Content marketing doesn’t deliver results overnight. Neither does it guarantee immediate conversion. Right from writing a content piece to publishing and promoting, it takes time, effort, and patience. Several incremental factors influence the content creation and promotion process. These factors tend to change every year. Marketers that constantly track and monitor these changes and trends emerge as a winner and have an edge over the competition.
Content Marketing Trends to Follow this Year and Beyond
In 2022 as well, content marketing will play an important role in curating brands’ marketing strategies. I have covered here some emerging and continuing content marketing trends that you can follow to shape and strengthen content marketing strategies. These trends will have a bigger impact this year depending upon your business goals.
Focus on Creating Personalized Content
It’s now more important than ever to build content that touches human nerves. Personalized content has always been and will be a key driver for your content marketing success in 2022.
At times when AI-based writing tools are being used to produce tons of mediocre content every day, you must deliver content that’s authentic and thoughtful. Create your buyer persona by humanizing your content to determine the right set of audience you want to reach out to. Compelling content can set the tone of your brand voice and build trust.
Track Audience's Changing Requirements
Audience requirements keep changing. And in the past two pandemic years, the changes have become more visible and significant. Lifestyle, use of devices, and media consumption are the decisive factors that drive these changes.
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This means the pandemic has substantially changed how we work, interact, and behave online. An ideal content marketing strategy should be in clear-cut alignment with these shifting trends to match the evolving business needs of your target audience.
To assure that your content is resonating with your current audience conduct a content audit. It will help you to find out if your content is still generating traction or getting outdated. To make your messaging worthwhile, replace and refine your content with new messaging.
To unleash more about your customer’s requirements, ask them what’s important to them right now.
Focus on Audience Research
Great content is all about facilitating customers with what they need. Thus, before creating content, look into your audience persona. Find out who they are and what they need.
In B2B content marketing strategy, customer persona and personalization enhance conversion rates and business growth. Once you understand your audience, you can craft a valuable story that matches their evolving needs.
There are multiple ways to collect buyer persona. You can conduct in-depth interviews and surveys. You should also leverage user analytics, trending topics, and industry resources to find out more about your audience and their user behavior.
Look at Content as Another Channel
Now it’s high time to regard content as a standalone channel instead of a messaging medium. Create informative and detailed content that matches the user's intent. Google has also become more intelligent when it comes to filtering spam content. The search giant is now making its algorithm smarter so that it can identify high-quality content pages that deliver a remarkable user experience.
Your new content strategy should experiment with different content formats such as informative videos, great visuals, comparison tables, and how-to content.
To outsmart the competition and build awesome content for your readers, audit your existing content for performance and organic traffic. Find out the content topics and formats that generate the most results. Then you should start tracking the performance of each content type by measuring metrics such as on-page engagement, shares, organic traffic, conversions, etc.
Create Short-form Video Content
In 2022 short videos will be a critical factor that will make your content strategy successful. In the last few years, we have seen tremendous growth in the popularity of the videos, especially short-form videos. Services like Instagram and Facebook stories, TikTok, and Instagram Reels among others turned out to be the game changers that delivered short-form video content that lasts for just a few seconds.
You may try out different short-form content formats to engage the audience and get more visitors. These may include FAQs, Video ads Testimonials, etc.
Make Content Audit a Habit
Frequent content audits help you get insights into your existing content. The metrics offer the opportunity for updating, pruning, and repurposing the content for more engagement and traction. As you keep updating the stale and old content with a fresh and unique one, you will see ranking recovery, traffic return, and more leads coming your way.
Content audit helps you determine what content performs best. This way you can make informed decisions about the content update or content repurposing. If your blog post has lots of content, it brings in an opportunity to rediscover good old content and revamp it adding fresh information.
If you manage to do content audit rightly, you will experience considerable growth in terms of organic traffic and ranking.
Conclusion
A content marketing strategy should be based on the understanding of the industry niche and customers your serve. Alongside, marketers have to be very vigilant about the trends that I have covered here. It will help marketers grow their business manifolds.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.