Content is king because visitors become loyal customers based on what they see, read, and feel. People buy or join based on emotion and justify those decisions with logic, so great content needs an artistic mix of spiritual and factual words, images, videos, and other types of content. As we discuss content marketing trends, keep the strange alchemy that wins customer hearts, minds, and loyalty online in mind.
I woke up thinking about the increasing importance of influencer collaborations, SEO, social media, interactive content, short-form video, user-generated content, voice search, and the role of online communities, so getting back to sleep was going to be impossible. However, by leveraging these trends, your content marketing efforts and high-quality content get wrapped in an effective content marketing strategy, sure to engage your target audience and win customer hearts, minds, and loyalty.
Understanding your target audience's pain points and content needs helps your marketing team know the best content to create because the amount of content you can make is infinite. In contrast, the digital marketing you should develop is a much smaller list. My report, and we may create a content marketing trends series, provides an in-depth analysis of the future of content marketing, so you'll join me for a trip into the future of content of content marketing by using the links below and I'm going back to bed.
Pulling others into your websites and apps is a consistent and crucial content marketing trend. Social media influencers, search engine optimization (SEO), voice search, social media, and online community express the need to pull others into your digital marketing.
Influencer Collaborations Influencer marketing will continue to grow in importance, so your brands should leverage the power of niche experts and micro-influencers to reach your target audience. Influencer partnerships offer an authentic way to deliver content leading to higher engagement and conversion rates as their (the influencer’s) fans get to know your company, brands, and products. Successful collaborations require careful selection of influencers aligned with your company and brand values and messaging. Integration into your overall content marketing strategy can be tricky, so look for ways to pull paid content creators new content onto your website and social media platforms.
SEO and Voice Search Search engine optimization (SEO) remains crucial for content visibility and discoverability. SEO gets built on backlinks, and your high-quality content earns backlinks when your case studies, webinars, podcasts, and infographics ride content marketing trends like a surfer on a big wave. As voice search becomes more prevalent, your brands must optimize their content for voice-activated devices like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. Voice Search requires a shift in keyword strategy, focusing on long-tail, conversational queries and leveraging schema markup to improve search results.
Social Media and Online Community Building Social media platforms will continue to be vital for content distribution, emphasizing creating shareable, engaging content that resonates with the short attention spans of your brand’s target audience. In addition, building online communities through platforms like Facebook Groups or LinkedIn Groups will become increasingly important, fostering brand loyalty and driving user-generated content as you take advantage of scaled social media networks.
Your content is a tent pole in the user experience your company, brands, products, and website make as you work on converting visitors into customers. Attention is precious, and competition for your customers' limited attention is furious and increasing fast.
Interactive Content and User Experience Interactive content types, such as quizzes, polls, and augmented reality experiences, will grow in popularity. These new content formats create a more engaging user experience and can lead to increased time on your website and social sharing. As these content marketing trends evolve, brands must explore innovative ways to include interactivity into their content marketing strategy, ensuring a seamless and enjoyable experience for your target audience.
User-Generated Content and Content Experience User-generated content (UGC) will continue to gain traction because it offers an authentic, relatable perspective on your brand's offerings. Encouraging and curating UGC fosters an online community and creates brand loyalty. No matter how large your marketing team can't make all the content you need, asking for help, valuing UGC, and rewarding contributors should become tent poles in your content experience. Additionally, companies should focus on creating a content experience that is personalized and tailored to individual preferences, using data-driven insights, artificial intelligence (AI), and metrics to improve engagement and conversion rates.
Whitepapers and Thought Leadership Long-form content, such as whitepapers and comprehensive blog posts, will continue to play a critical role in establishing your brand’s authority, credibility, and leadership. Thought leadership content helps brands differentiate themselves in a crowded market while improving SEO, generating leads, and taking advantage of content marketing trends in 2023 and beyond.
Establishing Key Performance Indicator (KPI) metrics to track progress is crucial. Look for new trends in your data, such as views for new content or backlinks to old content. Understand your 80/20 Rule. If you have a ten-page website, two pages, 20%, will usually receive most of the views and time. Use artificial intelligence to help understand how your target audience consumes and shares your content marketing. Watch your metrics in real-time to know when new content helps or hurts your need to win customer hearts, minds, and loyalty.
My favorite content marketing tools include:
Clearscope Clearscope is a content optimization tool designed to help improve your content's search engine performance (SEO). It uses advanced natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to analyze the top-ranking content in search engine results for specific keywords or phrases. Then, Clearscope generates recommendations on optimizing content to rank higher in search engine results based on its analysis. I love the tool's user interface; it checks off keywords as we write.
ChatGPT Clearscope always includes keywords we need to know more about, so we fire up ChatGPT and ask OpenAI's chatbot to explain keywords, phrases, and names Clearscope suggested we should include. As our use of ChatGPT matures, we learn to ask it to do more. For example, we created a prompt for this article asking for a report about the future of content marketing written in a McKinsey Consulting style. McKinsey doesn't sound like me, but they organize complex information clearly and concisely, so ChatGPT's response provided a great starting place.
Grammarly Read Martin's Flipboard Friday about why the AI writing assistant is crucial to using tools like ChatGPT. Even GPT4 makes passive voice and "stop word" mistakes, so we use Grammarly to correct the chatbot's tendency and edits. My voice and the voice of our website are different than ChatGPT, so Grammarly helps protect our brand too.
Dall-E Long-form content needs excellent images, so we use OpenAI's text-to-image generator Dall-E because it is free and one of the more accessible text-to-art generators. Once we have long-form content and images creating short-form videos is much easier. More challenging to go the other way, creating a short-form video, than writing a blog post and creating images, which we find to be a less efficient content marketing process.