Up to 95% of buyers consider content as trustworthy when evaluating your brand and its offerings, according to insights from NewsCred. If you’re not producing quality content, you’re missing out on an opportunity to improve your brand’s credibility. With 75% of consumers expecting a consistent experience when engaging with your business – website, social media, mobile and even in person, there’s no doubt that great content helps shape the customer experience.

Image Source – Design

Whether you’re a small business or large corporate looking to improve your brand, understanding the latest trends in content marketing plays a crucial role in helping you create a cohesive omnichannel experience for your customers.

Live-Streaming Content Everywhere

While live-streaming was pretty new in the market when Facebook Live was introduced to the public in 2016, more brands are embracing the ‘live everywhere’ trend. Platforms like JW live allow publishers to harness the power of live streaming for fresh promotional and revenue generating opportunities. With everything from corporate sites to social media networks and mobile web offering outlets for real-time video streaming, revolutionizing your marketing strategy is easier. Live streaming wields a digital influence that any business cannot afford to ignore when it comes to brand engagement and monetization.

To take advantage of this trend, pick a live streaming platform that best suits your marketing strategy. Take into consideration how many followers use the platform and how engaged they have been in the past. When going live, make sure not to miss any opportunity to interact. Respond to any comments, questions or concerns. Use platforms like Twitter’s Periscope, Youtube live streaming, Facebook live video or Tumblr to live stream your promotional content. There has never been a time when original content has been so attainable and accessible in the video community. By establishing new channels for digital content creation, such as live-streaming, you can easily foster engaging and rewarding opportunities for your business.

Content Built for Voice Search

Voice-enabled smart speakers are expected to be in 55% of households by 2022, as noted by TechCrunch. There is no doubt we’re in the age of the voice search revolution. Because of the opportunities that this growing trend offers, content writing agencies and marketers are focused on figuring out exactly how to provide better content value. Businesses across different industries are testing out potential integrations between their content strategies and voice search. To succeed, you need to look beyond functionality alone and embrace voice-search marketing capabilities.

With voice search representing more than 20% of queries on Google’s mobile app, it’s important to know how best to use voice-search marketing to your advantage. After years of adjusting digital content to optimize written search, brands need to re-strategize their SEO. The goal is to provide quick answers that help you drive more traffic to your site. This involves doing more strategic keyword research to identify which keywords in your niche result in a featured snippet. Combined with AI and its impact on consumer purchases, voice search can help you gain more entity authority, ensuring your content ranks higher.

Increased Investment in Mobile Content Strategies

You can’t ignore the power of mobile content marketing. Considering how ingrained mobile devices have become in our lives, optimizing content for mobile is something that every business should have embraced by now. By 2019, mobile content advertising is expected to represent up to 72% of all digital ad spending in the US. Advertisers and marketers are increasing their investment in mobile content strategies to remain competitive. Businesses must look beyond photos, videos, and chat for their content marketing and embrace more modern mobile marketing trends like e-books, live mobile streams, mobile alerts and interactive content.

Being a marketer in today’s evolving business world is no easy work. You need to understand new platforms in the market, their impact on how customers engage with brands and stay on top of new developments. Knowing and implementing some of these latest content marketing trends will help boost brand visibility and win the favor of customers.

DesignGild, a first of its kind design led startup accelerator from the house of MIT Institute of Design, announced the launch of its first batch of the accelerator programme with two startups QtPi from Bengaluru and RxHealth from Pune. The boot camp for these startups commences on 22nd May in Pune. The selected startups are from diverse technology spaces.

QtPi and RxHealth will be part of a robust six month immersive accelerator program that leverages the rich design thinking and design doing experience of MIT ID. The program will give startups an exposure to latest design methods, co-working space, access to prototyping facilities, IPR consulting and facilitation, business development support, public relations and processes that will enable them to unlock business opportunities.

A set of experienced design mentors and a dedicated design team will work together with the startups on various stages from design strategy to operations. To name a few, DesignGild’s mentors include Mr. Atindrya Bose – Ex Country Head- Sony [Playstation business], Snehal Vasani – Managing Director, Kitchen Grace [Part of Asian Paints], Sachin Tagra – Associate VP – Brand Capital, Ashish Despande – Co Founder, Elephant Design; Vice President, Association of Designers of India and Apurva Chamaria – VP & Head – Corporate Marketing, HCL Tech, Abhimanyu Kulkarni, Design Head – Philips, Nachiket Thakur – Director – Innovation & Entrepreneurship – Science & Tech Park, Shekhar Badve – Director LokusDesign, Jay Dutta – Design Partner at Saif Partners.

DesignGild also has a strategic partnership with The Institute of Healthcare Design Thinking, USA.

Speaking on the launch of DesignGild’s first batch, Harshit Desai, COO, DesignGild said

We are extremely delighted to onboard the two startups. DesignGild aims to empower these startups and help them build their product with innovation. The focus of the accelerator is towards strategic design consulting, business model innovation, and hands-on design services to enable seamless integration of design in business. We would be happy to mentor the two selected startups, RxHealth and QtPi who are unique in their own fields.

Prof. Anant Chakradeo, Dean, MIT Institute of Design said

DesignGild has been set up by the MIT Institute of Design, as one of the country’s first design-focused accelerators. The aim of the accelerator is to provide high-quality design mentorship and resources to passionate individuals and teams to create design-led businesses. With this MIT ID will add a new offering to its student by creating the much needed ecosystem under one roof.

Here are the profiles of the startups selected for the accelerator programme

QtPi [Robotics for everyone]

QtPi founder Jaison Leon is an industry veteran from MS, Yahoo, Oracle and Tech Mahindra with software and mechatronics background. QtPi has done years of research to eliminate fatigue caused by theoretical learning and mix with exciting practical.

The company has built ‘plug and play robotic kit’, consisting of Arduino based main board, sensors, actuators, building blocks and mobile app. The kit can be used by 7+ year old kids to build infinite types of robots. QtPi has list of projects & tutorials to assist early adapters. It also works with college students to develop innovative projects using QtPi kit or to design their own product.

RxHealth [Bringing DRS in Healthcare]

Founded by Rohan Prakash, RxHealth is the world’s first Health Informatics Company based in Pune that is catering expert system software in the field of computer-aided prognosis. It uses the avant-garde artificial intelligence solutions that recognize accurate and honest medical diagnosis support.

The principle objective is to provide the best healthcare services to every patient everywhere. It’s non-intrusive, seamless technology converts good doctors into excellent doctors by continuously upgrading their knowledge base and reference network. It helps doctors in better diagnosis and prescribing the most effective treatment to patients thus bringing down the time and cost of recovery.

On the patient side, its technology creates more aware and informed patients by providing them personalized information regarding preventions, doctors, consultations, treatment options, cost, time, precautions etc. The long-term objective is to create an effective, efficient and seamlessly integrated technology lead medical services ecosystem for better healthcare delivery.

About DesignGild

DesignGild is a startup eco-system that provides high-quality design mentorship and business development support to create Design-led businesses, based in Pune. It is leveraging the power of Design to create business value. It provides the right platform to incubate & accelerate innovative business ideas through a design focused road map. It achieves this by leveraging its vast network of experienced design professionals, consultants, academicians, researchers and students. DesignGild believes that they can take a start-up from one plane to a completely new and better one by playing on their strength : Design Thinking. DesignGild will support the selected start-ups to convert innovative ideas into valuable business propositions. DesignGild is an MIT ID initiative. For more informaion, please visit DesignGild

Design has always been one of the key aspects of any product. It is one of the foremost reasons why consumers want to grab a glance of the beautifully designed Apple Products. This also holds true why all of us love Gmail !!!

While reading about Design, I came across an interesting presentation that highlights it’s various aspects which can be split in four stages

  1. Approach
  2. Rapport
  3. Desire
  4. Commitment

I am sure you would really like the presentation just as I did.