Are you a trend hater, or do you embrace new, fashionable ideas? At PPR Strategies, our team loves the playful balance between utilizing current trends while keeping our tactics rooted in time-tested strategies for place-making, marketing, and economic development.
Through this creative lens of fun and function, our PPR team has pulled together our observations and thoughts on current trends!
Prioritizing long-form video over short-form. Video content platforms (especially TikTok) are pushing longer videos for users for three main reasons:
- To keep users on the platforms longer, proving how the content is engaging and meaningful.
- To provide users more educational, intriguing, inspiring content (which cannot always be condensed into super-short videos).
- To help creator accounts (or those that monetize their content for social) meet the video length needed to get paid.
Embracing Technology: Technology has opened up new possibilities for EDOs and local businesses, from digital menus at restaurants to virtual reality tours of available properties,enabling them to increase efficiencies and expand their reach. As new artificial intelligence (AI) tools are developed, our team sees these technologies playing a more prominent role in how EDOs create efficiencies!
PPR’s Winter 2024 intern, Rachel, compiled a list of tools for EDOs to check out and ideas for using them! Click here to read the blog.
Non-traditional Community Forums: Great marketing is all about reaching your audience where they are. We’ve seen the rise of online community forums, such as Nextdoor and local Facebook groups, in our personal lives and have leaned into using these as a mouthpiece to the community. These forums can help EDOs communicate with a widespread audience in a particular county, region, or neighborhood, but will the trend last?
Influencer marketing for travel destinations. Influencer marketing has taken over the world in the past decade, but it has recently taken a particular stronghold in local travel and business content.
Whether it is user-generated videos that show off “local gems” or business highlights made by paid creators, videos on everything from tourist attractions to places to stay and local businesses, etc., are on the rise.
Our senior content writer, Hannah Clawson, uses these videos (and only these videos) to plan potential coffee shops or attractions to visit during her weekend excursions and vacations. Public relations specialist, Mia Vaccaro, also relies on TikTok to find new restaurants, fun things to do, or reviews on products she’s considering!
Summer Rise in Content Density: As we enter peak tourism season (May through September for most of the United States), there is likely to be a boom in content on social media, blogs, etc., to make the most of catching potential visitors’ eyeballs. The upcoming election will also bring a LOT of political content onto platforms, flooding feeds and bringing a range of emotions.
You never know when a trend will become a lasting practice, but the practice of sharing our observations has inspired the team to keep trying new ideas and we hope it has done the same for you!
