5 Content Marketing Trends For 2020; None Of Which Are New
Entrepreneur.com listed the following 5 content marketing trends for the year 2020:
- Video and live-streaming
- Optimizing content for voice search
- AR-powered visuals
- Conversational marketing
- Dynamic content delivery
Some thoughts on these trends through the eyes of an online marketing professional. You can find the link to the article at the bottom of this page.
What’s new
None of these trends are new, but an increased awareness and adoption of technology forces businesses to do things differently. The two trends that are most tangible for most businesses are the first two on the list, Video Content Creation and Voice Search Optimization.
Visual communication TikTok, Snapchat, Twitch and YouTube have continued to grow their viewer statistics. None of which should come as a surprise to anyone really, as we are the consumers of this content ourselves.
Audio communication The era of “radio-making” seems to be making a comeback. Podcasts are a medium that has caught on with a relatively large audience in 2019. The engagement rates, frequency and time spend listening to podcasts is astonishingly high.
However, I personally doubt this medium has the potential to be as big as visual communication tools. It might be convenient to listen to something in the car or on the go, but podcast as such are too time intense. I have tried “multi-tasking” with a podcast in my ear on several occassions and miserably failed.
Video and live streaming are the most difficult to nail, with conversational (voice driven seo) being the most time intense.
A combination of both video and audio would be great for SEO in 2020
I think the key lies in creating question and answer based video content, that is transcribed to text. Whereas Google can create automated captions (subtitles) as far as I know, these captions are not used to index videos for content (just yet).
Most interview style video content is published as a podcast. I am not entirely convinced that this is a good strategy. The narrative, speed and conversation is different when creating content exclusively for audio purposes and multipurpose video is not something I think works well. Or at least, I haven’t seen anyone do it really really well, just yet.
Content quality
Managing content quality, whilst staying flexible and fast is a big challenge for anyone and any business. Hiring the right production teams and set building for video creation are not uncommon challenges for businesses in 2020.
Who can they rely on? Are 1–3 man influencer production teams the right setup to drive a multi-million dollar company into the next era? Perhaps these would be a great start. Think out of the box. Large long-term planned productions are most definitely an overkill.
Key is AUTHENTICITY. If the type of content does not fit the brand or company that is using it, customers will be put off.
Where to start
However, the most important thing is to get started in 2020. Get the conversation going and learn to make mistakes. That holds true for entrepreneurs, small- and large businesses alike.
What is important to understand: content is the driver for marketing efficiency. If your business does not put out the required content, you will not be able to reap the benefits of the marketing tools that Google, Facebook, Amazon, Criteo and Co. have on offer.
Product marketing based on price and availability is too short sighted and only covers the last part of the user conversion funnel. If you want to be successful online, your business will need to join the customer conversation at an earlier stage and content creation is the way into the hearts of the consumer in 2020.