Why Can’t You Ignore Content Marketing Trends?

Why is content marketing chosen today as the main promotion tool by almost all well-known global brands? The answer is simple – the modern Internet users are so fed up with advertising texts which trigger them to buy right away that they simply ignore them.

Today, buyers want to make purchases or order services gradually, knowing that they trust the company.

Besides that, content marketing has a high return on investment, provides the basis for running all marketing campaigns, increases brand awareness, and improves reputation. It boosts conversion, helps to interact with potential customers, and, what’s important, helps to differentiate any business from the competitors.

What Kind of Content Should the Brand Produce?

Let’s start with the basics: what content should definitely settle on your website?

Short format content

These are capacious, meaningful phrases or texts that can become a highlight of promotion and decorate your content marketing.

These include slogans, the purpose of which is to be remembered by the client (the famous “Just do it” is a marvelous content marketing example), micro-posts on Twitter or Instagram, digests, as well as checklists and lists.

Long format content

Although now the Internet gravitates towards short texts, long articles are a must. Large articles give relevant information with a touch of uniqueness and help to solve the possible clients’ issues. Moreover, they have a positive effect on the reputation of a website, according to search engines.

This category includes interviews with experts, exchange of opinions, storytelling, case studies with analytics and numbers, success stories, research, life hacks, and much more.

Interactive content

Interactive content is of great benefit: it engages the customer in interaction with the brand, helps to obtain unique information about the leads. They give a reason for further communication, educate the audience about the company and its product.

These are all kinds of polls, games, widgets, and FAQs.

Visual content

It’s simple – publish branded photos, pictures from events, as well as illustrations to enhance the text and fill it with vivid meanings, infographics, funny GIFs, memes, posters, and postcards.

By the way, ignoring trendy formats like podcasts and videos is one of the biggest mistakes to avoid. Without them, web resources are like clodhoppers that make the clients get confused.

User content

A very special category is the category of posts generated by clients themselves. You can warm users up by actively responding to comments, stimulating likes, reposts, questions, and new topics.

How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

1. Decide on a goal

Content shouldn’t be created on its own and just for show. It’s important to clearly understand why your project needs the information that you plan to publish. Otherwise, there may be a lot of texts and videos, but you won’t get any useful effect.

If you want to increase and diversify your traffic, publish more useful SEO-optimized content on your own website and third-party resources. If you want to establish yourself as an expert, publish case studies with the results of your work, researches and experiments, interviews, instructions, guides, and reviews.

2. Make a portrait of the target audience

Content is not created for everyone. It’s a tool that should be aimed at the target audience. The more accurately the portrait of the target audience is indicated, the more correctly you will be able to communicate with it, influencing people’s decisions and motivating them to take the action you need.

3. Analyze your competitors

You should know who is the best in your market and strive to repeat this success. Research what types of content your competitors are using, where you can find information about them and their product, and how they are interacting with their target audience. In other words, renew the best practices.

4. Define your content distribution channels

You can publish content in internal channels, as well as in external ones. We recommend that you work with content in parallel, using different types of distribution channels to crush your content goals. At a certain development stage, focus on the option that works best.

What Content Marketing Trends to Follow in 2021?

1. Go in collaboration to promote content

Throughout 2020, brands, bloggers, and influencers have come together to co-develop and promote content. In 2021, the collaborative content promotion remains effective. First of all, it’s an opportunity to exchange audiences and promote on different social platforms, which creates the word of mouth effect.

2. Produce more video content

Video continues to be the most effective form of content thanks to the rise of streaming platforms and, of course, the pandemic.

Consumers love with their eyes, so short entertainment and informational videos are in trend. Also, more and more brands start attracting audiences through challenges and videos in the format of user-generated content. Videos can be in the form of reviews or recommendations on how to use the product, adjusting to the UGC.

Augmented reality is another trend in video content that increases audience loyalty.

Don’t ignore live streaming as normal offline events got out of the game. In 2020, such content became much more important than before. And this trend will remain in 2021.

3. Improve the quality of content

People prefer to stay on pages that have a convenient and attractive structure and content. To increase ROI, you need to focus on the user experience. For example, if the target audience uses your resource more often from a mobile phone, immediately adapt all content for mobile formats. Take care of the video content usability – remember that not everyone is always comfortable watching it with sound, so to improve the experience, you need to insert the following text with a subtitle editor.

Also, pay attention to the versatility of video formats so that each person with any computer and the browser will be able to watch it. For example, if your PC supports the MKV format, you can edit it with the MKV video editor, but in the end, it is better to convert the material to the popular MP4 format.

4. Produce and test content using artificial intelligence

AI is not only an awesome content generator, but it also can explore consumer behavior and search patterns, as well as make social media data and blog content analysis to understand how customers find your products and services.

5. Double SEO expenses

Some trends never go out of style. In content, this trend is SEO. A solid SEO strategy and keyword research will be even more critical to a successful content strategy in 2021.

Final Words

Now is the time to make a content marketing plan for the next year and test various new trends. Don’t ignore them, and remember that digital content marketing is a long game, and its success doesn’t come overnight. The longer you practice, the more benefits you’ll see. So try all possible strategies and find your own Klondike. Good luck!

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