Content marketing trends continue to change as time passes by, adapting to new and emerging realities. Active internet users are now estimated at almost five billion, while social media users are at about four billion. Generally speaking, it is one huge opportunity for brands to appeal to consumers and attain monumental business growth with the help of technology like content marketing software.
Content marketing best practices rely on several factors, which include the industry one belongs to, business objectives, and product or service types. If your content marketing is faltering without leaving you any clues, it’s high time you pay attention to this year’s content marketing tips, as discussed in this article.
Best Content Marketing Practices and Strategy Table of Contents
Google launched the Panda algorithm in 2011. Since then, it has become very strict about online content quality. Websites having thin or plagiarized content were punished, and they could only redeem their platforms by improving the quality of their content. This instance reshaped the way content is made and paved the road to efficient content marketing best practices.
Make original, unique, consistent, and engaging content. This 2022, content strategies will become more cohesive. To adapt, your marketing team will have to research, plan, and implement this approach well. Content experience optimization calls for businesses to become a part of their customers’ world. This can be achieved by delivering consistent, pleasing content. In this manner, you can strengthen your customer loyalty and entire brand image. With this mindset, you can focus on improving your customers’ content experience by making time to plan what necessary actions to take and employing a competent team.
Best Content Marketing Practices and Strategy
In-Depth Content
In most cases, longer content works well in search engines compared to shorter ones. Hence, make long, in-depth content when writing for your website content.
Include everything readers should know in one copy, but do not write long paragraphs after paragraphs just for the sake of it. What you should do is provide answers to their questions and add tips that may be useful to them.
Learn what people are asking by looking at the “People also ask” box when searching for your target keyword. Also, bear in mind that every post should only talk about one topic and aim for one to two keywords.
Increased Interactive Content
Another way to improve content best practices is to make interactive content. Interactive content has the biggest potential to engage customers, hold their attention, keep them on your website for a longer period of time, improve preference for your business, and grow your conversion rate.
According to recent studies and polls, marketers believe that using interactive content instead of static ones improves customer experience. It is seen that there will be a continuous rise in the use of different interactive content this year.
Making interactive content that fits all the various stages along the customer’s journey continues to rise as a trend too. Interactive quizzes and polls are common on some social media sites. These tools do not just engage the audience, but also provide you with fast details about your prospective customers.
Measurement Criteria for Content Marketing Success
Source: Neil Patel Digital, LLC,
Designed byEmpathetic Content Marketing
Current world events have prompted businesses to embrace a new strategy, prioritizing customers at the core of their content marketing best practices. This strategy is referred to as empathetic marketing.
Empathetic marketing deals with seeing the world from the perspective of your customers and using what you discover to develop a content strategy that fulfills their needs. It is a way of communicating with your customers not just as prospective buyers, but, most essentially, as humans.
Know who your customers are, their challenges, and motivations. Once you know the answer to these questions, you can create useful content that elicits relatable sentiments in them. As a result, you can establish trust, make better customer experiences, form more genuine relationships, and develop an exemplary content marketing strategy.
Old Content Recycling
Do you have a podcast with a top-performing episode? Why not turn it into a blog post? Making a YouTube video out of a blog post will also do.
Repurposing old content is another way to market your existing content without exerting much effort and starting everything from scratch. For some time, the standard for creating quality content has already been set, and readers do not want to read topics piece by piece anymore. Elaborate content is what marketers should strive for these days.
Repurposing old content is the peak of a marketer’s efficiency. Doing this lets you reach new readers. It will also help your audience see your content in more than one way.
Simple SEO Tactics
Content visibility in search engines is a high-priority ingredient of a content’s success. All your blog posts will never be seen by readers if you are placed on the last pages of a Google search.
HubSpot Technical SEO Head Victor Pan says that marketers should impose simple yet consistent and up-to-date SEO tactics to make sure that their content stays relevant to search engines.
Pan recommends removing the year in the URL during content optimization, including the year in the content title, and arranging your editorial calendar to review the content yearly and keep it updated. He also adds not updating the URL so that you do not have to re-earn backlinks and make unimportant redirects.
Data and Statistics
Content should be a blend of creativity and data. Besides strategizing how your content will relate to your readers, you should also think about how these metrics will be used suitably in the process of content creation.
Data and statistics are excellent ways to prove your points and highlight the significance of your piece. They give readers enough reason to read your content. They can be used on social media platforms and websites. Whatever channel you are using, connect it to the merit of your service or product to strengthen your points. For example, you are a gym equipment brand. Write a caption like this: Did you know that people who do not exercise regularly are 5X more likely to suffer from heart problems? Stay fit with your (gym equipment brand).
Ensure that you will only be citing current research when using data and statistics. Plus, use accurate ones from credible sources.
Pillar-Cluster Model
Systemize your content using the pillar-cluster model to make a better reading experience and optimize your SEO.
In this framework, a pillar page discusses an umbrella topic, and cluster pages back the topic. Use internal linking to combine the topics together and notify Google that they are all connected.
For instance, you are a fashion design company. Fashion design might be your umbrella topic. Your pillar page might be titled “The Fundamental Guide to Fashion Design.” Then, there would be write pages, like “Fashion Design 101,” to back your umbrella topic.
The Most Effective Content Marketing Tactics Implemented by American Teams in 2020
Search engine optimization: 75
Search engine optimization
%Repurposing old content: 61
Repurposing old content
%Making more "How to" guides/educational content: 45
Making more "How to" guides/educational content
%Improving the customer journey: 41
Improving the customer journey
%Source: Semrush, 2020
Designed byStand-Out Video Marketing
Video is also on the rise as a well-known and effective online content type. This 2022, it will become more integral. Furthermore, searching for more ways to have an edge in this format may be a challenge.
David Kley from Web Design and Company notes that videos are remarkable channels of company culture and complete benefits of what you offer, and they can easily make people thrilled about your brand. Compared to still images, moving ads can also be more valuable in social media marketing.
When done the right way, videos make deeper connections and capture the attention of prospective customers. Video production is also becoming much less daunting and simpler to integrate into a content marketing approach as accessibility to it grows.
Online and Live Events
Experiences have predominantly been online over the past two years, with some entailing recordings and others real-time engagement. After coping with COVID-19 and getting used to everything going virtual, customers are now looking for more balanced interactions.
Bizzabo reports that most businesses will allocate their budgets to online events. However, they do not think that live events can be fully replaced. That is why businesses are finding ways to make a hybrid of online and live events to cater to the needs of their customers.
2022 is pictured to be the comeback of some live events, like conferences and workshops. Advancements in virtual events, like live-streaming social media and webinars, will prevail at the same time.
Source: Ziflow
Personalization Schemes
The personalization of information and messages grows general customer engagement, specifically in email marketing endeavors. As customers become accustomed to this measure, they are beginning to prefer it and look for brands implementing personalization schemes. 2022 will also be the year of brands doing more customization initiatives to their strategies.
Hyper-personalization will be a trend as well. This approach goes beyond calling a customer by name. It draws into personal preferences, needs, and wants. It utilizes data, analytics, AI, and automation to make extraordinary interactions with each customer.
As a result, businesses are considering their customer personas and creating content for certain products, languages, marketing channels, and more. Netflix and Amazon are among the brands that are already using hyper-personalization strategies.
Visual Content Optimization
Incorporating a range of content types across marketing vehicles is another top strategy. But although blog posts are becoming more appealing to consumers, text alone can no longer ensure success. The inclusion of more visual content that trended in 2021 will prevail in 2022, making the customer experience even better.
Our human brains process images fast, and visually stunning content can foster interaction and encourage customers to buy a certain product. Infographics are one visual content form that will expand and appeal to many consumers.
These types of graphic representations of salient information or knowledge help you send your message across quickly. By simply looking at an infographic, a person can gather information, engage, and have a grasp of what you are showing. This is true for visual learners.
Increased Audio Content
2022 is also a promising year for audio content. Audio enables consumers to personally connect with a company. Real voice helps them remember and trust a service or product, as well as outdo ad-heavy video content.
Live or on-demand podcasts made audio more popular in recent years. For listeners, podcasts are great channels to listen to information while they perform other activities, like studying or commuting.
Podcasts have been here for a long time, and they will continue to soar this year and in the years to come. ROI is still in question concerning audio content, but many businesses are still optimistic about audio content.
Content Optimization for Voice Search
The voice aptness of products like Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri has been fully embraced by many consumers, especially the younger ones. This is why voice search has been gaining fame until now, and will continue to expand this year. Looking for information without the need to type in questions is an absolute convenience.
Voice queries are structured as questions, not conversations, and this will impact your entire content. Voice search needs a concentration on the questioning format and consumer intent. More development may still be needed even if you have already considered this as part of your existing content marketing approach for text-centered questions.
Therefore, it is now paramount to accommodate questions, like “Alexa, what are the best laptop brands today?” instead of typing in keywords like “best laptop brands.” And marketing teams will now have to determine a way to mix this query type into their content.
Needless to say, businesses will have to explore and search for the best ways to improve their content for voice search without negatively affecting their content ranks.
AI
The benefits that AI bring keep many businesses afloat, and it continues to be a key figure in the content marketing field. If integrated properly with human efforts, AI can result in optimized marketing strategies, save time and budget, and enhance customer results.
This 2022, AI is forecast to be used in data analysis, blog posts, grammar and plagiarism checkers, and chatbots. It will also be used in hyper-personalization efforts. In addition, 2022 will see more experimentation with AI. In fact, some businesses are already exploring pilot programs for AI use in digital ad buying, advertisement copywriting, and more.
Nevertheless, marketers should be wary of flooding the internet with AI-generated content. If this would not be moderated, authentic content will be difficult to locate on search engines.
Source: Semrush, 2021
Visual Search
Consumers who do not know the exact term for the item they are looking for, want to learn more about it, or want to know where to buy it turn to visual search. Visual search capabilities appeared on several apps and platforms in 2021, letting consumers find what they are looking for solely through images. Some brands that are already bringing visual recognition to people are Google, Pinterest, and Amazon.
As a marketing content technique that uses images to boost product searches, visual search has become a winning strategy for many marketers. Classified algorithms start with an image online. Then, options are generated for buying a product. Add visual search to your content marketing strategy and SEO by including image search functionalities and Pinterest ads to your product pages and website content.
With visual search, businesses have observed massive growth in post interactions, and they have obtained stronger reaches to audiences and more chances of sales.
AR
While AR is already surging in brand and product marketing, it is predicted to move at a slow pace because it is quite costly for most marketers. Still, AR is already on their radar for this year.
AR adds details to the realities surrounding you. It lets you see virtual information while seeing the real deal. The static and moving lenses features of Snapchat to a selfie is an example of AR.
AR is also one of the best ways to make new and exciting content. Taking Facebook videos as an example, viewers are engaged in artificial 360-degree worlds. They are provided with a more unique way to get a glimpse of sample products or services too.
Source: Statista, 2021
A Steady Brand Voice
Spotify is among those brands that are recognized for their brand voice that is youthful and funny, whether you come across them on billboards, on their YouTube page, or Twitter account. This consistency is one of the reasons why many Spotify users connect well to the brand.
Craft your own brand voice, and be consistent with it. Unify your brand voice, core goals, vision, and values with your content. Let your team know the very reason for the existence of your brand.
Do not also diverge your content marketing initiatives from your brand voice. Having this symmetry will support your exposure, recognition, and overall brand awareness.
Analytics for Performance Tracking
Analytics use statistics, predictive modeling, and machine learning to answer questions and discover insights. Life insurance policies, weather predictions, and batting averages are all outcomes of analytics.
High-quality content will not mean anything to your business if your website cannot gain customers. And this is where analytics come in—to monitor, watch, and report on the numbers. Consequently, you can gauge what should be continued or improved.
Analytics will aid you in polishing and improving your existing and future strategies. For example, you observe that your blog readers are fond of social media-related topics. You can then concentrate more on these topics to grow your traffic.
What are the best content marketing software tools?
Businesses of all sizes across industries count on content marketing software to make and implement effective content strategies. When used right, these software can perfectly capture the attention of your target market. They are also used by many marketing teams to create, source, distribute, and make content available.
HubSpot
HubSpot Marketing is a sophisticated system that gathers all of your marketing initiatives together, enabling you to increase traffic and conversion. Its drag-and-drop feature helps you create and modify stunning websites on your own, even without the assistance of your IT team. This feature also ensures that all pages respond well on all devices.
HubSpot Marketing helps you make appealing and highly tailored landing pages for your projects, and disseminate static and dynamic HTML messages that can cite your expected feedback.
monday.com
The all-in-one digital platform monday.com is one of today’s leading collaboration tools. From sales pipelines to project and portfolio handling, this software is perfect for managing all your tasks as it integrates all information in one, accessible storage. It empowers teams to make decisions based on data.
The major field of action of monday.com is modernizing workflows and helping teams and departments get on the same page. You can also monitor the status of each of your projects due to its ability to study and show work in an organized, intuitive manner.
Semrush
Semrush is one of the cardinal online visibility management SaaS solutions. The provider strives to simplify the use of online marketing platforms; hence, they offer robust SEO functionalities for marketing experts. Prime features are modules for analytics reports, advertising research, and keyword research, just to name a few.
Semrush’s interface is extremely visual and graphs are instinctively displayed. With just a few clicks, you can also compare domains and perform competitive analysis.
Wrike
Wrike helps marketing teams improve their content planning and execution. This top-notch software delivers complete features, such as content creation, scheduling, and more. Thus, you can easily make high-quality articles, videos, and other well-timed content.
Wrike has a free plan that includes the basic features of the platform, making it suitable for freelance marketing teams and startups looking for an affordable yet efficient tool.
Contently
Contently labels itself as a full-packed content marketing software, and that is beacuse it is centered on carrying out content strategy solutions, enterprise content tool, and a pool of talented professionals. This software caters to businesses that do not have an in-house content team. For those with one, they can talk to the software provider to strengthen their content marketing campaigns.
In a nutshell, Contently can improve your content marketing operations and gauge ROI with definite numbers.
What Content Marketing Is Really All About
In-depth content and interactive content are just two of the content marketing best practices and strategies to embrace this 2022. In-depth content plays well with search engines, while interactive content engages customers, improves your business preference, and grows your conversion rate.
Content marketing will be here for much longer. Despite its ever-changing nature, there is one constant thing about it—it is always about the consumer, not your brand. On top of that, it is about promoting transparency, authenticity, and value to one’s content practices. As a responsible marketer, you should provide a sophisticated user experience and guide consumers in making sound decisions when purchasing from you.
Why is FinancesOnline free?
Leave a comment!