How trends changed the marketing. Part 2

The growing use of social media from 2005 until now brought the biggest changes not only to marketing but generally to the way we perceive information. The main marketing trends also showed up through an immense number of cat videos and the raising of the mem culture.

Today – after a few decades of video trends that happened mostly due to the world wide web – we can learn how to attract a customer based on the history, or, to be more precise, a recent history of the trends.

Don’t expect to read here “The history of trends”, but rather “Incomplete and utter history of video trends”. 🙂 However, all jokes aside, we are going to continue the topic we started here(Link) and talk more about marketing and video trends through the last decades.

As usual, we are not going to just look at the obvious stuff about the trends, but we’ll also try to see what was underneath these things. In the last 10 years, we saw a lot of things that affected the way marketing looks today. Besides the rise, of social media — which we will talk about later in this article —many other minor events have a huge impact on the market in general.

It is the emergency of Instagram, and its influencers, and the altering way of getting famous, and, eventually – how big brands started to promote their products through influencers. But let’s come back for a moment.

Ever since people wanted something to sell, marketing was out there. However, if even two decades ago marketing was only about selling products, services and other stuff, today it is different.

How? First of all, the effectiveness of marketing methods has taken a rather rapid pace. We now know how to segment the audience, how to offer people the product they would really want to have or use.

In other words, we attract clients, customers and followers not only in order to sell things, but also to give people real value. Many brands build their creative power exactly on this intention to give people value, to enrich their life. This is what we do in our company – we want to create a picturesque vision that would help brands to translate their value. 

Second, we can see now a clear timeline of many marketing trends that wasn’t really effective, but during decades became better. For example, if email marketing at some point was so badly affected by spam, we can see how many positively effective email marketing programs were launched recently. Despite the talks here and there that email is slowly dying, it proves to be effective even in the times where the main player is 100% visual.

Third, the number of things one could focus the business on change. Now you could create courses, share knowledge and teach other people to teach. Some people would assume that today the market transpires in absolute fullness. Don’t you agree with that?

Fourth, the expressive strategies that shape a market and its articulations, a quite concrete world that is giving us opportunities to affect people’s lives, not only changed but became real diverse. You can write a customer journey map and apply different ways of presenting your product — from a video marketing campaign to something else.

Finally, the dialect between what it means to be a consumer and the content creator for these purposes is now different. Everyone can post a video that could possibly hit millions of views and make that person an influencer. The point is that not only brands make content: everyone can do this. Something like that has the same impact on the whole marketing as we know it.

Trends in timelines

1999 — blogging emerges thanks to LiveJournal and Blogger.com. In just 7 years there will be 50 million blogs. Naturally, the effect on content marketing will be immense. Some would say this is exactly where content tactics have taken place for the first time. the 2000 — dot-com bubble pops up changing the powers on the market, and, to be honest, establishing the market.

Thanks to this technology companies made a first, huge step toward what we have now. This is the moment when inbound marketing started to rise. Information sharing, the customer-centred content started from that. 2004 – the year that it turned out to be truly revolutionary. Why? First of all, social media appears. Facebook, LinkedIn, email marketing. In a year Google will launch a personalized search for each user.

Practically, here we have the beginning of personalized content. 2010 – email marketing became a complete and total mess since 90% of the letters were spam. 2012 – remember how we tell about the tendency of brands to increase their video marketing budget and to concentrate generally on video? Well, in 2012 many marketers were about to increase their social media budget to 60%.

During this year the number of online video viewers was already 170 million, while mobile video viewers hit 50 million. This is where the modern buzz about the video has started. Just think about it for a moment: starting from 2012 video marketing slowly took its place among main marketing trends and completely changed how brands present themselves. 

How the rise of social media affected marketing trends?

All of it sounds incredible, but it actually didn’t show us how exactly video became what it is at the moment – the main language and the best way to communicate information to a wide audience of different people. And the number one trend.

We always like to pay attention to the shapes and mechanics behind the trends. It matters. The trends shouldn’t be reduced only to their actual embodiments, because what makes trends even more than any time changes is the way we perceive something. Social media’s cosmic rise — another amazing trend that deserves talking about —  had a profound impact on our information consumption, as well as the patterns we have in understanding what is worth attention. While the main social media platforms developed, they also brought what is called a different kind of content consumption.

Nowadays we can see how Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or even various messengers differentiated what we used to expect in the form of information. It doesn’t make boundaries for what can be made but definitely changes what can no longer work as an eligible marketing tool. At first everything — meaning all content — was rather verbal, at least sometimes moving to the visual representation of information.

Mostly in the shape of pictures and photographs. Moving pictures became such a big deal only within years and turned out to be our future only in 2015. Today it is a definitive formula that is not locking any form of expression for brands. You can see it through Instagram’s evolution. At first, it was only a picture-wise platform — people would share the photographs. But! Once the founders decided to bring a new feature called “stories”, millions of people would turn to video at a frightening pace.

Inbound marketing

Today businesses and entrepreneurs offer the world various kinds of content —  blog writing, podcasts, videos, but mostly videos. Together it creates something that is called “inbound marketing”. This is what helps brands to become more profitable, and recognising.

Videos alone are a great tool, but many brands quickly figured out that with the other types of content the potential and outcomes grows a few times. Social media posts now become embedded with some video clips, mostly short ones. To speak of the evolution of trends we should not forget to speak about the evolution of content.

But why does a video of all content become a winner? The video is incredibly engaging. If you think about it, video is much easier to swallow than blog posts, or even books. Decidedly, by 2021 YouTube is one of the main platforms in terms of information consumption.

Ever since marketers become more than just people who figure out how to sell stuff based on the state of the market, we rely on their finding more and more. Marketing becomes the architecture of our online (not only, however) experience.

Summary

From the very start of modern marketing, content was one of the best ways a business can help shape its brand identity, find its audience, and move to a bigger scale. Once the content emerges, it makes the biggest trends possible. The trends, therefore, would create the marketing landscape. As we can see through the years, trends are not static even for a year.

Especially now, when marketing alters its appearance, let’s say so, constantly. We got some perspective on what shapes trends and how they evolved during the years. We are going to continue pondering on the subject in order to give you a better perspective on the market in general and to help you forge your own ideas. It doesn’t matter if you are a marketing nerd or entrepreneur, you must find it useful.