The marketing trends that have shaped 2018 content
2018 has been an incredible year for the industry. An abundance of great music has been released and the industry has well and truly thrived as a result. Electronic music festivals around the world have continued to grow in influence, artists have risen to lofty heights, labels have outdone themselves with their content. In this article, we’ll take a look at the methods that have been used this year in the industry for content marketing.
Video
This year, video content has played a huge role in allowing artists to succeed. YouTube has become the second most popular social networking platform right behind Facebook. The rise in the popularity of video content has meant that in order to market a release, live footage and a music video are now necessities. Short video is now one of the easiest ways to generate a great deal of engagement on social media.
During 2018, we saw Instagram unveil its IGTV platform that has become hugely popular with artists looking to promote music videos and podcasts. It has also given festivals the opportunity to upload full aftermovies and gain views from Instagram. We also saw Snapchat develop to allow users to post much longer videos, a feature that has allowed artists to upload segments of their YouTube videos to Snapchat to increase click-throughs. With that being said, Facebook did recently reveal that they may have overestimated the volume of people watching extended Facebook videos in their entirety, something which has called into question the validity of longer video content.
Temporary content
Another trend that has dominated 2018 is the popularity of temporary content. Temporary content includes Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook stories, each of which are set to disappear after 24 hours. The beneficial aspect of stories is that they create an urgency for users to regularly check in. Whereas, there is no rush to scroll through your Twitter timeline, checking up on an artist’s Instagram story is something that fans must do in order to avoid missing out. This urgency and need to keep up to date is something which artists have been able to use to their advantage, keeping fans engaged more often. Not to mention, temporary content does not have the same need to be perfect, it can often be spontaneous. For this reason, it takes much less time to plan and implement than a full timeline post, something which can take a great deal of time and thinking.
Temporary content, in most cases, must be hunted down by the user. This means fans must actively choose to watch an artist’s story. For this reason, your audience is less likely to find multiple posts irritating. For example, if you post five times on your Facebook page within a few hours, people will soon be aggravated by the spam and may even unfollow you. If you post five times to your Facebook story, on the other hand, users will be entertained and not have a problem with the consistent posting. In short, you can post a lot more on your stories before you start coming across as a spammer. The only danger with posting a lot on your story is that people may not watch it until the end, try and keep your more important content at the start. If you’re going to make an announcement, don’t post anything on your story before it, simply kick off with a big announcement post when the time is right, even if this means deleting your last posts from the previous day.
Influencers
Influencers have also become a much more integral aspect of campaigns. Particularly for major festival brands, influencers, particularly bloggers, have played a vital role in furthering marketing campaigns. Now it is commonplace for influencers to be invited to festivals to simply share a short post on their Instagram page, providing valuable advertising for the event. In a similar way, artists also have been gaining from the work of influencers. This could simply be a person of interest sharing your latest track or being seen in your merchandise. In order to create relationships with influencers, detect your biggest supporters whose opinions carry weight online and share freebies with them in return for promotion. This could be in the form of inviting them to your show for free or giving them a low-cost item of merchandise like stickers or socks. If you really wanted to go all out, you could even provide higher value items.
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Search engines
Search engines have also adapted greatly over the course of 2018. A shift has occurred towards voice-based systems like Alexa, Cortana and Siri, meaning that many of the searches being made are much more conversational than before. For example, before people may have searched for ‘David Guetta age’, now they will search ‘how old is David Guetta?’ For this reason, you should adapt your strategy to make sure that your website is still performing as well as it can. Make sure that conversational search phrases still bring up your website as a top result.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become much more prevalent, with Spotify in particular working on developing the way music is recommended. Streaming platforms are now more intelligent than ever, allowing them to go much more in-depth when looking at recommending new music to a user. Software now exists that can analyse songs on a much deeper level to determine a track’s mood or genre. This complex technology looks into the core of a song and determines all of the factors that give it a specific mood, genre or popularity. For this reason, artists are set to reach the people who are even more likely to become dedicated fans, providing increased revenue in the long run.
Messenger chatbots
Chatbots have also dominated 2018, providing artists with a great method of communication between them and their fans. Artists such as Hardwell, Armin van Buuren and Axwell Λ Ingrosso are just a few of the artists who have been taking advantage of the technology. Not to mention, plenty of festivals have also been using the technology to further their own campaigns. This can be done by establishing a list of subscribers and sending updates directly to their messenger inbox. Studies have found that people are far more likely to open a message sent to them via messenger than they are to open a promotional email. Setting up a chatbot has never been easier and requires artists to dedicate a proportion of their planning to developing a strategy for a campaign through Facebook messenger. While setting up a bot does take a degree of time and energy, the results provided in the long-run are well worth it.
Technology has developed a great deal this year, meaning that artists must give a great deal more focus to adapting strategy. While change can be disconcerting, as long as you stay on top of the latest trends you can use the advances to your advantage. Any development in software or trends can become positive in the long run if utilised. Many artists will simply sit back and say “I don’t know why I’m no longer achieving the same results”. This is counter-productive, instead of sitting back and feeling dejected, research how or why you might not be seeing the same results as you were previously. Keep on top of trends and you’ll see your results improving in the long-term.