Human-Centric Marketing Trends
Human-centric marketing should not really be a trend, all you do is for humans. Your customers have never been one-dimensional people whose only purpose in life is to buy your product.
It’s not rocket science - the better you know and treat people, the better business results you get.
But human-centric marketing is not always easy either, thus human-centric marketing keeps on being a marketing “trend”.
Let’s dive into what it means today.
TIP: DOWNLOAD THIS BLOG POST AS A WHITEPAPER TO SAVE IT.
Values-Based Marketing
Values-based consumers are in the driver’s seat of major changes in the economy, and the biggest winners are the brands that are not afraid to show their true purpose.
Communicate your purpose, why your company exists, and why it matters, and show your values in action using clear messaging about which social or ethical (or even political) issues are important to you.
Walk the walk with your purpose, and unite with your customers to fight against the same bad guy (like climate change, or the frustration of how long it takes to find your dream home).
If your values are not defined - now is the time to do it. You will be surprised how much it will affect your bottom line.
More than half of European consumers (according to Laura Koetzle, VP, Group Research Director, Forrester) will buy from brands whose values match their own in 2022.
The rate is 71% in the USA and as high as 83% among Millennial Americans as 5W Public Relations found in their study.
One great way to showcase your purpose and values is through compelling video content, like cinematic commercials, and brand films with inspiring stories. Well-produced brand video lives forever and brings you ROI even after the latest marketing fad has been long forgotten.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
How diverse is your customer base - and marketing?
One in four people lives with a disability, and about 16% of the world population is non-religious. The LGBTQ+ community is above 10% of the adult population.
Did you know the silver economy, the folks over 65 years old, is the fastest growing - and the wealthiest - consumer group in the world?
When people see someone like them in ads, they are more likely to buy.
38% of consumers, in general, are more likely to trust brands that show diversity in their ads, but the rates go significantly higher when you look at different demographics.
Over 70% of Gen Z wants to see diversity in ads, and 85% of Latinx and LGBTQ+.
Don’t think it’s enough to add diverse-looking models in your ads or wave the rainbow flag one month a year or even worse: commercialize it for your benefit.
Diversity and inclusion aren’t just about marketing, it is a culture.
This company culture change drives company profits. According to Deloitte’s study on diversity and inclusion, high-growth brands with annual revenue growth of 10% or more are more likely to have key performance metrics for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) objectives than their lower-growth competitors.
93% of marketers believe inclusive marketing is important for the business potential it represents, according to research done by iProspect.
Rise of Privacy
Consumers are demanding more transparency from you, but they are also demanding you to respect their privacy more.
Sure, enjoy the third-party cookies as long as you can, but start moving towards first-party data - data about your customers that is collected and owned by your company.
There is a lot you can do to collect this data (different digital touchpoints, preferences, purchase history, online and offline behavior) and you can ask your customer to share their information with you.
Consumers want personalization, so they know they have to provide you with data in order to get it. They just want to be treated better than through third-party targeted ads.
First-party data should be part of your omnichannel marketing strategy of recognizing your customer at any touchpoint of interaction with them. You might want to rethink your membership and loyalty programs, newsletter lists, your own apps, and even text messages as part of your first-party data strategy.
In your content marketing, this also means an added emphasis on organic content and SEO.
Blockchain in Marketing Adds Privacy
Blockchain offers one solution for the added customer privacy, and simultaneously this technology will also significantly improve the way brands can be more authentic, transparent, and respect customers’ data.
Currently, centralized organizations, like Amazon, Facebook, and Google, control too much of the consumer data, limiting transparency.
Blockchain can be used in marketing to build more secure connections with customers, without having to share data with multiple third-party companies.
With blockchain, data stays secure, it can not be sold, and it prevents fraud.
Currently, people are bombarded with ads they didn’t ask to see, but with blockchain technology, they could be served more relevant advertising and information, and even get paid in cryptocurrency for watching ads.
Employer Branding
Inflation, Great Resignation (or Great Redesign of work-life), Recession, Quiet Quitting.
We have a lot going on in the post-pandemic world.
Keeping your own team happy, healthy, and motivated is more crucial than ever, but so is attracting new talent.
Happy employees keep customers happy, and your own team could be your biggest marketing asset.
However, stop trying to get your employees to share the corporate communications messages from your company's LinkedIn page, and instead finally create an employer branding strategy of how you can engage your own team in an authentic way - and make them your company’s most important hype people. If you are lucky, you will get to keep your star employees.
Gartner predicts that by 2023, 90% of B2B companies include employee branding and employee advocacy as part of their social media marketing strategy.
Additionally, LinkedIn says that employee-shared content gets a 200% higher click-through rate than content posted on company LinkedIn pages.
When you are ready to harness the power of your entire team to create brand-specific, flexible, and dynamic marketing content across all channels, let’s talk, maybe Tumplate can help.
Tumplate lets you control the brand consistency even when you unleash an entire team of real estate agents, independent sales reps, or IT professionals to create high-quality on-brand content within minutes. We have even created a simple way to create animated video content, just by entering a few variables into an easy form, without ever even seeing an editing tool.
Talk about empowerment, when everyone can create high-quality branded content!
Content Marketing Trends
We wanted to understand the challenges marketing teams face in terms of not being able to publish as much content as they’d like. You can not solve content production bottlenecks if you can't identify them.
Here are the most common pain points:
- Lack of good content ideas (43.2%)
- Lack of good content strategy (40.80%)
- Not sure how to get good results (28.8%)
- Can’t always produce good quality (24.5%)
Many lack resources:
- lack of skilled people (38%)
- not enough marketing budget (20.4%)
- not good enough tools (20.4%)
- takes too much time (32.4%)
How Companies Are Getting Better Results with Content
According to the surveyed marketing professionals the companies that are able to publish more content and get better results do have some commonalities.
Video becomes even more important. As the content production goes up, the percentage of video and animated content grows, but the portion of photo content respectively doesn’t grow the same rate.
The content is either more likely to be produced by external agencies OR the companies have more strict control and bigger internal team, but not as many mixing both internal and external teams creating content as the volume goes high. In many organizations, more members of the entire team is involved in the content creation.
Most companies say that the more content you post, the more important a good strategy, and managing the strategy and managing the brand becomes.
The importance of better and consistent quality, publishing more consistently and having brand consistency grows as the volume goes up.
Companies are more likely to use automation tools when content volume goes up.
Even companies that publish a lot of content still say they would publish more if they could because they see the ROI in high-quality content.
Tactics that have helped visual content strategy to be more successful:
- Having consistent branding in our visual content 49.81%
- An increasing quantity of content and publishing more consistently 43.24%
- Creating more video content 41.31%
- Improving quality of content 37.45%
- Trying new content distribution channels (for example TikTok) 37.45%
- Using automation tools to make content creation workflow better 16.22%
“A quite radical shift has happened with paid social media postings. Due to changing audience behavior and platform preferences, paying to push your posts is not making as much sense as just a year ago.
The field is so wide and scattered that you'd have to cast quite an expensive net. Right now you're best off with an amazing content plan and a steady flow of fresh or remixed content that will keep the algo's happy and the audience engaged and some standard paid advertising either on Google Ads platforms or collectively on your top social media platforms.
Sure, boosting is not completely out of the game, but a lot of professional marketers are reporting issues with Meta's and TikTok's policies and just plain reach that they get with paid boosts. Unless you've got an open budget, it's wiser to post a lot and push the organically well-reacting posts with some paid love.”
Jaakko Manninen, co-founder, CTO, Tumplate
Download this blog post as a white paper to save it.
Importance of Branding
In our content marketing survey, 50.9% of marketers said they think branding is very important in visual content, 46.7% find it somewhat important, and only 2.7% of marketers don’t think branding is important in all visual content.
“The big picture in overall brand communication is even more critical than ever: we have so many platforms with each having slightly different best practices, so it's important to have clean "storylines" in your communication that all point to the main target results and then publish content that fits each platform to support that messaging.
It's also essential to constantly test and validate your channels of communication and find the most engaged audiences for your brand. It's better to take those platforms as a point of focus instead of trying to win them all, especially if your team is limited.
For this, it's essential to make sure your data is on point so that you can focus on the audiences that matter the most.
One major thing to pay attention to right now is your overall brand image. You can see all the major brands starting to steer back to sleek professional, strictly brand-formatted, communication. Your brand is one of your most important ways to stand out in the world of digital communication and leveraging is like a low-hanging upper hand.”
Jaakko Manninen, co-founder, CTO, Tumplate.
The biggest challenges brand managers face are trying to balance brand personalization and the brand voice. How can you be authentic and personable, while still staying true to the established brand? How can you create personalized messages - at scale?
Video Content
TikTok tops Google as the most visited website on the internet and proves that it’s not just for teenagers. Formerly known as the photo content platform, Instagram also changed its focus to video.
“The vertical format video is the powerhouse of social media communication at the moment. TikTok is dominating it and other social media try to emulate it. Regardless of your focus platform, make sure you are putting emphasis on moving vertical content. At the moment the algorithms love it! Another trend that is rising heavily is real-time subtitling or great caption. They are the most important tools in the competitive feed-level interactions game.”
Jaakko Manninen, co-founder, CTO, Tumplate
In Wyzowl’s video marketing study, 84% of consumers said they have bought a product after watching a video online, and people are twice as likely to share videos than any other type of content. In 2021, 86% of businesses indicated that they were using video as a marketing tool, and 93% of CMOs say video content a critical part of their strategy.
You simply can’t ignore video any more.
As mentioned above, well-produced and search-engine-optimized video content practically lives forever. A video on an e-commerce product page can increase sales up to 300%. If you don’t believe me, test it!
Our team has been creating commercial video ads for household name brands for years. We know video brings you better ROI than any other type of content.
But are you trying to keep up with the daily video content demand and trying to keep the quality high on every piece of video content you publish? We understand the challenges, even for large brands with large budgets.
That’s why you need a well-rounded video content marketing strategy that mixes high-production value videos that tell compelling stories and highlights your company values with timely, less expensive, and even automated video content for social media, and content with motion graphics and light animation that anyone in your team can do fast with an automated tool.
And yes, add some more casual TikTok content there too. Your customers are already on TikTok, you should be there too.
“Standing out with video in marketing is more difficult than ever. Everyone has the opportunity to make video content, there are even full-length films already shot on the iPhone.
However, the need for video content continues to grow, and the budgets need to stretch further when the available resources have to be divided between several productions.
In the worst case, the end result is a pile of mediocre products that don't stand out from the crowd, and yet there is not enough content for all communication needs.
Concentrate on carefully selected larger video productions, where professional storytelling and high-quality visuals are at the center (brand videos, launches, TV commercials). Put more effort into individual high-quality productions that evoke emotions, instead of trying to produce a lot of mediocre videos.
In addition to high-quality productions with spectacular storytelling, use inexpensive and effective solutions, like Tumplate, and focus on the message for the needs of day-to-day video communication. With tools like Tumplate, your everyday moving content is also in line with the brand and of high-quality visually. That way you can use your video marketing resources more concentrated in places where the benefits are most effective: paid advertising, and high-quality video productions that stand out from the crowd.”
Vertti Virkajärvi, CFO, Tumplate
Don’t Forget Audio
If video content seems too much, add more audio.
Clubhouse fad in 2021 escalated the audio content boom, and now we don’t even have to go to a separate app to host audio-only talks. Twitter launched Spaces, Facebook their own live audio rooms, Spotify pushed out Greenroom, and then there is Discord.
Do live talks or even better: create a company podcast.
No time to produce a podcast? Record the company blog posts in an audio format, and your customers can listen to them while running or sitting in the traffic.
Remember that you still need to market to get listeners for your audio, so combining short audio snippets with dynamic motion graphics could be an easy way to maximize your audio content efforts for social media.
User-Generated Content
Consumers demand marketing content that mirrors the diverse group of who they are. Even your B2B customers want social proof. You are also dealing with over double the amount of marketing channels where you need content than just 10 years ago.
The good news is that just like consumers want to give you some data, they also want to do some of your marketing for you.
User-generated content isn’t a new idea, but it has become a necessity these days. While influencer marketing is still rising in popularity, consumers are not always trusting the sponsored posts. Authentic user-generated content (UGC) can be your answer. You can always work together with micro-influencers to get the excitement started.
User-generated content is almost ten times more impactful than content created by influencers, and consumers trust user-generated content 2.4 times more than content created by brands, according to survey done by Stackla.
UGC isn’t just about social media visibility, but the additional benefits include the possibility to create fun activation campaigns to engage with loyal brand fans, get consumer insights, and when done right, collect tons of first-party data.
With Tumplate, you could even add branded elements to UGC automatically.
Marketing Technology and Web3
You can not create a marketing strategy for 2023 without including how you are using technology to gather data to make sure your marketing efforts are working.
Most likely, you also can not create a marketing strategy for 2023 without thinking about web3 and metaverse.
You can let automation, AI, scheduling, chatbots, and other marketing tech help you to save your marketing resources for something else: caring about your customers and making it easy for them to buy from you. Focus on building a better user experience, and use technology to make the shopping experience frictionless.
“For me, the biggest question facing marketing is what kind of a role automation and AI will play in the future.
The rise of AI-powered content creation tools already allows brands and marketers to scale their marketing content and messaging, but not without cost. Using AI-powered content creation means that the core of their message - their point of view - is given to the AI to communicate resulting in content that's not relevant, doesn't speak for the brand, and only perpetuates the echo chamber of social media and the internet.
We need to make sure we don't give the keys to what our brand represents to the AI, but use it as a tool to help us better deliver our message, and our point of view. We need to use automation so that it helps us better communicate our values, not create those values for us.
The need for automated content is obviously driven by the fracturing of platforms that we use to gain access to the internet, and how we communicate and share about ourselves. Each platform requires a different kind of messaging that complicates the content creation process exponentially, so it's not surprising that solutions that offer to tackle those problems are on the rise.
What's crucial is to identify where one implements the automation process that allows the scaling of communication without compromising the integrity of the message and the values of the brand. It's not enough to just broadcast your values – you need to also take part in the conversation consistently and in a way that is authentic to you and your brand. The only way to excite people is to be excited first, and the AI-powered messaging is not the way to do that.”
Hannu Aukia, Co-founder, Chairman of the Board, Tumplate.
Tumplate Let’s You Automate Content Production for All Platforms
Marketing technology is a vast topic on its own, so let me be biased and sum up what our own platform, Tumplate, can do for you.
Over 93% of the respondents in our content marketing survey said they would like to publish more content.
Are you among them?
Tumplate’s customers produce large amounts of content and the content volume comes from two different aspects: content from multiple users or content of large amounts of products/messages.
Let’s talk about the multiuser case first.
Do you feel like you only wish you could get people in your organization to create great branded content? Or do you have some already creating content, but you almost wish they didn’t, because what they are creating isn’t really aligned with the brand?
You can gain back that brand control, while making it easier for everyone to create content with Tumplate.
Tumplate is for marketing directors who are seeking to manage even hundreds of team members who are all creating digital content but are struggling with output volume while keeping brand consistency. It works amazingly for large corporations, with large amounts of independent agents, who all have their own social media accounts. Or for multi-level marketing companies or franchises.
Tumplate is a zero skills required editor that allows anyone to create in-motion content in minutes while keeping the brand consistency. Unlike other tools that follow a graphic design-centric workflow, Tumplate automation keeps brand design always in check, allowing CMOs to scale their content needs at Tumplate’s web platform that any team member can master.
Secondly, our customers scale content production when the high content volume comes from multiple different message needs.
This could mean multiple products from an ecommerce site, multiple language needs for different markets, or need for customized messaging for each customer.
Tumplate’s web application comes less relevant when we can integrate content creation with a product, content, or text feed and create an automated way to produce content for different aspect ratios, never even using an editing tool.
And the best part of Tumplate for all: it automatically creates the content in multiple different aspect ratios, for all platforms. That’s right, you create a message once, and with one click, you resize the same message to fit all of your chosen aspect ratios.
Your multichannel communications have never been this easy.
Metaverse
Thanks to Facebook rebranding itself as Meta in 2021, the interest in the metaverse grew exponentially.
The initial trend wave has gone down, but Morgan Stanley estimates the metaverse as an $8 trillion business opportunity. Additionally, 54% of technology experts in the Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center study said that they expect the metaverse will be an aspect of daily life for a half billion or more people globally by 2040.
What IS the metaverse anyways? The definitions vary, depending on who you ask. Some say it’s a virtual world, accessible by things like VR goggles, and some say it’s definitely not a virtual place where you go.
One explanation is that the metaverse is a new way for people to connect in blended virtual and augmented reality environments. It is more community-driven than the current company-driven model of social media.
The most appealing view of the metaverse is when it will integrate the digital world and physical reality, creating a “phygital” world. Our real-life experiences can be enhanced with digital means in a new way.
As a marketer, you should at least follow along with what this will mean for your customers.
Web3
Web2 gave anyone the opportunity to become a content creator, thanks to social media.
While things like targeted digital advertising and online influencer marketing were born during this era, the power has still been centralized by the large companies like Meta, Amazon and Google, who collect user data and own that data.
Web3 distributes the ownership of data, and the users and content creators can own their own data. Web3 will also give more opportunities for content creators to monetize their content.
Marketers need to know the basics of cryptocurrencies, metaverse, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and decentralized applications, and be ready to adapt their strategies to fit the web3 landscape.
The consumer is in control in web3, and brands need to think of ways how to participate in new virtual platforms and learn to play by new rules.
Community building and engaging in a more transparent way will be even more important in web3. If you are using social media now only for one-way communication, it won’t work in web3 anymore.
That’s why we recommend spending less time editing the content you post, and spending more time engaging with your customers.
Web3 shows that we are trying to learn from many mistakes made in web2, and shows that also internet and metaverse are helping us to move towards more human-centric digital world.
Execute the Content Marketing Strategy of Your Dreams with the Team You Have
Content marketing is one of the corner stones of an impactful marketing strategy.
With technology, creating more content is actually the easy part, and you can finally execute the content marketing strategy of your dreams. Let computers do the mundane work, and let humans do what we do the best.
When you are ready to give Tumplate a go, contact us for a demo.
“I see big possibilities for marketers when every team member can participate in brand communication organically, and every customer can receive even more individualized marketing content on their screens and messages. In the future, no one will receive marketing that isn’t personalized just for your individual needs.
Video content is the world's most effective way to tell stories, share messages, or convey emotions. Thanks to the video revolution, a thousand words can now be said in seconds. Video is by far the most versatile and accessible communication tool for all marketers and storytellers.”
Joni Koukku, Head of Sales, Tumplate
Email joni@tumplate.com
Book a demo time Calendly link https://calendly.com/jonikoukku
Download this blog post as a white paper to save it.
Resources
More about Tumplate
Tumplate is marketing technology company founded by Jaakko Manninen, Hannu Aukia, Vertti Virkajärvi and Joni Koukku in 2019. The team was already known for their successful production company, No-Office Films, and their diverse film, music, and advertising backgrounds.
Tumplate is for brands who seek a strong digital presence with a high volume content marketing strategy, but are struggling to keep up the volume and brand consistency with the team and resources they have.
Tumplate’s marketing technology solves the content bottleneck problem and helps to scale branded content production. Unlike other tools that require design skills, Tumplate is a zero-skills required workflow automation tool that allows anyone to create high volumes of in-motion content in minutes while keeping brand on check.
About the author
This marketing report was written by Katja Presnal, Chief Marketing Officer of Tumplate. Katja is an American Advertising Award-winning marketing strategist, and author of Big Rich Money: How To Turn Your Business Intentions Into A Profitable Company (2021) and Instagram as Your Guide to the World - How, What and Who to Search and Follow on Instagram to Help You Travel the World (2012). Katja is a marketing trailblazer, who has worked with multiple Fortune 100 companies, and startups.
References
Tumplate's Visual Content Marketing Survey
Forrester: Predictions 2022: Values Come Front And Center For European Companies
Impact Plus: 36 Eye-Opening Inclusive Marketing Statistics That Prove Its Power for 2022 by Impact Plus
5WPR Report: Insight into the complexities of the modern consumer’s motivations, influences and purchasing habits
Deloitte: 2021 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Transparency Report by Deloitte:
iProspect: Future Focus 2020 - The Next Ten Year
Wyzowl: Video Marketing Statistics 2022
Business Insider: Stackla Survey Reveals Disconnect Between the Content Consumers Want & What Marketers Deliver
Pew Research: The Metaverse in 2040
