Content marketing is evolving rapidly. Thanks to the growing importance of content for branding, lead generation, and sales funnel. Marketers now have tools to access quantifiable data to understand buyers’ preferences and buying patterns.
Emerging Content Marketing Trends
With analytic tools, they always have the opportunity to improve and fine-tune their existing content marketing approach. To get the most out of your content marketing efforts, you have to understand and adopt content marketing trends that have become popular.
Let's discuss some of those trends in content marketing. It’s time to understand why they are important and how you can embed them into your content marketing plan.
Personalized Content
Marketing is all about reaching out to your target audience. But now it needs a more focused communication approach. The approach where hyper-personalized communication takes the front seat.
The focus should be on initiating one-to-one communication. Over the years, customer requirements and expectations from a brand have changed. Thus, before sending a communication to a customer you should double-check that it’s relevant to him.
Personalization offers multiple benefits. As your campaign is targeting the right set of customers, it improves conversion opportunities. The key element behind personalization is data. The more you know about your customers, the more accurate you will be with the messaging.
Before launching your next content marketing campaign, collect as much data and information about your customers including demographics, priorities, and preferences.
Niche Based Content
As every brand is working hard to produce amazing content for its readers, content is heading to a level of saturation and monotony. This means brands are pushing almost similar content online. It makes it harder to rank for high-value keywords.
To overcome this stress, you may want to work on niche-based content ideas. Many brands are already doing this to draw the attention of their target buyers. Niche content is focused on providing customers education about your product and how it can help a specific industry.
For example, if you have to promote your video conferencing app, don’t write a standard piece of text to tell how it helps in bringing several people on a single video call. Instead, focus on telling how this app can help school children in their online learning.
Voice Search, the next big thing
You must have at least once used personal assistants to ask a question or enquire some information. Voice searches allow users to discover information and get answers without thronging to search engines and putting in keywords.
Stats say that voice searches account for 40% of all searches done online. Experts in the content marketing niche are seeing this as a big-time paradigm shift.
Voice searches have changed the way we communicate via content. As personal assistants are designed for taking up queries in question-answer format, it’s imminent now to adapt content to natural language search. This is all about including questions and answers in your text.
To take advantage of voice search, use complete, full-sentence questions in your content. It’s also recommended to use longtail keywords in titles and headers. It helps Google crawlers to fetch the most relevant content that answers the question the user asks via voice search.
Diversified Content
Similar content can cause disengagement over time. Readers tend to engage with diversified content such as video, infographics, podcasts, and PPT presentations, etc. Marketers must consider ways to produce and present diversified content to their readers.
Diversified content will cut the efforts invested in producing new content. Content that has already attracted the eyeballs in one medium can be used, updated, and then presented again in another medium. For instance, a listicle from your blog can be repurposed as a YouTube video or an infographic.
This idea works since different users have a different way to consume content. Provide them the content in the form they prefer.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing will remain a great source of business promotion for brands. Brand influencers are key drivers of social proof. Reports suggest that 92% of buyers consider an influencer recommendation before making a buying decision.
Influencer marketing is still important for brands. What has been changed is the way they perceived it earlier. Brands that relied on the number of endorsements (quantity) in past are now shifting their focus on quality and the trustworthiness of the influencer.
If you’re planning to launch influencer marketing campaigns, determine the qualities of an influencer you want to work with. Once decided over, design a campaign targeting these influencers.
Try to get their attention and work on improving your relationship with them that respond to your requests. After the campaign to track and measure data available to ensure you’re heading in the right direction.
Live Video Gives an Edge
Live videos are now an important part of a brand’s content marketing strategy. Brands produce and share millions of videos every day to educate and inform their audience. Besides videos, now live videos are getting popular with brands.
The good thing about live videos is their ingenuity since they are not scripted and made in real-time. You can live stream new product launches and events. It helps you build more loyal and engaged customers.
Conclusion
These are some emerging content marketing trends that you can expect. They still exist in the content marketing ecosystem but may adopt certain changes to help brands excel in their content marketing.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.