Last updated on November 23rd, 2022
“According to more than 57% of marketers, content marketing has taken over social media marketing as India’s most popular strategy.”
Isn’t it a fascinating fact?
With every passing year, marketers and businesses around the world are witnessing a significant shift in focus towards content marketing because it plays a crucial role in attracting prospective customers to any business.
Content marketing in India has exploded, and every brand is trying to come up with a better tactic to outdo its competition.
Why Is Content Marketing Crucial?
Content marketing is a very effective way to promote any business by curating engaging material and stimulating the interest of the public in favor of a particular product, service, or brand.
The strategic planning of valuable content to target relevant customers is very helpful in gaining huge profits and multiplying the business growth manifold.
Content marketing helps brands build better connections with their customers. It is primarily done to provide useful information to the target audience to eventually capture their interest and earn profits.
Businesses have applied exclusively amazing content marketing tactics to build their reputation and form trust amongst the people.
Rise of Content Marketing in India
Over the years, the demand for content marketing in India has increased significantly. Today, even small-scale start-ups are making it a priority for more lead conversions.
In India, the fanatical era of content marketing started around the year 2017. Earlier, Indian brands would target their audience through product or service marketing. However, with the increasing scope of content marketing, these businesses began sharing informational content with the audience to help them realize the need for that particular product or service.
Consequently, the public soon started to feel a void in their lives, and the approach to selling the products became easier for Indian brands.
Content marketing helped brands generate high revenues. Since then, Indian brands never looked back, and there was an insane demand for content marketing strategies in India.
Today, the demand for content marketing is increasing manifold amongst start-ups because it is cheaper than traditional marketing and provides higher ROI.
71% of the marketers have agreed that traffic from influencer marketing (one of the kinds of content marketing) is of higher quality as compared to other marketing sources.
How Are Start-Ups Coming with Phenomenal Content Marketing Plans?
Content marketing is a creative art, and if used effectively, it can help in building life-long relationships with clients, in spite of having tons of competitors and challenges.
Start-ups in India are using fabulous content based marketing strategies to achieve their goals quickly, within a short period.
Here are some of the best content marketing strategies prevailing in India:
Educating People
Start-ups are hunting for trending issues or hot topics and coming up with compelling ideas to educate people about those issues and make them feel the need for that product or service.
For instance, Indian skincare brands have benefited from the current pollution statistics, and have continuously been educating their audience about the harmful effects of pollutants on the skin.
This, in turn, is helping industries like charcoal and sandalwood industry to earn as people have started feeling the need for these miraculous ingredients in their lives.
When people started ignoring the ever famous “Fair & Lovely,” the brand launched its Charcoal Face Wash and Pollution Clean Up Face Wash.
It educated the audience about the power of activated charcoal and its benefits in pulling out the harmful pollutants deep inside the skin and scripted a huge comeback story.
Consistent Pushing
Start-ups have started building their authenticity as a brand by producing quality content consistently on their blogs.
For example, an Indian Hair Care brand called Satthwa published many informative blogs to educate the Indian audience about various hair problems and their solutions. The information helped people decide what they need to look for in their hair oils, masks, serums, etc.
When Satthwa launched its Good Night’s Blend Oil, it regularly posted content related to the impact of sound sleep on the personal as well as professional life of an individual. This, in turn, helped it to get several customers who felt the need for its product.
Involvement of Influencers
Many companies involve social media influencers to spread the word about them by either reviewing their product or by curating engaging content which tells the customers about them. Also, many of them do guest posting on other websites to target a similar audience.
Several furniture start-ups spread the word about themselves amongst the audience, which likes to see DIYs or content related to home furnishing. Hence, Indian influencers are another critical content marketing tool for start-ups.
As an example, KFC developed its reputation as one of the best global restaurant chain brands in India by targeting the young audience through Instagram influencers. Many bloggers and vloggers included KFC’s latest menu options and offer in their posts and vlogs. As a result, their Facebook page’s popularity grew from 6.2% to 93.8% and their sales substantially increased as well.
Similarly, Vaseline increased awareness about the uses of their product and its needs by creating a “hacks” campaign on Instagram. During the campaign, influencers focused on sharing three to five Vaseline hacks they included in their daily routine. This created a perceptible engagement amongst their followers, and the sales increased visibly.
What Does the Future of Content Marketing Look Like?
As content marketing in India is growing remarkably, and the return on investment is totally worth it, there is no doubt that the future will be even better. Nowadays, businesses are growing rapidly by curating high-quality content in the form of blogs, case studies, website content, social media posts, newsletter, infographics, etc.
However, the future has a lot more to witness. Let us have a look at the number of trends that are likely to dominate the upcoming content marketing era.
Repurposing of long form text into different other forms
The attention span of people has reduced drastically in the last few years. Also, people are more interested in looking at photos and videos rather than reading long blog posts and articles.
Hence, the long form content, once published, can be easily re-purposed into various formats such as gifs, memes, videos, presentations, data visualization, and graphics.
It’ll not only counter the decreasing attention span but also be helpful in marketing the long form of content across different channels.
It is a matter of fact that people like video content better than text. Moreover, visual content helps convey the motive of the content way better. It quickly grabs the visitor’s attention, is easier and faster to process, and leads to better engagement.
Hence, visual content will be a compelling content marketing strategy in the upcoming years. As a result, the audience will increase as people who don’t want to read will also engage with the content.
Emerging Voice Assistants
A paradigm shift has been noticed in Google search results and usage of the internet ever since various voice assistants like “Google,” “Siri,” “Cortana,” and “Alexa” emerged. Instead of typing their queries, people are asking Google to find a solution by giving voice instructions.
As a result, the marketers will have to use keywords that are prominently spoken in natural language.
For example, if you would want to know how to clean a stain from your favorite t-shirt instantly, you would type “cleaning t-shirt instantly.” On the other hand, with voice assistants, you would say, “how can I instantly remove a stain on my t-shirt?”.
Therefore, with emerging voice assistants, the landscape of content marketing is likely to change a lot.
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Personalised storytelling
Content addressing the general public gets much less engagement as compared to when it addresses “you” directly. People love reading content, which is written specifically for them.
To bridge the gap between visitors and readers, it is crucial to give a personalized touch to the content.
Also, people love to read stories. Hence, content marketers will have to inculcate storytelling into their pieces to grab the attention quickly. The attention span of the audience is reduced. Thus, visual stories will have a more significant impact.
The Road Ahead
Content marketing is regularly evolving and is yet to develop more to offer a better experience, generate more revenue, and build lifelong relationships.
As content marketing is going to transform itself in the upcoming years, it will be a more significant challenge for marketers to make changes and take their start-ups forward, but it will be more opportunistic as well.
Do numbers fascinate you? Will content marketing be as compelling in the future as it is now? If you have answered in affirmative to both these questions, do watch out for our next article in this series ‘101 Useful Content Marketing Stats’ which I’ll give you several numbers to ponder upon.
One of the best ways to achieve your content marketing goals is also to outsource your content requirements to professional content writing services. They can save you a great deal of time and money while helping you achieve the best results.
