The way customers want to consume information has evolved by leaps and bounds over the past year. And if your company isn’t adapting to those trends, it runs the risk of looking like a dinosaur in the digital age.
The best way to grab customers’ attention today is to display product info, news and insights in ways that show your company’s thinking and acting like it’s in the 21st Century.
To do that you have to embrace these tech trends:
1. Visual content is king
If you’re not visually focused online, you’re starting to fall behind the curve.
Not only have photos and videos become the centerpieces of what were once text-heavy social sites in Facebook and Twitter, humans’ hunger for visuals has given birth to photo-centric sites like Pinterest and Instagram.
This proliferation of photography across the web has made it difficult for text-dominated sites to keep visitors’ attention.
2. People want bite-sized chunks of info
Long-form content certainly still has its place, especially in B2B sales cycles where buyers tend to conduct lots of research before committing to an expensive purchase.
But short-form and micro content are what’s dominating most buyers’ attention today.
First, there was Twitter’s 140-max-character blogging platform. And now there’s Vine, Twitter’s six-second video blog feature.
The popularity of both has proven that humans want to be able to get in, get info and get out — all in the same breath.
This is forcing companies to tell their stories and present their product info in short, bit-sized chunks — using lots of one- and two-sentence paragraphs and bullet points.
3. Video is taking hold
iPhones and Androids have made everyone feel like professional photographers and videographers — including business personnel.
This technology has also given users more opportunities in which to view videos. They can do it from anywhere, at anytime. As a result, video marketing is taking off.
In addition, due to the ease with which quality videos can be made, customers now realize there’s no excuse for not creating them — and they’re demanding video.
Example: Instead of reading a manual, they want to watch a how-to video.
4. SEO is dependent upon social integration
With Google now indexing Facebook posts and just about everything that happens on Google+, companies that have a large social media presence are getting a healthy boost in Google’s search rankings.
In addition, Facebook’s Graph Search is deeply tied into Bing — and vice versa.
This means you can no longer ignore social media if you’re looking for an SEO boost.
Make sure your product pages and any articles or research reports on your website contain social sharing buttons. Search engines are looking for validation that content is high quality before placing it in their search results — and one of the first places search engines will look for this validation is in social signals (Likes, Shares, Tweets, etc).
