Content marketing will unite online-offline experiences in 2022: Prachi Bali of Zoo Media

Content has always played a crucial role in the success of experiential marketing campaigns. However, most of the experiential marketing initiatives which used to take place in the form of events have now started happening online to create similar experiences for audiences.

Experiential marketing has evolved a lot over the course of the last 18 months and marketers are finding various ways to put meaningful experiences online via content.

With the offline-online narrative developing at such a pace, content marketing will be the next big thing that unites both, as per Prachi Bali, National Head of Client Partnerships and Business Head, North- Zoo Media.

Bali, in an interaction with BuzzInContent.com, shared various content marketing and branded content marketing trends that will change in the next 12 months.

With the popularity of social commerce, she said, more brands will be using content marketing for other purposes rather than just engagement and vanity metrics.

“Brands creating content to build relevance and resonance with individual consumer communities will drive higher engagement for sure and now with the consumer being able to buy there itself, it'll be a full funnel. The ability of brands to create solutions which add value to the consumer's lives, while also enabling social commerce, will be the biggest challenge,” she said.

In 2022, she foresees brands being a lot more strategic with their spends on content and will choose to invest in content which works harder and smarter for them.

She added that it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be more expensive.

“Performance-based content will be the direction in which branded content will continue to move and brands will continue to experiment to see what delivers results for them,” she said.

Pandemic has served quite a lesson for most marketers around the importance of content marketing and branded content.

However, when it comes to the measurement of ROI, she said that most marketers definitely need to evolve beyond the basic parameters of likes and shares, since most of these can today be bought.

She said that as the platforms and audiences keep evolving, digital medium will be used to achieve objectives beyond ROI as well.

She added, “Generic metrics cannot be qualified as KPIs and evolved brands are clear about adapting their measurement parameters based on platform, objectives and consumer intent.”

Being in the digital industry, she shared that one can't complain about the silver lining of the pandemic which is the rate at which consumption patterns have evolved - whether it is for content or purchase.

According to Bali, the same trend will continue upwards aggressively. However, she added that it will take another year for levels to normalise to where they should've been by 2023.

Sharing Zoo Media’s focus for the next year, she said, “Our focus areas are multi-fold since each of our agencies is an expert in its own domain. Social commerce, the advent of Naya Bharat and Experiential Marketing, I would say are the three underlying themes across the board.”

She also believes that brands are increasing their spending on content agencies and are going to continue to do so in the next 12 months as brands want to work with specialist agencies now and not those who are present in every field.