How are innovative brands telling stories and connecting with their audience? As digital transformation accelerates, the marketers who keep up with the latest innovations also unlock growth.

With the rise of AI, VR, and new user-driven trends, brands can explore exciting content creation and distribution opportunities. Here are the 2024 content marketing trends to watch and incorporate into your strategy.

Immersive Technologies: The Rise of Augmented Reality (AR)

Augmented Reality (AR) superimposes digital elements with the real world. It’s an incredibly immersive medium, and marketers are finding new ways to connect digital content to real-world experiences with AR.

AR use is on the rise with mobile apps, but headsets will shape what AR experiences are like in the future. The number of mobile AR devices could reach 1.73 billion by 2024.

Early adopters have the opportunity to set themselves apart with engaging and meaningful experiences:

• AR can change in-store shopping with contextual information about products or offers.
• It can facilitate access to digital services from a real-world touchpoint.
• Users can scan print content to access digital resources.
• Virtual try-ons are catching on and supporting buying purchases in fashion, home decor, and other industries.
• Gamification elements can guide the content discovery and shopping experience.

Several brands are already using AR to redefine the user experience. For instance, Eyebuydirect lets shoppers superimpose different frames on their faces before purchasing.

Starbucks also recently launched an AR app. This app allows users to scan their environment and discover virtual messages of kindness and encouragement left by others. This AR experience creates a sense of community by blending real and virtual elements.

The Power of Micro-Influencers

On a global scale, influencer marketing is worth $21.1 billion. However, as influencers grow in popularity, they become less relatable.

Micro-influencers are emerging as a more genuine and relevant alternative. These users have a small but loyal following in a specific niche. Followers strongly identify with them. Trust and engagement are high, resulting in a more valuable partnership.

Brands that embrace the latest content marketing trends collaborate with micro-influencers. Here’s how you can get started:

• Explore hashtags for your niche. See who is consistently active and generating engagement.
• Check popular industry blogs to identify the top content creators in your niche.
• Find out who is already mentioning your business.

Once you have identified a potential partner, help grow their outreach by featuring their content. You can also go through an agency to find the right match.

The next step is to create impactful collaborations and measure results:

• Give micro-influencers creative freedom, but provide them with brand guidelines for content creation.
• Send your influencers a product to use, or let them test your services. A first-hand experience will result in genuine content.
• Partner with an influencer and design a new product together.
• Give your partners a tour of your business, or provide another industry-related experience they can document.
• Have clear goals for the partnership. Identify KPIs you can track, such as impression and engagement. Attribution analytics can also help if your goal is lead generation.

Purpose-Driven Storytelling: Connecting with Audiences on a Deeper Level

One of the top 2024 content marketing trends is the use of storytelling. A purpose-driven narrative makes your content memorable. It creates emotions and highlights the values you share with your audience.

Humanize your brand with these story ideas:

• Talk about a time when your brand or product solved a problem.
• Tell the story of how your company came to be.
• Write a piece about how your industry rose to prominence and evolved.
• Focus on the people behind your brand. Tell stories about their achievements.
• Stories can be about your community. Show how your brand is making a difference.
• Feature User-Generated Content to let customers tell their own stories.

King Arthur Baking is an excellent example of a brand that leverages storytelling. The brand tells its story through the rise of popular culinary staples, from apple pie to pizza.

If you’re curious about how you can tell stories about your employees, look at this page from the Salesforce website. If you scroll down, you’ll see a carousel with featured stories. These stories celebrate the employees participating in the company’s volunteering program.

Voice Assistants and Voice Search Optimization

Voice assistants offer a new way to search. Users typically prefer a hands-free experience for local queries and quick questions. Still, voice search capabilities are expanding and can support more complex content discovery tasks.

Voice search will continue growing between phone assistants, smart speakers, and smart TVs. Immersive technologies like VR and AR headsets could also rely on voice as a navigation and search tool in the future.

Keep up with the latest content marketing trends by optimizing your content for voice search and voice results:

• Target conversational queries. Voice search users ask questions and use long-tail keywords that sound more natural.
• Incorporate voice search into your keyword research strategy to identify these new trends.
• Create content with a Q&A format. Develop short-form pieces, and enhance long-form content with summaries and multiple headers.
• Adopt a writing style that feels accessible and conversational.
• Remember loading speed optimization since most voice searches come from mobile users.

Data-Driven Personalization: Tailoring Content to Individual Preferences

Personalization makes users feel valued while supporting a wide range of buying tasks by delivering the right message at the right time. Innovations in data science are making advanced personalization possible.

With the rise of AI-powered analytics, marketers can offer personalized experiences that align with specific user behaviors and preferences rather than demographic data.

There are multiple strategies you can implement to collect valuable data for personalization:

• Use website analytics to map the user’s journey and understand intent.
• Analyzing user-generated content (UGC) can uncover interests and pain points.
• Capture data with interactive content like forms or surveys.
• Use an opt-in model for content delivery to let users select topics that make sense.

Turn your personalization efforts into a scalable strategy with these tips:

• Address privacy. Be transparent about the data you collect and how you use it. Give users control over their data.
• Your historical data is a good starting point for building user personas.
• Using a CRM platform results in a more consistent experience and allows for personalization based on past interactions.
• Consider using AI-enhanced content. This approach allows you to scale content creation and deliver highly-targeted messages.
• Use feedback, user testing, and focus groups to understand what users expect from your personalization strategy and assess how well you meet their expectations.

Sustainability in Content Marketing: Making a Positive Impact

Incorporating sustainability into your messaging shows that your brand aligns with users’ values. With 78% of consumers considering sustainability as necessary, your content marketing strategy needs to focus on social and environmental issues:

• Develop thought leadership content that discusses sustainability challenges in your industry. You can also discuss possible solutions.
• Use storytelling techniques to show your steps to become a more sustainable brand.
• Be transparent. Use data and reporting to show the impact of your efforts.

GreenToys sets a creative example with a counter that shows how many milk jugs the company has recycled in real-time. It’s a simple strategy that shows the brand’s positive impact while fostering transparency.

Boxed Water is an innovative brand that replaces plastic bottles with plant-based packaging. On Instagram, the brand uses UGC and storytelling to highlight the sustainable design of its packaging and show consumers making a difference by using this product.

Embracing Cross-Channel Integration

Besides increasing your outreach, a cross-channel approach allows users to interact with your brand on their preferred channel.

Being present on multiple channels is needed. Users expect a highly-personalized and consistent experience that allows them to jump from one medium to another seamlessly.

Here’s how you can coordinate your content marketing efforts across different channels:

• Limit yourself to the media your audience actively uses.
• Understand what users do on different channels and what they expect based on the channel they interact with.
• Develop content guidelines to maintain consistency.
• Be active and manage content distribution on multiple channels with an overall publication strategy.
• Look into headless content management. This model keeps your content in a repository and packages it based on the channel where you publish it.
• Collect data from all your channels and enhance visibility with a centralized analytics solution.

Innovate by Adopting the Top 2024 Content Marketing Trends

There are exciting opportunities to explore for brands ready to embrace the latest innovations. Applying these top content marketing trends can help you stay ahead of the competition, meet the changing expectations of your audience, and emerge as an industry leader:

• Develop content for new platforms like AR and voice search.
• Focus on experience with highly-personalized content powered by data and a modern cross-channel experience.
• Create genuine connections with micro-influencers, storytelling techniques, and content highlighting your sustainability efforts.

Tempesta Media’s managed services can help you incorporate these trends into your content marketing strategy. Learn more about our Bullseye Effect approach and how we help organizations like yours gain a competitive edge through innovation.