In the World of Digital Marketing, Content Is King

© 2019 March Oyinki

Good content helps to improve visibility by attracting visitors to your site and ensuring high retention rate. Good content in whatever form, be it photography, video, illustration, cinemagraph, podcast, article, webinar etc., is crucial for a successful and exciting web experience. Quality content appeals to visitors and followers of your website.

Part of having good quality content is by ensuring that your curations meet high professional standards. If it is an article, it must write it in good English and it must be devoid of common spelling and grammatical errors. It must also be clean with clear thought sequences of the message you want to deliver. Whatever type of content you have on your site, ensuring that it is of high quality is what we mean by “Content Is King.” This expression highlights the importance of content to the success or failure of a website.

As the digital marketing industry continues to expand, new methods of curating compelling content are emerging. The era of static GIF images and illustrations is passing; and gradually replaced by animated GIF and cinemagraph. These new forms are an exciting way to catch the attention of the audience. Presently, you find more of these new forms of content in use brand managers and content curators.

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Just as the name implies, animated GIFs are simply a combination of images, graphics, photographs or video content that forms an animated advertisement. Animated GIF is a cool way for a campaign to stand out in the crowd, because, it gives the advert a little more pep and increases engagement by the audience by way of like, share or comment. 

Cinemagraph is a GIF format, which is a combination of still photograph, illustration and short video frames to produce stunning effect of still-motion GIF, seen often on the landing pages of a websites, used to attract more traffic. We are beginning to see increasing use of this format of adverts across platforms.

This innovation has led to enormous increase in the use of animation and cinemagraph contents in the digital marketing industry, and ostensibly, it has raised the bar to a new height and completely transforming the digital marketing landscape.

Whatever digital marketing channel you have in your mix, content remains the most essential component of curating a campaign. What really matters is the use of a content type that produces maximum effect and attracts more visits to a website. Contents types such as cinemagraph, video, animated GIF is clearly the future of digital marketing. The increasing use of these content types is an indication of the relevance of video content in the industry. 

Many website owners that want to increase traffic now introduces video in their landing pages. Study has shown that websites that have video on their landing pages are more likely to experience increase conversion rate by as much as 86%.¹⁸ 

Presently, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and others, have introduced features that encourage the use of animated GIF content more on their platforms; and that include blogging sites. 

The difference between video, animated GIF and cinemagraph in effectiveness are obvious, because it reflects in the number of engagement (likes, comments and shares or retweets), which increases and helps to attract more visitors to the site, and it is a clear indication of the dynamic nature of the digital marketing industry, and its ability to adopt new technology.

Any digital marketer who seriously wants to achieve good return on invest and have not already started using these innovative content types, they should do so for their own best interest. The earlier they start the better for them, because the competition that exist presently in the digital marketing industry is not merely immense but quite fierce.

In recent times, the digital marketing industry has grown quite rapidly, and it is evolving and adapting to new technology as they emerge. New ads agencies are springing up, and there is a rise in the number of young professionals who are attracted to the industry. At this rate, in another 2 years, the digital marketing industry in Nigeria will blossom. 

For any company to stand out in the crowd in the face of keen competition much is expected from the digital marketer, social media manager or content curator, because, it has become even more challenging and to compete for the few willing advertisers that are ready to promote their brands on the Internet, require a good strategy. Therefore, they must exhibit ingenuity and must be top of their game always.

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