The 5 Biggest Content Marketing Trends that are Here to Stay

It goes without saying - Great content is the best marketing tool in the world. That’s because it is what everybody wants.

We all crave for valuable content that can add meaning to our life. We don’t want intrusive banners, ads, pop-ups, spam, irrelevant messages. It’s only high-quality, useful, relevant and engaging content that catches our attention.

And this is what content marketing is all about in a nutshell. "Content is king" but only if you use it effectively.

Content plays a pivotal role in your digital marketing strategy and without good content, it’s nearly impossible to cut through the clutter and get around ad blockers that are prevalent today.

Businesses that use content marketing have conversion rates 6x more than those that don’t. Therefore don’t overlook the power of content and what it can do to transform your digital marketing.

How Does SEO Fit into Content Marketing?

At times SEO and Content marketing are used interchangeably since SEO serves as the foundation of all content strategies and campaigns. Optimizing your content for search provides you the opportunity to rank high in search results and boost brand visibility.

However, SEO and content marketing are different, yet complement each other.

Content marketing is a much larger function as it is.

The definition of content marketing states that “it is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action”.

As implied, the foremost principle of content marketing is to generate content for users that would be incidentally liked by search engines and not the other way around.

The more your content is liked by your audience, the greater the visibility. 

Content Marketing: Trends Now and Beyond

Content marketing – as with everything digital is constantly evolving. What worked sometime back may not work now. Marketers have to stay on top of the trends, pay attention to what people want and serve the right content accordingly.

Here are some evergreen content marketing trends that are relevant now and here to stay:

1. Emphasize on Engagement not Direct Promotion

Regardless of the era, if you write content that engages with your audience, you have a winner. On the flip side, if your content is all about promoting products and selling, your audiences will be put off. Therefore create content with intent that aligns with your audiences’ needs. Offer a valuable takeaway from your content so that your readers turn to you when they are researching something.

2. Develop Creative Content Based on Analytical Insights

Content works best when it's hinged upon data-backed insights with a methodical approach to strategize what you want to write. At the same time, you don’t want to sound boring and avoid the ‘corporate’ tone. Lighten up and get creative; strike the right balance between analytics and creativity to come up with engaging content that influences audiences to take some action.

3. Personalize Content to Attract

Move away from company-focused content to content that is tailor-made to the customer level. As companies collect more customer data from various data points, the ability to produce and push personalized content is getting easier. Creating dynamic content based on customer behaviour can help users to find exactly the type of content they want.

4. Align Content Format to Delivery Channels

Apart from social media channels, websites and mobile, several other new channels are emerging including the Internet of Things. Provide content that works with the evolving delivery landscape using less text, more visuals, videos and succinct verbal answers. Here are some new content formats and types:

·      Interactive storytelling

·      Podcasts

·      Virtual reality

·      Live streaming

·      Short-form videos

5. Quality vs. Quantity

When it comes to writing a blog post, the first question that comes to mind is 'what is the ideal number of words to start with'. Statistics indicate that the ideal blog post length should be 2100 to 2400 words. This may sound counterintuitive as our attention spans are getting shorter by the day. Nevertheless, people are willing to invest time for a well-written post as long as it’s relevant and qualitative for them. Success in content marketing is not related to how many words you are writing; quality matters the most.

Trends come and go, but content will continue to hold its central role in digital marketing that makes or breaks the path towards success. As media continues to evolve, companies must prioritize developing content that connects and builds direct relationships with customers.

Have we missed anything? What do you see as the biggest trends in content marketing that will continue to rock the digital marketing landscape? Share your views with us by writing to #Xerago at marketingfolks@xerago.com or drop your comments below.