In recent times, content marketing has become indispensable in staying competitive, improving customer/user experience, and attracting the target audience through relevant, valuable content. Given the changes and challenges of 2020, more businesses have invested in online marketing, thus inevitably growing competition.
With content marketing becoming essential to business growth, here are the trends to keep in mind as you plan your marketing strategies for 2021.
Video Content – A Google research revealed that 70% of B2B buyers and researchers watch videos throughout their buying journey. Video content uses storytelling as a content generation tool, allowing intelligent and compelling narratives to reach the target audience. It is observed that most viewers watch an entertaining, engaging short video that might be of value to them.
Webinars or Livestreams – Multiple social media platforms provide its unique form of live streaming. Utilizing these tools enables you to reach your desired audience and engage with them in real-time. This assists in building trust with your existing audience and captures the attention of newer ones. Authenticity is vital when it comes to social media, particularly on a live stream.
Podcasts – Just like video content, audio content doesn’t have to be highly produced. Producing audio content for marketing is a faster process as it does not require tedious editing. Another perk of using audio content is that putting your podcast up on podcast networks is mostly free of cost.
Featured Snippets – A featured snippet is that pop-up box displayed after you do a Google search that has the answer to your question. It’s an aspiring position for every company to land on because it’s usually the first thing the users glance upon. This type of brand exposure is relatively safe and could include how-to lists, summary paragraphs, and even an information table that Google could pull and show in the featured snippet.
Content is King – Recently, many brands have proved themselves to be ahead of the competition by gratifying and educating their consumers with insightful and valuable content. Creating Informative content such as blogs and reports is becoming one of the increasingly used content optimization tools that are important to consumers, as many rely on it as their source of news and information. The key to a successful content strategy is creating value for your audience. A recent report revealed that 83% of marketers said that publishing content provided value to their customers and contributed significantly to their content marketing efforts.
Search Intent – Search Intent is a massive part of B2B SEO. It is a phenomenon where every time you search on Google, it assumes that other people who do that same search want something similar. This way, Google consistently intends to show information without people having to type continually. Search intent plays an integral part in getting you a position on Google a lot better than you would otherwise and keeping you a rank ahead of the competition.
Partner Operations – Partner promotion content is a significant content marketing trend and is essential for cross-promotion and relationship building. Most of the tech companies prefer having a partner team tasked with creating sales channels and relationships. The essential advantage of this is that those partners are willing to promote you, which leads to exposure and sales.
Voice content Optimization – Voice content optimization has been actively used by a lot of people. People prefer asking Siri, Alexa, or Google to answer questions, rather than typing. It is anticipated that in 2021, voice-based content will be a top trend for content marketers. Producing content optimized for voice search will help AI features find and use your content.
Social Media is Crucial – Social media platforms let you share your content, thus enabling you to reach people interested in hearing from you. These platforms allow you to communicate and share relevant content with your target audience at zero cost but also lets you reach out to a new set of audience. Social media also allows you to converse with your customers, thus building strong brand-customer relationships.
Content Marketing in B2B is one of the fastest-growing marketing fields today; making the old marketing adage Content is King relevant. With the persistent rise of influencer marketing, narrative storytelling through AR and VR will emerge as a staple of all content distribution into 2021 and beyond. Technology is evolving the way content is delivered to customers.