7 Content Marketing Trends All Content Marketers Must Watch and Follow in 2020 and Onward
When it comes to creating an effective internet marketing campaign, there’s really no denying that content is the king. After all, when people browse on the internet for any kind of information, it’s usually credible and quality content they are looking for. Whether it’s an insightful blog post, a stunning collection of photographs, or a captivating video, web content must educate, solve a problem, or entertain the viewers. If it can do all three of them, you are all set to win with your content marketing strategy.
The main focus of your content marketing should be on providing information to your target audience and meeting their needs and desires. That’s why you need to know your audience beforehand to provide content that is both useful and interesting to them. With such content, you can keep your readers engaged and encourage them to take the desired actions you want them to accomplish.
While a few brands can still doubt the effectiveness of content marketing at least in the initial stage, the tools, techniques, and channels marketers use to create and distribute contents will continue to thrive. So which content marketing trends should you watch out for in 2020 and beyond to keep pace with the changes?
Let’s find them out.
1. Focus on Content Personalization and Interactive Contents
The majority of the content that is available online these days simply convey some message to the viewers. But, with the rise of personalized and interactive content marketing, users can do much more than that. They can actually get involved with it – whether it’s by filling out a form, by taking a poll or participating in a quiz or contest, etc. This allows marketers to use the content that personalizes users’ experience and entices them to respond and react while educating or entertaining them.
On the other hand, personalized content allows brands to stand out from a large number of competitors. When a user gets the content that is intended for his/her needs and demands, then he/she feels valued. This results in more engagement, more views, and that leads to more brand awareness, which eventually translates into more customers.
Perhaps, one of the simplest ways to develop and deliver personalized content is to reach out to your customers and engage them in a discussion regarding their recent experience with your brand. For example, send your users a follow-up email almost immediately after they buy your products or services. Not only does this strategy provide them the opportunity to review your brand, but it also allows you to get a better understanding of the users’ needs and expectations while using your brand.
2. Employ AI-Powered Content Marketing Strategy
Artificial Intelligence might not be completely ready yet to boss every element of the marketing but it is surely playing a crucial role in the content marketing field. It is helping marketers to examine the user-data more precisely than ever, and enabling them to devise the right content planning that suits their users’ intents.
Systems involved in AI, analyze your content performance data, compare that data with other brands, and offer predictions about everything from what to write to which topics will perform the best on search engines and social media, etc.
Besides, helping in taking the right decision at the right time and planning the execution with almost no room for errors, AI helps content marketers in several other ways.
Artificial Intelligence lets you optimize your content before and after it’s published, reducing the manual work and involvement required to get the most out of your content marketing efforts. There are AI tools that can analyze the content consumption habits of your site’s visitors, and then recommend pieces of contents that they might like to consume next.
AI is continually getting better and better at predicting what the audience might want to read, watch, or listen to next. Indeed, this can open a window full of alluring opportunities for brands that employ AI for their content planning and marketing.
3. Content Must Be Optimized for Voice-Based Searches
In the past few years, voice search has become more popular and widespread, and people have become more comfortable using tools like Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, etc. These devices allow users to perform voice search queries, along with various commands. The ability to recognize and process a wide variety of commands and words allows voice search to become more effective and accurate.
According to a Google report in 2016, 20 percent of queries on the mobile app and on Android devices were voice searches and without any doubt, this has steeply increased these days. This is causing a shift in content because how we speak is not always in alignment with how we type our search queries. So, content marketers need to invest quality time and resources to plan and adjust their contents and make them more aligned with natural language that their customers use. This means including more conversational, question and answer based keywords in your content.
To optimize your content for voice search, include full-sentence questions, use long-tail keywords in titles and headers, and keep frequently asked question section on your website and important pages. Additionally, try to answer users’ questions in as much detail as possible.
4. Brand Storytelling Contents Should be Consistently Created
People love to read about something similar to what they have experienced in their life. So, storytelling can be a very powerful tool for content creators that can influence peoples’ emotions, get those precious likes, shares, and eventually guarantee more human engagement. This is the reason why storytelling can be a great idea for any marketing campaign.
However, storytelling should not be used as another selling tool in your marketing strategy. The more promotional lines you use in a write-up, the faster your readers will stop reading it. That is why storytelling should be used as a method of building a strong relationship with your customers and a thriving community of loyal followers over time. Your story tells about what your passions are and serves as the foundation for all your future content developments.
Make the storyteller look as similar to your readers as possible, having the same problems and worries. This personalized marketing approach would be perfect where the main character talks about the products or services, answering the most probable questions that people may have. You can take people’s worries, doubts, and insecurities and show them how your products or services can deal with these problems.
5. Content Marketing with Micro-Influencers Guarantees the Success
Social proof is a critical factor these days for consumers and they rely on it much more than any other influencing factors. If you are running a local business, one of the best options is to look around and find a popular individual who can impact your potential customers.
The world of micro-influencer marketing is growing rapidly and gives you plenty of options to choose from. However, you need to be careful enough to find the right person who can promote your products or services successfully. If you can find persons in your industry looking to collab and mutually grow each other’s social branding, this can be a great way of getting free advertising.
The most perfect micro-influencer should look like and be similar to your buyer persona, matching the demographics, age group, educational qualification, and the overall appearance. At the same time, it’s important to find a person who uses the right marketing channels and who could quickly give you that much-needed sales boost.
6. Super Niche Content Marketing Strategy Will Pay Off
There is probably a content saturation point in all niches, no matter which domain or vertical you are in. Almost all companies are publishing similar types of content and it is getting even harder each day to improve their organic rankings, social media influence, and brands’ authority. To break this content dead-lock and stay one step ahead of the competitions, some brands are going super niche with their content creation and marketing to draw in a more specific buyers’ segment.
To get started, identify the micro-niche in your industry, narrow down your content-focus, cater to a very specific audience group, and induce them with creative and persuasive contents that will excite them till the end of the sales funnel. Though it requires more work and research on what your audience wants, if done well, the return of your efforts can be highly rewarding.
7. Live Video Contents Will be There
Video is a versatile and engaging content format that not only gives your audience a real-life picture of what is going on; it’s also easy to share across multiple platforms. People like it because it’s entertaining and engaging, and marketers like it because it gives them a potentially huge return on investment (ROI) through multiple channels.
The increase in the use of live videos is because of its un-cut nature which sets up an engaging and interactive platform between the brand and its audience. With live video, there is a chance that what happens next could be unscripted, and this enthuses people more than anything.
Using live video makes a lot of sense to attract your audience and show them something exciting, which relates to both the user and brand. You might have seen people conducting live Q&A sessions like “ask me anything”, companies hosting webinars, etc. When all of them not only enhance the brand-customer personalized conversation, these also help in building a whopping community of prospective buyers.
Wrapping Up
Content marketing is always changing and it’s not something that you set and forget. Whether it’s organic content or paid advertisements, consumers are constantly being tapped in with messages from several brands every day. This surplus of content has increased competition and forced brands to differentiate their marketing in creative and compelling ways. With more access to data and a better understanding of your buyer persona, it’s time when you need to fine-tune your approach to content marketing. Let’s get started!
An advanced All-in-One Digital Marketing Course.
Mentored by Mr. Soumya Roy, the Founder, CEO of PromozSEO Web Marketing Academy.
Being an entrepreneur and digital marketer, he loves to share his knowledge and experience in topics related to internet marketing, SEO, SEM, social media, content marketing, branding, entrepreneurship, and many more.
- Reasons Your Business Needs to be on Instagram - September 16, 2021
- 7 Reasons Your Business Should Invest in Professional Content Creation - August 12, 2021
- 5 Ways You Can Improve Your Website’s Existing Backlinks - April 30, 2021
