Content marketing isn’t something that you can have a set plan about. In this era of digital marketing, you need to keep your content marketing strategy as dynamic as possible. You’ll need to evolve with time, otherwise, your competitors will go way ahead of you through their content marketing.
Now it is all the more important to shape your content marketing strategy according to the current market trends. Nowadays content marketing has become the core of lead generation, marketing, and even sales campaigns across paid and inbound channels. The effectiveness of content marketing has made it one of the most compelling parts of any digital marketing campaign.
These days, around 70% of consumers would rather learn about a product from articles than ads. Businesses that incorporate content marketing into their digital marketing tend to have 6 times higher conversion rates on average than the ones that don’t. So, you can understand how vital content marketing is.
For an overall marketing strategy, content marketing bears extreme importance according to 60% of marketers. Also, SMBs that blog experiences 126% more lead growth than their competitors that don’t blog.
Since content marketing is always changing and evolving, it is crucial for digital marketers to understand where their target audience is spending their time on the internet. Also, what they are interested in, and what they are consuming. Not to mention keeping a track of what competitors are doing.
Then, you will be easily able to fine-tune your approach for the content marketing of your business. You will be equipped with a better understanding of the preferences of your buyers, and with more access to numerous data.
So, for now, let’s find out what are the content marketing trends in 2021, and what’s going on in the content marketing industry these days. Some of the trends are-
Personalized Content
These days you’ll need a more advanced way to communicate with your customers, especially in the way that you will speak to customers on an individual level. Expectations of the customers towards content have changed. It is a must that you stay relevant to the needs and wants of your customers.
If you can create properly personalized content, it will give you an edge over your competitors. Demand Gen has conducted a study where it was found that brands experience a 20% increase in sales opportunities when personalized lead nurturing is used. Also, according to a report by Forrester, 92% of marketers have faced an increase in this personalized type of marketing.
This trend has become highly prolific. Personalized marketing depends on data almost completely. You can create more meaningful content for your customers if you have more data about your customers. In order to do that, you’ll need to understand what kind of information you need about your customers, including priorities, objections, demographics, preferences, and how they use things offered by you.
Content Optimization for Niche and Long Tail Keywords
Digital marketers were focused on long-form content for a long time. In recent times, however, content marketing has changed its ways from lengthy and detailed article guides. Instead of that, the use of long-tail keywords and niches is becoming more pervasive. Long-tail keywords are more specific, and as a result, contents with long-tail keywords face less competition in the search engines.
As most companies of the industries are publishing a similar type of content, you won’t be able to increase the organic ranking of your content using certain keywords. For drawing in a more specific buyer, you can go niche with your content.
Finding a proper niche includes the combination of a specific industry, a well-performing product of yours, or a service that you provide. For instance, instead of writing why outsourcing app development is important, you can try writing why healthcare needs to outsource app development.
Also, these days content with long-tail keywords gets ranked easily on Google. If you target a competitive niche, using long-tail keywords in your content will bring in great results, as the organic traffic will increase. There are many different tools that can be used to find long-tail keywords. Some of the popular free and paid tools for searching long-tail keywords are-
- Semrush
- Wordtracker
- Moz.com
- Ubersuggest
Topical Authority
In 2021, more emphasis will be placed on the authority and expertise of content by search engine algorithms while ranking websites on the SERPs. When it comes to a specific subject matter, topical authority is determined by the depth of knowledge of a website or its content. If the content is long and of high quality, it achieves topical authority over other content on a similar topic.
In high-quality and long content, you’ll be providing your customers with more information. The topic will be discussed in more detail and depth, which will help you gain the trust of your customers. Other websites can help your website as a reference if they find your content valuable. This will also help you gain backlinks.
Optimization for Voice Search
These days millions of people conduct screenless services or voice searches while searching for something on the internet. People simply ask questions to their digital or voice assistant. Around 20% of all searches are voice searches these days.
This will have a huge impact on content marketing. This is because how people speak doesn’t always align with how people write. It is vital to take some time to adapt your content to natural language search. This must include incorporating questions and answers into the content.
Complete and full-sentence questions need to be included in the content. Also, incorporating long-tail keywords in headers and titles will help you optimize the content properly for voice searches. You can also optimize the natural language of the content or pages with “near me” search terms. This will enable you to take advantage of these types of searches.
Diversified Content
If you only keep putting up the content of a specific type, it will bore your target audience. The audience expects your site to make use of various media, be it galleries, infographics, podcasts, videos, or something else.
This means you’ll need to diversify the skillset of your team so that you can diversify how your content is presented to the audience. If you can do that, you won’t need to work much on creating new content. Instead, you can put content that has already been successful in a particular medium, and update it to present it again in a different form of media.
This works really well as most users tend to consume content from their preferred media. This means most users will get divided into different groups, and the vast majority won’t notice that the same content has been used in different media before. So, in order to get the attention of new audience bases, it is crucial to diversify your content, and use them in diverse media.
Final Words
If you are a digital marketer, you have definitely heard the saying “Content is King”. This is very much true even in 2021. To keep up with your competitors, you will need to step up your content marketing strategy and also consider affiliate marketing. The audience is evolving continuously, and they are always looking for new ways of accessing and consuming information.
To grab the attention of these audiences, and bring in profit for the business, you will need to adapt to the new trends of content marketing as soon as possible. It will allow you to deliver your content properly to your audience, and get the conversions you want.