In this post, we discuss what are the top content marketing trends that will keep marketers busy in the next year. We analyze the shift in the way people are consuming content and how marketers can attract attention of their potential clients.
Top Content Marketing Trends and Best Practices For 2021
1. Influencer Marketing Is On The Rise
Influencer marketing is gaining importance, shifting the trend from celebrities to loyal customers that become independent brand advocates and influence purchase decisions through their social media presence.
Platforms like Instagram and YouTube have the maximum number of influencers in varied niches. It is to see that bloggers, though still popular, have begun to lose importance as more and more people use social media to share content and stories. It could also be because of the insane amount of effort it takes to drive traffic to self-hosted blogs. Blogs on platforms that have an existing user-base like Medium and Instagram are easier to grow and maintain.
Platforms are rolling out in-built capabilities for brand partnerships for example, Instagram & Facebook have ‘branded content’ to help influencers and brand collaborate whereas YouTube has already had options to disclose sponsored content.
All that has made easier for brands to collaborate with influencers, in fact, necessary as people rely heavily on the advice of these social media stars.
2. Personalized Content Will Be Preferred
The content on the websites is becoming more consumer-centric, as spammy SEO tactics are losing their effectiveness day by day. It’s crucial to deliver quality content that offers exactly what the customer is looking for, in detail.
Interactive website designs are becoming conventional. Ad campaigns are becoming more targeted, directing users to the very specific page consumer is looking for. Retargeting campaigns in PPC advertising are much more effective than the usual ads, due to higher level of personalization.
3. Greater Transparency Is Appreciated By Customers
Marketers are no longer requesting influencers and bloggers to do sponsored content without proper disclosure. It’s illegal in many countries, for once. Moreover, customers appreciate transparency and are susceptible to branded content than before, if they trust the influencer.
Consequently, it makes sense for the brands to encourage influencers to disclose sponsored content. Even the social media platforms like Instagram & Facebook gently nudge the content creators to be more transparent with their reminders to tag brands when doing sponsored content.
Also Read: Ultimate Guide To Google My Business To Get More Customers
4. Remarketing Is The Best Lead Generation Tool
Backstory: Display marketing was declared dead by marketers a few years ago.
It made sense, then. Search ads were cheaper and converted better due to the intent. But as remarketing came into the picture, display ads started gaining importance, again. In fact, the ad spend on display ads is consistently increasing since a last few years.
Marketers are spending more on remarketing campaigns, as the conversion rates get better with more ad impressions.
5. Niche Content & Brand Authority Is Being Prioritized
Instead of a brand targeting a bazillion different keywords and products, brands are better off with a very narrow and specific niche in 2019. The amount of content that marketers are generating is growing, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that all such marketers are tasting success. In fact, it’s most likely they’re not.
It’s because majority of them are still working on too many things at the same time. With the current competitive landscape, it’s crucial to build brand authority by picking a very specific sub niche from your niche and juicing it out until you move on to the next.
For example, if you have a brand that sells fitness supplements, instead of making your content in general about fitness supplements, focus on a specific target audience like 'fitness supplements for middle-aged women', and cater to them. It will help you narrow down your audience and create more in-depth content to relevant to this target group.
Working on super niche content will improve your chances to win the fight for the audience.
6. Conversational Searches Are Replacing Keyword-Based Searches
Sales for devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home are skyrocketing. People are far more likely to search using voice, changing the way they search. They’ll no longer be searching for ‘top content marketing trends 2019’ but will like for ‘what are the top content marketing trends for 2019.’
This shift in the way people search on the internet changes everything. Marketers will need to create content that answers questions and use specific phrases in their titles than the usual keyword rich jargon. Long tail keywords have been trending for years but we’re about to see the golden era of long tail conversational phrases being used for search.
7. Back To Bite-Sized Content
We’re at the crossroads here - ranking well on Google takes the lengthy detailed posts with average content length upto 3000 words. But the users are far less likely to read such pieces of content with their goldfish-like attention span. How do you craft content that gets you the best of both?
For ranking well in search engines, you need in-depth and lengthy content. But for your website visitors, you’ll be better off with short and specific content, preferably in video format. Infographics are also still relevant.
How to balance it all? Depends on how your SEO strategy is, but we personally like to focus on the big picture, crafting multiple pieces of content to cover a topic in depth. Breaking down a topic into a series of posts instead of a single one helps target more keywords and still, establish authority due to the details covered in the content while not scaring off the visitors with insanely long content.
Also Read: Ultimate Guide To Instagram Marketing
8. Video And Live Video Are Trending
People don’t want to read anymore. Look at the stats of how many people read books in America and you’ll get a good perspective on how interest in reading is declining. Video, on the other hand, is the #1 way people are consuming content these days. In fact, 87% of content consumed on the internet is video. But that’s not it.
Even consumption of video is changing. While YouTube began with landscape viewing, due to increasing use of mobile phones, vertical videos are more important. InstaTv and Snapchat videos have made this trend quite obvious.
It’s clear - you have to invest in video in 2019. Another trend to watch out for is live video. It may seem like ‘unprofessional’ and ‘raw’ form of content but it works. People love the originality and the natural approach of live videos. On Facebook, people are spending three times more time watching live video than traditional videos(Source: Facebook). Live videos also get more engagement.
9. New Forms of Content Are Here
For a long time, marketers had a laser sharp focus on creating blog posts. Nothing else existed, until infographics gained importance. Before you noticed, the video was trending. Webinars, ebooks, social media content - instagram, snapchat, and now, podcasts are already being preferred than the usual blog posts.
What’s next? The new trend in content creation to watch out for is Alexa Skills. Very few marketers are using it but considering the sales statistics of these home assistant devices, it makes sense for marketers to be the early birds and pick up this trend.
Conclusion
2019 is going to move faster than 2018, with alexa skills and live video picking up more users, pushing marketers to pay attention. Influencer marketing is already replacing celebrity endorsements and transparency is much appreciated by consumers these days.
The way content is planned and created is changing. From very specific niche content to bite-sized content and use of video instead of text - the content creation is about to get more challenging for brands.
Personalized content and remarketing ad campaigns are the best approach to nurture leads and turn them into paying customers.
Also Read: The Ultimate Guide To Data Driven Marketing
With that being said, it would be no surprise if we see a completely new trend in the next year that we all didn’t even expect. But these 9 content marketing trends are here to stay for many years and the sooner the marketers and brands embrace these, the better they will be at beating the competition!
At HurekaTek, we help brands to finalize a content strategy that can bring them customers and boost their conversion rates. We can help you create the content you need and deliver it to your target audience. Find out more about our content marketing services here!
