As we move further into the 21st century, businesses must stay up to date on the latest trends in their industry. If you’re a content marketer, you need to be aware of the trends shaping the content marketing landscape in 2022. In this blog post, we will discuss each of these trends and how you can prepare for them.
1.) The Most Human Content Wins
With AI-driven content flooding the Internet, low-quality articles and videos dominate search engines. But marketers who know their niche audience will stand out from this sea of mediocrity because they are creative minds that captivate audiences using novel ideas intended to inspire, captivate, and educate fellow learners of the craft. They are the people who also experiment on how far an idea goes and explore new territories in content marketing.
Create more human content by:
● Avoid sharing the same content everyone else is sharing. Be original by commissioning original research and focusing on growing your expertise by reading more than just what algorithms suggest.
● It’s crucial to sound different from everyone else. Your content is like an interview with your audience, so let your brand stand out and weave original stories into your creations.
● Create ‘meaty’ and more engaging content by writing more concisely, more vividly, and giving your readers confidence to implement what you shared.
2.) Keep up with your audience’s shifting needs
The way people live and work has changed a lot in recent years. There’s a higher consumption of media and heavy use of smartphones, with most businesses implementing remote work. Other factors include lifestyle changes and shifts in how employees work compared to the traditional office setup. Make content more post-pandemic friendly.
Update existing content to:
● Restrain overloading your pieces with COVID-related content.
● Reach for on-the-go audiences by adding voice-to-text features to your content.
● Create visual content from your existing voice and audio content to reach more audiences who prefer this medium.
3.) Understand your customer avatar
Those operating in the B2B industry would often lose sight of their customers and focus more on marketing their businesses. Understanding your customer’s pain points and figuring out what they need should be injected into your content strategy. When you empathize with your ideal client’s needs, your brand (and content) will be able to establish a connection explicitly geared for them. Take time to dig further into your ideal market’s persona.
Personalized content by:
● Understanding your ideal clients and learning how to speak their language.
● Look into psychographics such as lifestyle, hobbies, and interests to
determine their buying choices, preferences, and understand your target
market on a deeper level.
● By understanding what your customer avatar wants, you can give
engaging content but relevant in addressing their pain points.
● Create engaging content that meets your ideal avatar wherever they are in
their buying journey. Each client avatar has specific needs in their journey,
so you can convert better from your leads by creating a funnel to address
clients in their buying journey.
4.) Be A Better Storyteller
This craft has long been engaged by several writers working in Hollywood. Content marketing is all about creativity. It’s the ability to tell a story that will keep your customers engaged and interested in what you have offered them, whether it be through an informative blog post or engaging social media update. Incorporating storytelling aspects of your content will keep your clients interested, entertained, and compelled to read, listen, or watch. Much of storytelling is about whom we are trying to reach beyond keyword research and search results.
As storytelling has become increasingly important across industries and well-tailored communication with audiences, it becomes imperative to want your business’ voice to be ‘humanized’.
Talk to your existing clients and ask what else they are interested in. What are they looking forward to about your brand? Are there other things they want to go with your services or products? These kinds of questions will help you create the type of stories your customers would stay engaged in.
5.) Content Will Generate More Revenues
Small businesses are up against some tough competition in the digital marketing space when it comes to digital marketing. Moreover, a small business must shell
out resources and budget for content. With a limited budget, it’s imperative to focus all resources and money on creating an effective content funnel.
● Be accountable for every content you post. Set KPIs to monitor performance for every piece you put out. Identify what works and what doesn’t.
● Use tools to monitor traffic, leads, engagement, and conversion rate to see if what you’re putting out gives you a good ROI.
● You can’t optimize your content plans if you’re always involving your agenda in the process. Use actual user data to create better and wiser content that interacts with your ideal customers.
6.) Click-Through-Rates (CTR) Will Be The Top KPI
As a content marketer, you may consider SEO, rankings, EAT (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness), and CWV (Core Web Vitals). But the current trend is shifting away from this and focusing more on building a constant stream of qualified visitors. Come to think of it, numerous websites hit a high rank in search engines but shows declining traffic.
Here are a few things you could do to improve your CTRs:
● Create content that answers a complex question. Google is not interested in showing obvious answers or answerable by just a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Dig deeper and create content that users want to click to read more.
● Put out video formats to answer those queries. Although Google prefers to show search results in photos or texts, videos are also becoming a common item shown from their search engines.
● Creating a Youtube video that answers the query would also make for a winning Youtube marketing strategy.
● The traffic your content can generate is often short-lived (typically 5 to 7 minutes). Giving them high-value content that shifts the way they think about a specific idea or ponders on them for weeks on end is a sure way to beat your competition to a pulp. CTRs, at this point, may not be as relevant since your customer will search using a branded query.
● Google’s major update on CWS (now Page User Experience) latches on these three core features: how fast your site loads, how quickly it responds to user input, and content stability while loading on the browser.
7.) Leverage on video content
What started with the Vine is now a lucrative pursuit by TikTok and Instagram reels. Short-form videos are here is to stay. Short videos target busy customers who only have a few seconds to minutes to get information. Most of these videos are quick and entertaining that can go viral. And it’s not just performing weird dance moves; it’s an arsenal you must add to your content strategy.
Some short video forms you can start today:
● Frequently asked questions
● Announcements
● Ad types (usually best when you’re working with an influencer)
● Educational
● Challenges (particularly user-generated challenges where they will be the ones performing the challenge you put out)
● Testimonials (positive customer feedback)
Best places for short videos:
● TikTok
● Instagram reels
● Youtube shorts
● Pinterest idea pins
● Facebook stories
8.) Regularly do content audits
If you have existing content on your site, you need to regularly ‘freshen it up’ to keep it relevant for the search engines. Although other forms of exotic content such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence may come to play, it’s essential to go back to past content that performed well, repurpose, update, or prune to make it new again.
Bottom Line
The secret to creating content that your audience will love will not be solely based on the trends. A big chunk of your content will come from deeply understanding what your market cares about and giving them content that fulfills that need.
Source: SEMrush.com
