When it comes to content marketing, things change quickly and often. If you want to stay competitive, you need to know what direction marketers are taking to keep themselves and their clients’ brands relevant and trending. Fresh, high quality, consistent content will always be the prime driving factors in content marketing online, but there are always techniques and concepts that will evolve and change around that overarching principle. Here are 15 content marketing trends you need to familiarize yourself with to keep your clientele happy and your head in the game:
1. Strong Emphasis on Meaningful Content
This topic is number one because it is and continues to be imperative to your content marketing success. It is a keystone of content marketing; remove it, and your content marketing plan collapses beneath its own weight. Intentional marketers avoid poorly written filler content like the plague. If you are an earner that implements creative content, your focus needs to be thorough research, providing relevant answers to target audience questions, and the consistent production of engaging and shareable content.
2. Personalize Your Content
Put in the time to research your audience. Know all there is to know about who you market to potential clientele. Take advantage of data analysis, tailor content specific to your target market based on device usage and preferences. Establish yourself as a friendly, personable companion that is an integral part of their digital journey in how they engage with your goods and services.
3. Video Is Necessary
More and more users comment in surveys that they tend to engage more frequently if a brand or business makes good use of video. Focus on capturing and retaining audience attention, and making visually engaging and exciting content is integral to that process.
4. Device-based Custom Content is a Must
Designing your site and landing pages to be viewable on multiple platforms and browsers is no longer optional, but vital. Targeting content to be mobile friendly is essential to your marketing success, and minimizing content size via short word count, lists, GIFs, and images is imperative.
5. E-commerce Evolution
Content for e-commerce has largely been dry lists of specifications and technical jargon. The way forward is through engaging content such as “how-to’s” that showcase a product’s usefulness and create transfer of ownership experiences for users online who are potential customers.
6. Auto-Generated Content
This emerging concept is still largely in its infancy, but it is a trend that is well worth keeping an eye on for the future. Writing algorithm programs are getting closer each year to producing quality meaningful content, and while they may not yet be as efficient or engaging as human content creators, their abilities are starting to become more adaptable all the time.
7. Long-form Content Still Reigns Supreme
Google’s rankings are ever-changing, and at present they are trending more towards long-form, well researched content as opposed to short informative pieces. To stay relevant online, more complex content will continue to be key.
8. Innovate with GIFs
New avenues outside the norm have always been the best pathways to success. GIFs are one such emerging format that creates opportunities for engagement with Millennials and other young customer bases. Establishing your clients brands on the ground floor in this expanding opportunity for marketing creates excellent opportunities for future profits.
9. Google Knowledge Graph Matters
Google’s knowledge graph is forever changing the digital marketing game for content creators, and those who cannot adapt will struggle. Creating an authority page that Google directs searchers to for answers means quality long-form content to get those enviable, top-of-the-list SERP spots.
10. Aggregated Content Bears Watching
Social media sites and others are starting to mine user content to create news and informational articles. Content created by users for users will continue to gain prominence, and is a potential marketing opportunity that bears close watching.
11. SEO and Content Are Now Synonymous
With the evolution of Google’s search engine rules, SEO techniques that have proven effective in the past are now nearly obsolete. Linking PBNs and other somewhat gray area approaches will no longer be able to compensate for non-relevant, uninteresting content. Time on page now rules supreme in terms of page performance. Informative unique content is now the only method that will boost rank and increase engagement.
12. Skyscraper Content is Now The Norm
Evolving content built around existing content using community reader feedback is now essential to creating engaging, relevant content. Skyscraper content means that every rendition of new content is now more succinct, valuable, and concise based on two way communication with target market communities.
13. Content Saturation
Content needs to shift from an exposure model to personalized content that users will actually want to engage with. With most Americans bombarded with up to four hours a day with marketing content, overload is inevitable, and it will become increasingly more difficult to differentiate oneself from the competition without personalizing content.
14. Expanded Publishing Options
Articles shared via social media generate higher engagement than articles published via other platforms. This trend has led to social media giants like Facebook to offer immediate publication via their site. As social media continues to expand, it is likely that this trend will drive much of the content engagement going forward.
15. ROI is Still the Bottom Line
There is no point to continuing to invest in content marketing if your success is not measurable in some concrete way. An emerging trend to watch is stricter guidelines and metrics integrated with budgeting departments to protect investment dollars and verify that their money is being well spent.
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