How your brand can avoid becoming fake news in 2019

The stats don’t lie: more and more Australians are turning their backs on traditional media. According to the latest Australian Multi-Screen report, TV broadcasters have lost a quarter of their audiences over the last five years to online streaming services. And as nationwide newspaper circulation falls (dropping up to 16% within a six-month period), digital subscriptions to the same publishers increased (21% year on year). If you haven’t started shifting your marketing budget towards digital channels yet, your brand – and your profits – will be impacted.

While it’s never been so important to connect with your customers online, a ‘one size fits all’ approach won’t cut it. The speed at which the digital space evolves is extremely difficult to keep up with. In the last 18 months alone, the stratospheric rise and fall of ‘fake news’ has altered the rules of engagement – causing Facebook to launch a new algorithm, prioritising content shared by friends and family over businesses and publishers.

So what does this mean for your brand’s ability to stay relevant online and drive sales in 2019? Here are just a couple of insights for creating digital content and the most effective ways to share it:

According to Collective Bias, influencers are 10 times more likely to inspire an in-store purchase compared to a celebrity endorsement. That’s because their followers see them as relatable and trustworthy; a friendly face in their daily social feed. With the aforementioned changes to Facebook’s newsfeed and a growing lack of role models across politics and entertainment, influencers will have even more power this year.

The key to a successful influencer campaign is the right alignment from the get-go. The perfect influencer won’t just champion your brand – they will be passionate about being a part of your integrated strategy and collaborating on content that creates genuine engagement. As an example, last year we helped Pierre Fabre find the right influencers for the brand’s new sunscreen launch. We worked closely with pro-surfer Laura Enever and humanitarian, athlete and author Turia Pitt, capitalising on their authenticity and audience reach in a way that benefitted all involved.

Yes, content is definitely still king when it comes to digital marketing… so it’s time for businesses get savvy about their strategy for it. Simply uploading your TVCs to YouTube isn’t going to work anymore – video will make up 80% of all web traffic by 2019 according to HubSpot, so web users now expect a quality viewing experience from brands.

Your brand needs to determine original concepts for content that is genuinely useful and relevant to your audience and then produce it for purely digital consumption, adapting it for the relevant social platforms where engagement behaviours can differ. This tailored approach can be far more cost effective and drive far greater engagement than some traditional advertising means.

And in a landscape where content can be so easily stolen and reposted, you can also protect your intellectual property and future profits by using blockchain technology. Startups such as Mediachain have set up these decentralised databases so creators and companies can track their work for attribution and monetisation.