Content marketing is the act of creating, distributing, and promoting content, such as blog posts, articles, podcasts, and videos with the aim of attracting, engaging, and retaining customers. For ecommerce marketers, content can be a way of building a relationship with a shopper, which in turn will allow an online store to compete not on price or delivery speed, but on experience.
1. Video Will Begin to Dominate
This should not be too surprising, millennials aged 18 to 34 have shown a strong preference for digital video over traditional television.
A recent comScore and YouTube study found that about 35 percent of millennials preferred to watch YouTube compared to about 18 percent that preferred traditional television programming.
What’s more, some 74 percent of those millennials said they liked to watch videos that brands, companies, or institutions had uploaded. It is not much of a stretch to say that some 74 percent of these millennials like content marketing.
2. Mobile-friendly Formats
According to various reports, somewhere between 65 percent and 75 percent of all Internet use will come from mobile devices in 2017. Again, depending on who one asks, this might mean that a typical person will spend three hours a day on a smartphone or tablet.
While ecommerce sales will still skew a bit more toward desktop devices, shoppers are increasingly likely to consume content on a mobile device.
3. Increased Content Investment
As online marketers, particular sales-oriented ecommerce marketers, become more comfortable with and confident in content marketing, they will also become more likely to increase how much they invest in content development and promotion.
About 63 percent of B2BC marketers surveyed for a recent MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute study believed that their organization’s content marketing was either somewhat more successful or much more successful than it had been a year ago.
4. Episodes
Entertainment and information is an important part of content marketing. If you can consistently provide an audience with entertaining information, you can build a relationship with that audience, which in turn may result in sales and profit.
In 2017, marketers who admire the success of popular YouTube shows or podcasts may begin to release their own, episode-based content.
5. Artificial Intelligence
In 2016, some content marketers began to experiment with machine-generated content. These innovators were, for example, trying to produce product descriptions from a list of product specifications.
While this is still far from taking hold, it was a significant topic of discussion at important industry events, like Shop.org’s digital summit.
Next year, look for machine-generated content to continue to evolve under the heading of artificial intelligence.
Courtesy of PracticalEcommerce
