartphones that we look at, regularly.

So, as businesses have understood that it’s the technology that runs the show, marketers now have to stay up-to-date on the latest advances, while recognizing their affect on their content marketing and PR initiatives, and adjust the strategies accordingly. Hence, the trends in content marketing are constantly changing. Have a look at some them that could probably be in vogue in 2018. 

Artificial Intelligence

Futuristic AI tools such as natural language processing, predictive analytics, and generation algorithms are being deployed by conglomerates to make their content much more proactive and engaging. Machine-generated content could be much more in use in near future, which would help increase both the volume and speed of information.

Eventually, as machines will develop content, humans would have to use their expertise only to supervise and edit the content when necessary. While such a development can take considerable time to get accomplished, 2018 could well witness the start of initiatives that could propel these predictions into reality.

Live Streaming

The realm of content has changed forever as the Internet speed on Smartphones has increased exponentially in past couple of years. As videos have the ability to grab the attention, there’s a much better chance of getting high traction and social media engagement through them. Apparently, videos now compose almost two-thirds of internet traffic.

However, with the advent of Live streaming, the popularity of recorded videos could now face a stiff challenge. Most of us are already hooked to the trendy and easy to use platforms such as SnapChat, YouTube Live and Facebook Live. Moreover, these tools have made it quite simple for marketers to host live marketing and promotional activities.

Thus, marketing initiatives such as product launch events, product briefings, tutorials, etc., can now be easily converted into real-time content. Going by this, integrating live interviews and reviews in their promotion strategy to perform real-time content marketing could be one of the major trends in 2018.

AR & VR

Virtual and Augmented reality technologies have been touted as one of the most promising tech developments in recent years. If able to deliver on the potential, 2018 could well be the year when AR & VR can be termed as a trend in content marketing. Experts predict that the widespread availability of VR and AR would create new opportunities for marketers to develop innovating content that offer highly immersive experience.

As the visual content in interactive graphics and apps keep improving, both these technologies would find more takers and could turn into an important aspect of every content marketing strategy.

Mobile

The percentage of digital media engagement on mobile platforms is set to increase even more in next few years, so mobile optimization would eventually turn into a standard across industries. It means, companies planning to build an app of their own would have to make sure the app is optimized for consumption across different mobile platforms.

The number of users who access internet exclusively from their mobile devices has been increasing rapidly. Hence, companies looking to expand and sustain their reach would have to get serious about optimizing for mobile. It’s because this modest recommendation could turn into a requirement as quickly as next year.

Machine Learning

It’s a known fact that the success of a company depends on its marketing team’s ability to deliver the related message to the targeted audience at the right time. Surely, the marketing experts cannot depend on educated guesses every time and have to base their strategic initiatives on something more concrete such as hard facts and figures. Here’s where AI techniques such as machine learning can prove to be indispensable.

As content has evidently turned more conversational due to the popularity of social media, the line between sales and content marketing has blurred. So when customers want to have one-on-one interaction with organizations, machine learning technologies can be used to manage quality conversations at scale. As the technology improves, machine-mediated conversational marketing is soon to become a huge trend.

However, as advanced features such as chatbots, personalized recommendation systems, and data analysis algorithms have already hit the market. The content marketing is all set to experience a major revolution, and we shouldn’t be surprised if it happens as early as 2018.