What is The Future of Digital Marketing?
The internet has changed a lot of things. It has affected education, finance, entertainment and the way people interact with others. Since it started, it has been a continuing struggle for content creators and curators, website owners, developers, and administrators, as well as software and hardware companies to keep up. There has been an insatiable need for more information, as well as better and faster access.
Twenty years ago, the most popular form of internet access was via email. People sent a lot of things via email. At the time, going viral meant that media or files were sent from one person to another, and it kept being sent. One of the early viral videos was the “dancing baby.” Since then, the power of viral media has the intent of internet promotion and content marketing. This is the internet’s version of “word of mouth.”
Forwarding media has evolved, from images to animated gif files, audio, links, and video. The method of sharing has also evolved. Social media, especially mobile social media, has made it easy to pass along videos. Large video files are being sent on chat, without any problems, even as email providers have a cap on attachment file sizes.
The confluence of demand for more content, by even more users, and continuing development of technology to deliver large bandwidth has made it feasible to watch high-resolution videos, as well as live stream on social media. Marketers use webinars and educational videos as content marketing materials. These are high-value content which provides entertainment and information to a wide audience. Putting these up on video-sharing websites and posting the links to blogs and social media has made it easier to share with potential customers. The real value of videos is that they not only pull in clicks and views, they also result in a list of people who subscribe to podcasts, webinars, and other newsletters. This is the wide mouth of the marketing funnel.
Videos have become the most popular form of online media. Even mainstream news and other media have made their broadcast content accessible online. According to Cisco Systems, they expect that by 2022, videos will comprise 82% of internet traffic. The next stage in the evolution of video is clear: 8K videos, livestreaming, viewed on a smartphone running on 5G networks.
