Why Brands Should Start Capitalizing on Ephemeral Content
Digital marketing trends come and go, but you can expect content to remain king for the foreseeable future. It’s clear that brands now embrace content marketing to generate more customers and engage them better. Focusing on traditional marketing channels; however, may cause you to lag behind the competition.
Videos, infographics and good old blog posts continue to be effective. When creating these content formats, the idea is to make them as relevant for years to come. There’s a reason why marketers love crafting evergreen content, as the potential returns are enormous. But what if you can achieve the same goals and returns with impermanent content?
Such is the promise of ephemeral content marketing. Made famous by Snapchat, countless brands across the globe now leverage ephemeral messaging to reach out to prospective customers in a more exciting fashion. Whether you want to attract more customers to use your financial services, build up hype for a new product or simply keep in touch with followers, ephemeral content can prove to be the right medium through which you can connect with your target audience.
The success of Snapchat came as a surprise to many. The idea of sharing content that disappears within 24 hours used to turn off marketers. Today, they try to find all sorts of ways to incorporate it into their overall content marketing strategy.
It’s interesting that what many people considered to be ephemeral content’s greatest weakness is actually its most powerful feature. When you send content that vanishes in a set period of time, it gives people a reason to check it out. Consumers don’t want to miss out on awesome deals and great content. This offers a touch of exclusivity while adding a more personal approach to your campaigns at the same time.
The challenge lies in formulating a strategy around ephemeral messaging. Social platforms now utilize complex algorithms that consider a multitude of different factors to determine what content gets seen by users. Aside from creating content that followers will find compelling, it’s necessary to learn about how social channels filter content to ensure your messages reach your desired audience.
Ephemeral content is relatively young, and while it already benefits several brands, we have yet to see its true potential. For one, there’s a lack of analytics solutions to learn about how users interact with ephemeral content. Some tools now offer performance metrics to some degree, but there’s still a long way to go before the support industry around this type of content becomes fully developed.
Despite a few shortcomings, it’s definitely worth it to invest time and money on ephemeral marketing. It offers the perfect opportunity to grab the attention of potential customers, something that gets harder to do each day with all the businesses competing for the same set of eyes.
Although some perceive it to be inferior to traditional types of content such as videos and blog posts, ephemeral content has delivered promising results thus far. It can be just what you need to gain the attention of fans and keep it for the long term.
