Tag Archives: content marketing predictions

5 content marketing trends for 2019

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Content marketing trends 2019

Content marketing trends 2019

Content marketing is constantly evolving as more and more organizations adopt it as primary marketing and promotional activity.

For many years now it has been a trend among content marketing companies and online publications to predict the trends of the forthcoming year. 2018 is about to end and we are about to enter 2019.

Many publications will be coming up with their own take on how content marketing is going to change in the new year, what turns it is going to take and where it is heading in terms of adaptation, big data, artificial intelligence, analytics and technology.

The Forbes magazine has just published “Five Predicted Trends for Digital Content Marketing in 2019“. According to the projections in the article,

  1. Content will be better integrated into email marketing strategies.
  2. Content marketing departments will grow.
  3. Content will need to be optimized for voice search.
  4. Marketers will start making thorough content marketing strategies, not just editorial calendars.
  5. Live video, as a content marketing tool, will catch on.

Content marketing will be integrated into email marketing strategies

I’m happy to see that email marketing, which was, for a few years, being ignored, is still being taken seriously. Email campaigns that can make personal connections with the recipients/subscribers, will perform better and personal connections can be made through customized, targeted content that is meaningful and useful.

Off late my landing pages that I have created to promote my email writing services have been generating lots of queries and I can see that most of the customers are better informed when it comes to how to use email communications to reach out to their prospective customers and clients; not just by blasting off random messages, but through targeting and segmentation.

Content marketing departments will grow

Since content marketing is maturing and it is no longer a “snake oil” field, many businesses are having dedicated content marketing departments and since these departments have experienced better and growing ROI, they too are bound to grow.

Content will need to be optimized for voice search

When people use voice to search they use slightly different language. They search the way they talk. For example, to find my content writing services, instead of merely typing “content writing services”, someone may say into the phone, “find me a content writing service” or “looking for a content writing service”, or “content writer for my garments business”, or “find me a content writing service to improve my SEO”, and so on.

The best way of achieving this is preparing your content in question and answer format. Anyway, this is a totally different topic but yes, content will need to be prepared so that it is optimized for voice search.

Thorough content marketing strategies instead of merely content publishing calendars

Strategy, in simple terms, means knowing what you want to achieve and then taking strategic steps to achieve that, using the resources that you have in the best possible manner.

Since many people are using content marketing and experiencing success, more documentation is available. More insights are available. Over the years people have discovered what works and what doesn’t. This helps in strategizing.

Strategy means publishing and distributing content on the basis of at what stage of the funnel your target audience is.

Live video will be a major part of content marketing

Live video is more engaging. Though the success of your live video depends on how many people are actually “live” at that particular moment, but yes, if you have a brand presence and if you publicize the event in advance, it is a great way to interact with your prospective customers and clients in real time.

This sums up the blog post on the upcoming content marketing trends in 2019 that are published in the Forbes magazine. I will be covering more such trends in the coming days.

 

What is the future of content marketing?

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Future of content marketing

Future of content marketing

Quick note: Of late I have been very busy with work (which is a good thing, right?) and I haven’t been able to publish my regular blog posts. For the time being, I will be publishing smaller, quicker blog posts, that I will be mostly referencing from other content marketing websites and blogs.

So, what is the future of content marketing?

I came across this quandary on this blog post.

In the past, content marketing simply meant publishing lots of articles and blog posts on your website and it would get you good traffic.

Back in 2002 when blogging hadn’t yet been invented (or maybe it was, I’m forgetting) I used to publish .asp web pages on my website and then I would manually update the index file to include the latest web page.

I knew it generated traffic (although, it didn’t help me grow my business much but that’s a different story).

I also published lots of web design related articles on other websites because I knew that would to get me traffic, and it did.

Since then, content marketing has turned into an industry, and, “content marketer” is a profession.

There are two trends that have mostly affected content marketing over all these years:

  1. Advertisements are no longer effective; in fact, people devise ways to avoid them.
  2. Google has been continuously changing its ranking algorithm, increasingly giving prominence to content that is high-quality, relevant and useful.

Social media has also impacted the way people consume content and hence, content marketers are constantly brainstorming on how to format their content and how to steer their content marketing strategy to get more attention from their social media followers.

The continuous effort is to get more eyeballs and, through more eyeballs, more targeted traffic to the website or the blog.

What has changed in the past and what is going to change in the future for content marketing?

In the past content marketing has become, from just a form of increasing your search engine rankings, to a full-fledged form of marketing.

Just as content marketers paid close attention to what the search engines did to their content, the search engines now pay close attention to what the content marketers are doing to their content.

Aside from that, there are different forms of content that are continuously gaining prominence over the written content.

Yes, written content still matters, but you can get traffic to your website through all types of content including images, sound files (audio files like podcasts), GIFs, PDFs, and of course, videos.

According to a Cisco study that came back in 2016, by 2020 75% of mobile traffic will be video (source).

It means video may dominate content marketing – more of your content may exist as video rather than text and images.

But if you are a big fan of content writing – text – focus on content clusters. I have written about content clusters in the blog post titled What are topic clusters and pillar pages and how they improve your SEO?

It means you create very long web pages and blog posts – 3000-400 words – and cover your topic from every possible angle.

Writing individual blog posts and web pages for your keywords and key phrases is frowned upon by Google these days.

Comprehensive blog posts and web pages also help you bring down your bounce rate because people get lots of valuable information on a single page and they don’t have to come back to Google to look for additional information.

Talking about creating topic clusters, one thing that I must point out is that to create very long blog posts and web pages, your writing needs to be very engaging and conversational.

Long streams of boring text are going to send people away.

I’m already observing this trend among my clients – they are coming to me for the need to publish very long pieces of content and they know that I can keep their readers interested.

So, this is a new door of opportunity for writers who can write well.

Anyway, the purpose of this particular blog post is not to publish something very structured and informative. Due to my ongoing workload, I haven’t been able to publish much. I’m trying to figure out how to regularly publish on my blog while writing for my clients.

9 Content Marketing Trends for 2018, According to Neil Patel

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As the 2017 year-end approaches more and more digital marketing companies and content marketing experts will start coming up with their 2018 content marketing trends and predictions. Making a list of trends and predictions gives you an opportunity to show that you have your finger on the pulse of the latest developments in your area of expertise.

Neil Patel has just published his own take on the content marketing trends for 2018. As usual his post brims with valuable data and data graphics.

So, what is the year 2018 going to bring for content marketing? What changes are we going to experience? Is business perception of content marketing going to change? Will people eagerly invest more money in it?

Neil begins by quoting Content Marketing Institute that companies who have been investing in content marketing for years are finally reaping the benefits. This will certainly have a positive impact in the coming years.

According to this source, 60% B2B marketers believe that their content marketing strategies in 2017 have been more effective than the previous year. Every year content marketers are getting better results (experience can be a big contributing factor) and this trend may continue in 2018. The experience gained in the current year becomes useful in the coming year.

The graph given below explains to an extent why B2B content marketing success rate has been improving year after year:

graph explaining why B2B content marketing has been improving year after year

As usual, Neil’s post is quite comprehensive, so, here I will briefly describe his take on the emerging trends in content marketing for 2018.

Single or a select few content formats are not going to work from 2018 onwards

Content these days is being created and published with multiple formats. Consequently, your content team needs to be adaptive and multi-talented. A typical content marketing team may have to handle jobs like

  • Video production and editing
  • Graphic design, illustration, and editing
  • Audio editing and production skills
  • Content optimization across multiple formats
  • Content distribution and promotion
  • Content marketing strategy, execution and campaign management
  • Communications and branding
  • Advertising and media buying
  • Analytics, metrics and reporting
  • Also add search engine optimization

Frankly, I think even presently content marketing teams have to take care of all these jobs.

But yes, as content marketing continues to evolve into its own entity, it is going to have its own, dedicated ecosystem of various formats and activities to bring a multifaceted approach to the table.

Just writing blog posts and publishing them is no longer going to work.

Having said that, writers are going to have the last word. Ultimately, it’s the message that counts.

Content marketers, in their zeal to present a very dynamic form of content marketing, somehow end up discounting the importance of content writers. This is not so. No matter how many formats you can handle, unless the message is convincing, no format is going to help you.

Content marketing for Internet of Things

Your content is going to be accessed using multiple devices and some of these devices may not even have a screen to show your content.

Take for example a device called Amazon Echo using a voice interface called Alexa. In Amazon Echo, everything is voice. The device just sits there in the corner and you have to speak to it and it provides you all the answers it can find. Want some recipe? Just ask Alexa and it is going to give it to you. Want to know the location of the nearest auto repair shop? You get it.

Soon a day may come when people’s refrigerators will be interacting with your content. You will need to carry out your content marketing in 2018 and the coming years keeping that in mind.

Transparency and trustworthiness is going to rule the roost

This trend has been going on for many years. Exactly this is why content marketing caught on. There is lots of mistrust, most of it justified, on the Internet. This is because the entry cost is negligible, and even zero, on the Internet. People with no stakes at all can set up a business and start hoodwinking gullible customers.

This is why people trust opinions of people they know. A Facebook recommendation may be far better than an advertisement for your brand.

Through your content marketing you need to make people trust you and this can be achieved by publishing relevant, useful and engaging content across multiple platforms.

Targeted content for your sales funnel

Since content marketing is totally going to take over your entire buying and selling process, you will need to create and distribute content to cater to different stages and phases of your sales funnel.

For more explanation on this, you may like to read Importance of content writing throughout the sales funnel.

Content from different media may need to converge to give you a consolidated presence

Normally a medium-sized company and a big company may have the following forms of content in their content marketing kitty:

  1. Owned media
  2. Paid media
  3. Earned media

Content marketing in the coming years, including 2018, will need to be a well-balanced combination of all forms of media.

Further reading on this Main difference between paid, owned and earned content.

The undiminished importance of content marketing documentation

Most of the businesses that claim that content marketing doesn’t work for them, don’t have a documented content marketing strategy.

Documentation gives you the direction. It keeps you focused. It helps you set goals and then pursue those goals.

Read What do you mean by documented content marketing strategy?

Live video and interactive visual content are the other two developments that are going to gain prominence according to the 2018 content marketing trends being mentioned on various websites.

Distribution is a big part of content marketing

In 2018, it is being predicted, that a greater number of content marketers will realize the importance of distribution.

No matter how great your content is, unless you make it easier for people to find it, to come across it at the crucial moment, it doesn’t benefit you much.

Often, people confuse content marketing with relentlessly publishing content on their own websites and blogs and then occasionally sharing the links from their social networking profiles.

One needs to develop a system to make sure that you are able to disseminate or distribute your quality content. A big part of content marketing is, marketing your content.

So, these are the 9 content marketing trends for 2018 published by Neil Patel.

You may also like to read 5 content marketing trends in 2018, according to Salesforce.