Road to 2020: 4 fundamental content marketing trends

What can brands do to stand out through content marketing in 2020? Faisal Haq from WATConsult answers this through some content marketing trends that one can look out for.

Content Marketing Trends

1. Episodic content

Episodic content has gained not just acceptance but popularity with a different set of generations. In today’s day and age people’s attention span is short, and the way they consume content has drastically changed.

The story-like content formats are quite popular. They are not just short, engaging, and addictive in their forms but also see a considerable audience pool who not just scroll through them but also engage with it by responding through the reply feature.

2. Rise of content/product over popularity

Platforms like Instagram has been talking about getting rid of likes feature for a while. Now as they have rolled this feature in its testing phase in a few countries, Post-testing it won’t be long before it gets integrated to other social media platforms as well.

No More Likes will be quite useful for businesses as audiences will be attracted to the content/product not just by its popularity.

The feature will open a whole new dialogue/user experience with brands as the focus of platforms and communication will be about the response to the posts to engage the audience, rather than just the performance benchmark as likes.

Also read: Road to 2020: Digital marketing cheat sheet for the New Year

3. The monetization of newer platforms

Brands and Agencies used to rely on the Internet realm like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube who have ruled the internet over the years. Still, audiences are turning to the new social platforms on the go.

TikTok as a platform is gaining big audiences, initially gaining popularity among youth but over time have got all-SEC & Tiers accepting the platform and making brands consider it as one of the most engaging platforms while planning the marketing spends.

4. Content is not the only King. Customer is the one who rules

A deeper relationship with the customer is the need of the hour; finding balance will be the key during this phase. Brands need to learn the language that their customers speak and understand.

When a brand takes the user from public feed to the more focused on one-to-one engagement in a private channel ( like Facebook messenger, Instagram DM or a Whatsapp message) the communication needs to be in the tone that they relate to and all of this should be basis deeper understanding of that user with the help of Data, and social cloud of the user. Personalized messaging should lead the strategy for such communication to make the user turn into a customer.

This article piece is authored by Faisal Haq, EVP – Operations & Business Development, WATConsult, Dentsu Aegis Network