Content marketing is all about the information which is shared through business or a brand to entertain, educate or share a piece of information that helps people to gain more insights or improve their lives. So it’s not a surprise that marketers are allocating 32% of the budget to content creation. The questions are what content are they investing in and how to make it work for our businesses?
According to HubSpot’s latest Marketing Statistics for 2019 32% of marketers state that visual images are the most important form of content and at the same time 55% of marketers agree that blog textual content is a top marketing priority. Does it mean that we need to continue with the combination of great copy and engaging visuals or is there something else coming in 2020? We will share with you 8 content marketing trends that are already here and will be ruling the upcoming year:
Personalized and relevant content
There is so much information out there that makes it overwhelming to decide on having too many options to choose from. This state is well known as choice fatigue. Back in the days, Waitrose has found that 64% of consumers say there’s too much choice online, which leads to the fact that 54% of them will abandon the e-commerce sites. The solution is a more tailored and personalized message sent to the client, Infosys study is strengthening this idea with the survey results where 86% of consumers agreed that personalization influences their buying decision.
How to perform this? Reach out to your client and get feedback about their recent experience with your brand or send a follow-up email after they have checked-in to the hotel. For example, Netflix does a great job in personal recommendations and shows suggests based on a customer’s previous playlist and interests.
Video content and storytelling
Video content is not new, moreover, it has a great potential to take over the social platforms. According to Renderforest’s findings, 52% of marketers find video content which generates the best ROI. With Facebook Live feature and Instagram Live stories you can create personalized content on the go, not only scripted broadcasts but also Q&A sessions with your audience.
Gary Vaynerchuk is a well-known entrepreneur who uses this trend throughout his career. Have a look at least at one of his educational and at the same time entertaining #AskGaryVee episodes.
Email marketing
Even though Email marketing is one of the oldest tools in marketing strategy, it stays the most effective in connecting to your audience. With over 6.69 billion email accounts and the fact that 91% of customers would like to hear from companies they do business with, email marketing remains one of the most important and effective ways for your business to connect with customers.
However, you need to be careful with spamming and sending too many emails. Set an automation and create triggers for important parameters, for example, welcome email after registration, follow up email when the shopping cart is filled but consumer didn’t proceed with the purchase, come back email for those customers who haven’t visited your site for 7, 14 or 21 days etc. Create an email marketing strategy, follow the plan, analyze, check open rates and test.
Brand collaborations
More often we are seeing brands working together and creating significant engagement and brand awareness for both parties. The most recent activity which was winning people’s hearts was a king-sized gesture from Burger King who stopped selling whoppers in Argentina for an entire day to divert burger craving customers to McDonald’s instead so that the latter could raise more money for children fighting cancer. We see as a good gesture and great marketing. We understand you might be not as big as Burger King and McDonald’s, but there are many other ways how to collaborate and send the message across:
- Interviews on the brand channels;
- Mutual case studies;
- Social media cross-posting content.
Micro-Influencers
The importance of influencers has raised significantly, especially since Instagram climbed the pedestal of the social media network as the best platform for different types of influencers: micro, macro, nano, celebrities, etc. Surprisingly,micro-influencers became more popular than celebrities. This is happening because people are more willing to trust the opinion of those individuals who they follow. There are more connections and trust in pages that have between 1,000 – 1,000,000 followers rather than big names with one-way communication. When it comes to engagement, those profiles with 1,000 followers generate an 85% higher engagement rate compared to influencers with 100,000+ followers.
This means, that you need to identify influencers you would like to work with first either manually or with the help of platforms that are gathering different influencer accounts. Create a marketing campaign with the guidelines and send it over to the selected group. Test, analyze and track key metrics to see how it goes. This will help you to understand the power of influencer content marketing.
Voice search
We’re all familiar with digital assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. Those ladies are quickly becoming the best friends for consumers everywhere. It is predicted that over 50% of all searches will be done by voice search. This means, that you need to go hand in hand with a trend to reach your customer – optimize your content for voice search purposes and do this before your competitors.
Podcasts
According to Statista weekly podcast consumption has increased rapidly, the number of audio content listeners has nearly tripled in the last decade. However, this is not only about people who suddenly started to listen to audio content, but it’s also about this content becoming engaging.
If you decide to give it a try, record at least a few interviews in advance this will give you a better understanding of whether this content is suitable for your brand and customers who are going to be engaged with it.
AI-powered content
Last but not least and maybe the biggest game-changing trend is Artificial Intelligence. Loads of AI-powered tools already exist, however, they might not be highly accessible. The main advantage of AI is analytics and machine learning, the possibility to gather and interpret a huge amount of data in seconds. This will help marketers build better content and send it to the precisely targeted audience segments.
Look at those chat-bots in messengers, they do all of the customer support work for you, while you are sleeping or having a day off. Or such video makers as Renderforest, who just in few easy steps come up with the ready video to share on your social media and other communication platforms.
Conclusion
To wrap it up it is clear that content is everywhere and marketers are taking it seriously when engaging their customers with it. To perform well in the upcoming years, stay on top of the trends we have mentioned in this article: optimize your content for voice search, leverage AI, make videos and audio podcasts, start working with micro-influencers and collaborate with other big and small brands.
If you are struggling and uncertain where to start and what tools to use, have a look at the article created by Renderforest, there are 165+ content marketing tools for your business to get going, some of them are free of charge. Good luck!
