Content marketing has quickly become an essential practice for any modern business. It helps to build authority, attract customers, and increase trust all at once. Who wouldn’t want to experience those benefits? Read on Content Marketing Trends 2020 to follow for better content consumption and engagement.
Content marketing, just like any other strategy, is in a constant flux. If you want to increase the performance of your content campaigns, you need to stay up to date on trends.
Moving into 2020, it’s crucial for marketers to align their SEO with voice search. This can be done by using search terms that are in the form of how they’d be asked by a customer versus choppy phrases.
Personalizing content to a very niche audience will also become more important. Similarly, you need to engage with customers via user generated content. Promoting longer form content across many channels including audio and video is also necessary for enhancing a brand’s reach in the new year.
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6 Content Marketing Trends to Follow in 2020
While more and more companies are doing content marketing, some are not keeping up with the rapid changes. This results in them falling behind competitors and missing opportunities.
That’s why we’re going to be outlining 6 content marketing trends you need to follow moving into 2020 and beyond. Applying these will maximize the ROI of content campaigns and competitiveness in your niche.
1. Don’t neglect voice search
You perform SEO, right? 236.5 million people use search engines in the United States on a regular basis and this number is only going up. However, SEO is changing just like everything else and specifically voice search is on the rise.
More and more users are searching from their mobile phones and other devices by asking questions via voice. While this might not seem like the biggest change, let us explain why you shouldn’t neglect it.
If you want to improve your performance in the SERPs and get found by users, you will need to start changing how you do keyword research.
Traditional search terms are choppy and not full sentences or questions. This isn’t how people talk. See where we’re going with this? Instead, marketers need to begin targeting full questions and statements that people would ask into their phones or other mobile devices.
2. Begin personalizing content to a small segment
Content marketing is a part of the inbound funnel which starts wide and narrows down as you get towards higher quality leads. This funnel is broken down into three stages:
- Top of the funnel: Blog posts, videos, and podcasts help attract the widest audience possible, hence why it’s at the top of the funnel.
- Middle of the funnel: Whitepapers and case studies act as great middle of the funnel content as you collect information with these and only more serious users will download them.
- Bottom of the funnel: Demos and consultations are reserved for the highest quality of leads you generate via inbound marketing at the latest stage.
Imagine if you could skip to those high quality leads at the bottom of the funnel. Well, you can. It’s doable if you have a buyers persona.
A buyers persona is a personification of your dream customer. Think demographics, pain points, questions, and values. Planning all of these out allows you to tailor content towards a very specific target audience.
This results in only attracting the highest quality and most relevant users to your website. As a matter of fact, 71% of businesses that exceed revenue goals have a documented persona. Every time you research a topic to write about, you can reference your buyers persona to ensure it aligns.
3. Take an omnichannel approach
You have a blog. Great. But do you have an active YouTube channel, podcast, social media accounts, and email newsletter? If not, you need to start mastering all channels.
It used to be normal for a company to use a single channel like the blog on their website and that’s it. However, users are on different platforms and devices at once now. This means you need to be all over the web in different formats to maximize your reach.
Begin by first determining what platform you focus on primarily. Presuming you’ve built a good foundation there, such as a blog, expand outward to different formats. Think YouTube, Soundcloud, and public speaking events.
The best part about omnichannel marketing is that you can take a piece of content you’ve published and repurpose it. 90% of the work is already you done since you simply have to port it over into video, audio, a slidedeck, etc.
4. User generated content
While it’s great that you produce your own content, user generated content is even better. But don’t take our word for it. 55% of consumers trust UGC over any other form of advertising.
This is content that your customers create and share with you. It’s the most common on social media and allows a brand to create a deeper connection with its audience.
You can take advantage of user generated content by asking customers to take photos of them using your product. Post these on your website or social media. Also consider creating your own hashtag for users to make your brand go viral.
5. Long form content is in
It wasn’t long ago where 300 to 500 word blog posts would rank on the front page of Google. Not any more. Google’s algorithm and consumer demands have driven the word count needed to be on the front page of Google upwards to 1,890!
That means you’ll need to write approximately 2,000 words if you want to hit the first ranking. However, it’s not at difficult as you might think. If you organize content before you begin writing, you can skip writers block and fly through content quickly.
Next time you write an article, map out each major point and subpoint you’d like to cover. Collect resources like stats or case studies to reference as you write, as well.
Think of a long form blog post as several mini articles. If there are ten headers in your post, aim to write 200 words under each one and suddenly you have a masterpiece of an article.
6. Podcasting is on the rise
Have you noticed podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience have exploded in the last couple of years? In fact, there are over 525,000 active shows. This is because audio has quickly become one of the most sought after forms of content. It’s easy to see why, too.
Podcasts are easy to digest from anywhere and on many different devices. All you need to create one is a microphone and a topic! This is also where repurposing, as we mentioned previously, comes into play. You can take previous content you’ve published and record it as a podcast episode.
Upload podcasts you create to the following free platforms for maximizing your reach:
- Soundcloud
- Google Play
- iTunes
Are Your Business Goals Aligned with Content Marketing Trends 2020?
There has been exponential growth in the use of content marketing over the past three years. A trends report published by Content Marketing Institute (CMI) found that 29% of companies are currently spending their entire business marketing budget specifically on content marketing.
A comparable survey conducted by LinkedIn in 2014, found that only 1% of companies allocated their entire marketing funds towards content marketing, whereas the mode category was 10% of companies who only used 18% of their financial resources.
This proves that it was an under-represented marketing vehicle at the time. There is no doubt that content marketing has since exploded as a way in which to spread the word about a brand.
The question is no longer whether content marketing is worth investing in, but how much of your budget you should be putting towards this type of campaign.
Marrying Business Goals with Your Marketing Strategy
Before investing in any type of marketing activity, you must draw up a strategy which provides you with clear business goals that you need to achieve. Content marketing is no different and you might be interested to see how it affects goals such as increased lead generation, sales enablement, audience engagement or brand awareness.
The amount that you choose to invest in content specifically, will depend on your estimates for ROI compared to other marketing channels.
It is vital before beginning a content marketing operation that you devise a way to accurately measure the success of your campaign. You will need reliable metrics in place to help assist you with tracking the value of your strategy.
This will allow you to monitor its efficacy and be able to make changes to enhance it when required. The metrics you use will vary depending on your goals.
However, they might include tracking conversions, CTRs, social shares, social followers, article views, or blog comments. Proper planning in terms of what these goals will mean to your ROI, will enable you to draw up a budget and allocate resources towards content creation accordingly.
Delays May Cost You More
Those that remain unconvinced by the merits of investing in content marketing, or are finding it difficult to convince executives of its benefits, may get left behind in the long run if they are slow to join the party.
Your industry competitors are likely already doing it and word will be spreading about their brands. The longer it takes you to get involved, the more you’ll be playing a game of catch-up, particularly when it comes to the design of evergreen content.
Providing current, relevant posts about news within your industry has many advantages particularly with regards to SEO, but this type of content can quickly become outdated.
Those brands who invest in the regular creation of comprehensive articles and guides that don’t age quickly can keep on attracting new readers years down the line, who might then potentially convert into sales for the company.
By getting on-board sooner rather than later with the notion of content marketing, you won’t need to use as many resources to rival your industry competitors as you will if you choose to wait. Imagine how much content your competitors can produce in six months or even a year.
Make Your Content Stand Out
According to CMI, 70% of B2B marketers are looking to create more content this year compared to last. Of course, one of the challenges with such growth in the content marketing industry, is that the arena is quickly becoming saturated and therefore it’s vital that your business produces compelling content that stands out from the crowd and appeals to your target audience.
Here are some content marketing trends that have taken off recently and look set to have a bright future in 2020.
Video Marketing –
as online videos are estimated to make up 75% of all Internet traffic in 2017, if you’re not yet using video marketing, then you should be. It is consumed most frequently on social media, where 500 million Facebook users watch vids every day, in comparison to 82% of Twitter users.
Interactive Marketing –
allow your audience to become engaged with your brand by providing some interactive content marketing features, such as clickable polls on social media.
Influencer Marketing –
amplify your content with the assistance of an industry influencer who can reach out to their own network and promote your brand on social channels. 86% of marketers used this strategy last year and most are looking to double their investment in 2017.
Content marketing looks set to stay. Invest in it as a fresh strategy for your brand and use it as a prime opportunity to increase the reach of your business throughout 2017 and beyond.
- 6 Content Marketing Trends to Follow Moving into 2020 - September 15, 2019