Blogpost 3 - Future trends in content marketing

Ongoing Video Marketing

A growing and effective trend since 2020 is the use of video as a popular medium of online content to engage and earn significant ROI, according to Von der Osten (2022). Video captures attention and had the ability to create connections, entertain and tell brand stories all with minimal effort from the viewer. Social media apps such as Youtube, Instagram and TikTok have made lower quality video production more common and acceptable. Brands can now produce video content on a small budget quickly and publish immediately. Short-form videos of around 20 seconds are especially effective as viewers’ attention span become increasingly shorter. Videos can now include a shoppable call to action for convenience and this can result in higher lead generation (Von der Osten, 2022). According to Perry “78% of people watch online videos every week, and 55% view online videos every day. In fact, that 54% of consumers want to see more video content this year.”

Looking to the future digital marketing, businesses will have to get comfortable in front of the camera to increase engagement and trust, be willing to ensure videos are optimised for search and consider scrapping images alone. For example, if your buyer persona is found on Instagram reels, lives, stories and Instagram video must be embraced and leveraged in order to stay relevant (Ruta, 2021.)

Artificial intelligence (AI) Content Marketing

An upward trend is combining content marketing with AI and machine learning. Benefits include personalisation, predicting customers' behaviours, improving user experience, data processing, content sourcing and curation. Using AI improves the quality of content while reducing laborious and monotonous tasks. It helps users have a better more tailored experience. For example, eBay used natural language algorithms combined with their brand voice to write thousands of machine-produced headlines personalised to echo their customer interests (Rock Content, n.d.).

According to Chmielewski (2021), “in 5 years, AI will most likely automate up to 80% of tasks that marketers spend their time doing today.” AI will continue to be a valuable and necessary tool for medium to large businesses with huge data sets to process. A positive outcome is that AI will take care of all the time-consuming jobs we don’t want to do, in turn allowing more time for humans to get creative with innovative strategies and tactics.