With pandemic thrusting itself into our worlds, it has become quite a challenge for businesses all around the globe to survive and thrive for success. This has increased and revamped the role of the digital media industry in India and worldwide, making them an indispensable tool for businesses to outgrow and connect with consumers at large. With the increase in the number of users of social media and the quarantined situation of the world, digital has been adopted as the new age solution for growth and increased brand awareness. Brands should work in close connection with their digital marketing agency to use these difficult situations to their best possible advantage.
As of recently, most brands and advertisers have generally considered influencer marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, and PR as independent, discrete kinds of digital advertising. However, in all actuality, they are altogether a distinguished part of one, big solitary digital/online marketing procedure.
This factual process will turn out to be progressively obvious throughout this year. In the real world, most firms do not simply partake in just one of these marketing exercises – instead, they single out the bits they like from each one of the three.
You can see content marketing as a general procedure that includes creating meaningful content and offering it to a brand’s clients and potential customers. Both influencers promoting advertising and social media marketing focus more on content dissemination – the two kinds frequently make use of online networking and social media accounts as a conveyance system, to deliver the bits of information to the target group of consumers. The principal distinction between these two sorts of advertising is who physically makes the content and who conveys it.
Be that as it may, even the most enthusiastic supporters of influencer marketing still work their social accounts – just with lesser followers and less reach than those of mighty influencers. Similarly, the administrators of the biggest, best online blogs and websites, utilize social media accounts (both their own and those of specialists in their niche) to advance their content
This is probably going to turn out to be progressively obvious this year as well, and it is showing the growth. Firms are evidently churning out content – blogs, YouTube recordings, podcasts, illustrations, and graphics. These brands are engaging themselves to share these content through their organization’s social account in order to expand their organization’s social reach. Be that as it may, the brands are also working with the influencers in their niche to grasp the attention of their consumers, online.
Following these trails, we hereby present to you the trend and changes that have been necessitated for brand growth as it not only depends on social media performance, but also a lot on frequent and meaningful coverage, more specifically digital coverage, and the use of influencing personalities.
1. Influencers or Creators?:
If you are an ardent follower of the social media world, you probably have come across multiple creators online, promoting a brand or a product in their whimsical way. The most famous genre of “Influencers” has now popularly revamped into “Digital Creators”. While an influencer in early times was responsible for merely connecting his followers with the brand, today they are responsible for curating compelling content for retaining their followers. As such, in 2020 the brands will have to delegate creative freedom and distinguished content to these creators, in addition to other perks if they wish to keep both the brand and influencer intact with the consumers online, that have now become smarter.
2. Measure the value added by digital PR methods:
Agreeably, the process of measuring and comparing the result of digital PR with the desired set of results was difficult and time taking in previous days. But, this is not the case anymore. Today, the availability of real-time data and its reliability, in addition to the insights that it allows us to grab, has served a bomb in providing the required autonomy to gain the outputs of digital PR. Today, it is possible for the digital agencies, and hence the brands, to clearly understand how their message is being perceived by the target audience and to how many people the message is being delivered. Followed by the information so received, the marketers can optimize their communication and target audience to appeal to them in a more fruitful method. Digital PR methods have proven themselves to be the easiest, most convenient, and successful mode of creating ripples and attention to the campaigns and work of any brand, as opposed to the traditional model of PR.
3. The impact of Storytelling:
Today, journalists all over the world are swamped with thousands of stories and press releases for both traditional and digital PR routines. However, the end consumers, that are the target group of potential consumers have reduced their spending time on these releases and only invest their valuable time and effort on those pieces of PR that convey something interesting, spun in the most creative methods of storytelling. This year, the biggest area of concern should not be on the mode of coverage, but on creating engaging content for the smarter audience. Also, the PR executives should come up with newer modes of dispersing the information like EBooks, White Papers, Infographics, etc.
4. More motion, lesser static:
As we stated above, the audience of 2020 has become a lot smarter and tech-savvy, hence the brands and digital agencies will also have to keep up with them in order to stay rooted in the market and to grow their business. Apart from this, a considerable increase in the speed of the internet and its bandwidth has resulted in easier ways to create, upload, and download audio and video content. In fact, to believe a video marketing statistics,
# More than 81% of businesses today have understood the importance of video marketing tools and have started implementing them in their strategies to lure maximum consumer attention.
# 7 out of every 10 people are more interested in watching a video online than watching regular television.
# The consumption of mobile video and internet consumption via mobile phones has seen a rise of 100% during these six months of 2020.
These insights and the bending curve of consumers towards audio and video PR as well influencer marketing methods have forced the creators and brands to include maximum audio and video content in their brand communication to engage more and more consumers.
5. Keeping the values intact:
Of all the trends engulfing the influencer and PR marketing, this one happens to be the most crucial and positive, creating a constructive impact for both the creators and consumers. Every niche of today consists of consumers that are sensitive to values that a brand adds or takes away from society. This has resulted in creating a major impact on the buying decision of today’s consumer. The consumer is willing to pay a higher amount for his preferred goods and services if they are in alignment with his principles and values. This is the reason why brands should have values integrated into the center of their campaigns, especially in influencer and PR marketing. The trust of the brand is of the utmost importance when the talk is about promoting values along with their goods and services and a right influencer can impart justice to it, making it a perfect vector for both. Similarly, if the brands look like shaking hands with the influencers and others with a hole in their values and principles, it can backfire for the brand, destroying its reputation forever. Therefore, brands should take extreme care in joining hands with influencers and in their communication as well.
These few trends will help your brand to hang their champion hat in the right nail and right direction, thereby helping you to grow even during these difficult times.