Tag Archives: Content Marketing Trends

In terms of content, what you should adopt and leave what, in 2020

How your content marketing should be in 2020

This LinkedIn content marketing blog post compiles insights by various industry experts on what to adopt and what to leave in 2020 while implementing and carrying out a digital marketing and content marketing strategy.

The first, and the most noticeable advise is from Michael Brenner (because I too have been advising the same thing to my clients) who says that marketers should shift away from content randomness and have a clearly-defined idea of why they are publishing a particular piece of content.

He says that brands that stop publishing content randomly and follow a consistent pattern experience an increase of 50-200% in traffic and leads.

When you use content marketing to promote your business on the web, it is like maintaining a publishing or a media platform.

Whether they are consciously aware of it or not, your target customers and clients expect you to publish high-value content on regular basis.

Read How to come up with great content writing ideas every day.

Another issue that I have experienced with many content writing and copywriting clients is that all their content requirements are based on their keywords.

Yes, keywords are important, and you must optimize your content for better SEO, but if you solely focus on the keywords instead of the value that you plan to deliver with your content, your content begins to lose meaning.

As the next person in the thread says, you should escape the “sea of sameness” and focus on something unique.

The beauty of the world is, every person is unique.

Although, when you’re working with a content writer or an online copywriter, his or her own perspective is going to permeate through the content, but you can control the direction of the content to a great extent by choosing to focus on the value that you want to deliver instead of the keywords you want to optimize your content for.

How do you do that?

Stop living in a cocoon.

Take an active interest in your industry.

Follow conversations on Twitter and LinkedIn and participate in those conversations.

See how you can align your marketing message with the issues affecting the society in general.

You can also publish valuable content by vertical focusing.

Talk to a single individual instead of targeting a broad spectrum.

Focus on problems and issues being faced by a single individual for that blog post or web page.

Yes, if you don’t handle multiple issues in a single blog post you may have to publish multiple blog posts but then, this is a blessing in disguise.

You do need to publish multiple blog posts to cover all possible topics.

Does a strict schedule matter?

If you are publishing a blog post every Wednesday, unless people are really expecting to hear from you on Wednesday, it hardly matters, as long as, you are publishing every week.

Regularity is important.

It increases your brand visibility.

People become familiar with your business and they also begin to recognize you for your quality and sincerity.

This is what ultimately improves your SEO.

The right content writing way: focus on value and accommodate SEO.

The wrong content writing way: focus on SEO and accommodate value.

The wrong way doesn’t work but it seems like shortcut and hence, most of the people want to follow it.

The right way takes time and effort but also delivers results.

5 content marketing trends for 2019

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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,

Content will be better integrated into email marketing strategies.
Content marketing departments will grow.
Content will need to be optimized for voice search.
Marketers will start making thorough content marketing strategies, not just editorial calendars.
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

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:

Advertisements are no longer effective; in fact, people devise ways to avoid them.
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.

2018 Content Marketing Trends According to Joe Pulizzi

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While I’m still contemplating my own take on 2018 content marketing trends I’m trying to compile the views of various content marketing gurus, and in this post I am briefly going through the points presented by none other than Joe Pulizzi, the man who practically coined the term “content marketing”.

Why is it important to keep track of the upcoming trends?

Talking about trends isn’t just crystal ball gazing. The upcoming trends are mostly listed by industry leaders because they know where their field has come from, where it is right now, and based on the past and the present, where it’s going.

One can prepare accordingly.

Also, they are in the thick of things. They are already solving problems for big businesses. They have already gotten a glimpse of the upcoming trends and technologies. They know where their niche is heading to. If you follow them, you are not caught off guard.

For example, if you are already aware what developments are going to take place in 2018, you can formulate and put in place your content marketing strategy accordingly.

What’s happening with content marketing in 2018 according to Joe Pulizzi?

Big investments in original content. Joe mentions in the above link that Apple is planning to invest over $1 billion on original content. Though, most of this content will be coming because Apple is trying to create something like Netflix. But, the key is original content. Whether it is content marketing or streaming media, the significance of original content is going to increase.
Established media houses and content providers will be acquired. Businesses sometimes acquire conventional newspapers and magazines to expand their media outreach.
Content marketing for direct profit. Conventionally, content is published to attract people to websites and blogs that either raises awareness or results in direct sales. What about making revenue from the content produced for content marketing? It may seem like an obscure concept, but Joe Pulizzi’s post mentions Pepsi that is trying to achieve exactly that. This AdAge India report says that Pepsi has created a state-of-the-art in-house content studio to create original content. The company hopes that it will be able to sell the content to cover the cost of creating original content.
More budget for content marketing. Joe says that there is a worldwide trend of increasing budgets for content marketing. He also has a word of caution. Increasing budget for content marketing doesn’t mean that businesses might be focusing on more original, helpful content. They may also spend money on creating conventional sort of content, but in digital format and then assume that they’re doing content marketing.
Conflicts of interests are going to rise. Conventional advertising companies are already feeling the pinch as more and more businesses are creating their in-house content marketing departments. Although these agencies are building their own content marketing units, somehow, they are always seen as conventional advertisers. There is also a continuous conflict between who creates the content, who manages it and eventually who owns it.

The good thing about content marketing trends for 2018 is that, as is being pointed out by most of the industry experts, this new form of marketing (it is actually not a new form of marketing) is becoming a preferred form of marketing compared to conventional advertising. The reasons being that conventional advertising no longer works and content marketing is much more effective. It engages your audience. It helps you build your own platform. You own your content. You don’t have to depend on third-party publications.

In the coming weeks I may come up with my own take on the upcoming content marketing trends for 2018, but even if I don’t, at least I will be discussing the point of views of various industry experts.

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:

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:

Owned media
Paid media
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.