5 Emerging Trends That Will Drive Content Marketing in 2014

With the advent of eCommerce and online business opportunities, the need for digital content marketing is in higher demand when compared to traditional marketing methods. Every time a new technology surfaces, more opportunities are made available to the digital marketer to reach their target audience in a highly effective manner.

These strategies were created by people who have gone through the digital content marketing process and made mistakes. They developed ways to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. All the tricks of the trade have been learned through practical experience. You need to constantly evaluate the technological resources that are available for coming up with the best mix which allows you to deliver great results.

Here are 5 emerging trends that have the potential of driving content marketing in 2014.

Evaluating Multichannel Performance with Integrated Analytics

One of the biggest challenges that marketers face today is to track the outcomes of integrated marketing strategies which comprise digital as well as traditional channels. These multi channel strategies help a business reach its target audience in an effective manner by securing a place in all platforms and digital channels of promotion. The recently developed partnership between Yahoo and comScore will offer better analytical capabilities by allowing users (marketers) to access the validated Campaign Essentials metrics (a product of comScore). This tool will prove to be extremely valuable as it calculates the statistics for video, display, and mobile performance in terms of TV metrics. The rising trend of cross-media measurement would allow content markets to monitor their ROI more accurately.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Content in Real Time

Digital communication technologies are capable of providing dynamic real time interactions and these interactions are being used by content marketers to target their audience in an effective manner. While this may be efficient feature, it can also be rather challenging to measure the performance of the content in such real time interactions.

Tech-experts are coming up with tools that are capable of providing comparative performance information not only from within the industry in which the brand operates, but also sourced from the web. This helps achieve a comprehensive understanding of the performance of the contents. With such tools it is also possible to get real time analytics as well as historical stats.

A good example of this can be found in a new feature introduced by YouTube that gives brands the power to evaluate the performance of contents based on real time searches. This is just one example of integrated performance measurements which are becoming quite popular with marketers.

Creating Content with Increased Targeting

Gone are the days when content used to be prepared by keeping general preferences in mind. The current trend indicates a significant shift towards “interest targeting” where digital content is prepared by focusing on the specific needs of a target group. Such focused strategies not only ensure greater engagement with optimized reach, but they also increase the viral activity of the content.

Google Preferred, a service announced by YouTube, lets brands target pre-roll ads to the top 5 percent of the most popular content within specific topics. This is a new technology which is meant to enhance targeting efforts. With this service, brands can align their content so that their channels contain information that is highly targeted and is of value to the audience.

Ensuring the Existence of “Value” in Content

Over the past few months, Google has made several changes to its search algorithms and this has caused a lot of content to lose their rankings in the search results. This has sparked a dire need for content, to be endowed with sufficient value such that it is able to stand the test of time.

It is difficult to come up with a standard definition of the value of digital content, but you can get a pretty good idea by analyzing the current trends and monitoring the preferences of the target audience. However, you should never stick to one approach. You need to change your approach with time so that you add value to your brand and prevent it from stagnating.

Enhancing the Interactivity of Content

Animations, videos, and a clickable interface used to be the basic requirements for making interactive content. But with the advent of technology, interactivity is being taken to a whole new level. Touch screens and mobile technologies have not only revolutionized the way users interact with content, but it has also generated considerable possibilities for coming up with innovative ideas.

You can zoom into the content, share it at the touch of an icon, initiate video / audio streaming without leaving the page, flip pages over like a real book or magazine, and much more. Such inclusions can make even the simplest of content highly engaging and interactive.