How did you start your day today? Perhaps you looked at your phone, or your virtual assistant woke you up with a news bulletin. Welcome to the digital age – from the moment our eyes open, we’re consuming content.

So, what does this mean for marketers?

A new level of competition

With every tweet, podcast and ad vying for our attention, marketers need to do better. This is particularly true for video: our content needs to distract as well as engage.

In recent years, we’ve relied on data optimisation and volume to progress. The data we have is key – 95 per cent of marketers, for example, plan to increase their video spend in years to come. But with these astronomical content volumes, we risk saturation.

The solution? A focus on high quality, not quantity.

Synthetic media poses a potential threat

Indeed, it’s not just the competition that poses a challenge. It’s the technology itself. While we can’t teach machines to be creative, computers are pretty close to overtaking humans on quality. Just take a look at synthetic media – text to voice assistants are almost indistinguishable from human voices. This allows us to do a lot more in a shorter space of time.

Likewise, on video we can digitally render images that appear almost human. If we’re this close to blending the synthetic with reality, how can we ever compete against machines?

Provenance equals quality

For all its grandeur, synthetic media lacks a backstory. This is how we can challenge the threat of machine-generated content. Quality is about more than just crisp audio and sharp images; it’s about being able to tell a story in a fresh, creative manner, providing a human element that helps users engage with the message.

This storytelling approach is likely one of the reasons podcasting has become so popular.

Consumable audio content

Our busy lifestyles mean we want consumable content. According to Podcast Insights, 22 per cent of us are listening to podcasts in the car. This spells big developments for audio, which is phasing out the traditional corporate blog.

Audiobooks and podcasts are the tip of the iceberg – they’re getting easier to record and can be accompanied by video. What’s more, this focus on audio could even affect our search marketing strategies.

Optimising our results for voice search

Today, the onus isn’t just on producing high quality content: we also need to consider voice search. A Google voice assistant will offer multiple results when asked a question. Alexa, by comparison, only offers one. When we consider that 100 million of us have a device with pre-installed Alexa capabilities, there’s a huge pressure to make sure we get that first result.

Again, this comes back to creativity and quality. Our competitors will pay over the odds to be the first result on Alexa, so our video and audio content needs to be as relevant, informative and engaging as possible. This is only going to increase, so we need to make sure we’re getting our message across on audio.

Using tech to our advantage

The best way to capitalise on these new advances would be not to see them as a threat. Instead, we should educate ourselves and focus on the human element:

• Apply SEO best practices like schema for voice search
• Use a storytelling approach
• Diversify content into video and audio for maximum reach.

In the age of content overkill, video marketing should be one tool in a rich media arsenal. Pair tech with a human touch, and you’ll grab their attention every time.