Content Marketing Trends
April 23, 2019
Rajat Tyagi
Content Marketing Industry Trends
Content Marketing has become one of the biggest digital marketing strategies for all small-to-medium and medium-to-large organizations and enterprises. Businesses tend to look for trends in their respective marketing activities. So, here we’ve compiled all possible content marketing trends for 2019-2020.
With the expansion of digital marketing and continuous adoption of new facets of online marketing, businesses now have protocols in place to keep pace with the rapid transformations. Every business wants to be a part of the digital marketing evolution and they are either participating or are waiting in the wings to join the digital revolution.
A major chunk of digital marketing is directly dependent on content marketing. The growth of content marketing is evidently established and a research report of Statista clearly validates it. Content marketing revenue generation worldwide in 2014 was 144.81 billion USD. It is also predicted that the content marketing revenue generation worldwide in 2019 will be 313.42 billion USD. A steep growth of around 168.61 billion USD within 5 years, is definitely one of the major reasons for businesses wanting to be a part of this growth. It is clear that many businesses willingly accept newer trends and marketing strategies to ensure their successes.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a content-based marketing strategy focused on content creation (textual and visual) and distribution of those content using different channels. Though the basic motive is conversion, the marketing approach should not be promotional. Your content should help grow interest about your products or services amongst the target audience.
Content Marketing is one of the most effective SEO services that a business can practice to popularize its products or services, and to achieve a higher organic position on the search engines such as Google or Bing. It is an advanced and a mixed approach of SEO and content creation. Thus, adopting a content marketing strategy is a way forward, towards establishing a digital presence that captures the attention and the imagination of your users.
What does Content Marketing Include?
Content marketing includes three essential steps-
Step 1:
Content Creation – Content needs to be created with customized keywords, decided upon with in-depth planning and comprehensive research.
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- Textual content includes blog posts, news articles, research content, interactive articles, business or work related long form content, news related long form content, case studies, press releases etc.
- Visual content includes videos, Infographics, Slideshares, illustrations, images, whitepapers, podcasts, newsletter, etc.
Also Read: Grammar Checker Tools
Step 2:
Content Distribution – Creating the content is never considered to be sufficient unless and until it is distributed in a proper manner in various forms and through different channels.
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- Social media posts
- Questions and answers
- Content curations
- Forum postings and many more.
Step 3:
Measurement – Creation and distribution is not enough until you measure digital marketing campaign success or failure rate. Constant tracking on monthly reports of traffic and conversion rate will help to review the present scenario and draw a more robust future plan.
What’ll be the Future of Content Marketing? – Content Marketing Trends
According to Hubspot, the types of content that will gain popularity in 2018-2019, are:
| Content Activity |
% Share |
| Social Media Posts |
45% |
| News Articles |
44% |
| Videos |
43% |
| Interactive Articles |
31% |
| Research Content |
31% |
| Blogs |
29% |
| Business or Work Related Long form Content |
21% |
| News Related Long form Content |
17% |
| Podcasts |
17% |
It was noticed in 2016, that the most commonly produced content type for marketing purpose worldwide was a blog post. But, in the future, it is being estimated that social media posts, news articles and videos will take over the market.
Content Marketing Trends
So, here we’ve compiled all of the latest Content Marketing trends. Check them below-
Role of AI
Content Marketers creating and publishing content:
- without verifying facts,
- adding sentences to meet desired word counts, or
- stuffing keywords to optimize content
be prepared for a major change in working styles. Once Paraphrasing Algorithm by Google or Maluuba’s system of “generating relevant questions from text” comes into play, only relevant, factual and important content will matter to search engines.
How it will work:
- Google’s Algorithm will extract summaries from several text-based or AV content to create snippets for a user’s query or intent.
- Sentences extracted will contain the information the user is looking for and the algorithm will simply ignore the rest of the content.
- The content (from multiple resources) will be paraphrased or abstracted to create easy-to-understand sentences.
Two things are still unclear, will Google create a totally new content for its users and ignore the source, or will links be provided to content ‘extracted and abstracted’.
Voice Control and Search
As more and more people invest in voice-controlled devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, search patterns are changing and there is a rise in voice search. As marketeers, it is imperative that we think through how customers will search in the future – voice searches are typically framed as questions, are longer, and use conversational words. Plan and optimise your keywords keeping these trends in mind – creating content in the form of FAQs, quick answers and natural-sounding long-tail keywords. Working on featured snippets and optimising for local search will also help with the same. According to Comscore, 50% of all search will be voice search by 2020.
Micro-Influencers
Micro-influencers are credible thought-leaders and knowledge sharers, with small but loyal audiences – a big change from “influencers” and celebrities with a huge following. With so much content competing for a consumer’s attention, people are more likely to trust authentic recommendations as opposed to celeb endorsements, marketing gimmicks or aggressive product pushes. Choosing micro-influencers for your influencer marketing campaigns can result in increased traffic, heightened brand awareness, and boosted sales.
In order to find these micro-influencers – look to your own customers or your employees as brand ambassadors. Use tools such as Agorapulse and Buzzsumo to find micro-influencers that identify with your niche and have brand synergy. Collaborate and co-create with these micro-influencers to further your content evolution.
Live Streaming:
Many social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat have started providing easy-to- use live platforms. This live streaming method can be used for products and services descriptions and briefs, tours, tutorials, product launch events or any other purposes. In 2017, almost 74% of internet usage has been covered by video. This is a positive sign for the growth of live streaming. Snapchat is already driving a huge number of audiences to their 10 billion videos per day and Facebook Live is getting more than 8 billion video views from 500 million viewers per day.
Virtual Reality:
A new technology advancement that is slowly and gradually building a firm position on digital marketing is virtual reality (VR). Businesses mainly use this methodology to showcase premium products and services. Presently, this technology is costly, so only a few uses it effectively for promotion. But, it is expected to get cheaper and affordable in the future, so more businesses irrespective of their sizes will start using it. It is predicted that the virtual reality has potential to generate revenue of up to 5.2 billion USD by 2018.
Augmented Reality:
Online games are also gaining popularity, and Pokemon Go is a brilliant example. These reality-based games are designed with augmented reality. It is predicted that more and more businesses will be eager to use this technology in future. This is because, 53% of the marketers are optimistic about the future of augmented reality.
Email Newsletter:
Newsletter is an old marketing tool used by both B2B and B2C marketers to build a connection with their users, clients and audiences. Recently, it has gained popularity among different businesses as email marketing success rate has shown an increase. Email marketing is an essential element for a digital marketing agency. Opening rates of emails has increased subsequently as less and less people are ignoring them. In 2015, 205 billion emails were sent and received per day, and this figure is expected to reach 246 billion in 2018-2019.
Storytelling:
It is actually the future of content marketing. Audiences or readers, already stuffed with information, do not have the time or patience to go through uninteresting content. Storytelling is the best way to feed new content in an interesting way. A boring piece of article, blog post or social update will not help anymore. It is important to grab the attention of the audiences and keep them engaged throughout the content until they take some effective actions. Stories are 22 times easier to remember than straight facts and figures.
Content marketing is becoming the prime necessity for business marketing. That is the reason most of the digital marketing agencies are offering these services to their clients. The future scope of content marketing will increase manifold. The recent scenario is the best proof of that. If we consider only North America as our sample study, we will notice that in 2016 the share of B2B marketers using content marketing was 89% and that of B2C marketers was 86%. The rest of the world is at par, and across the globe this figure is increasing rapidly, making content marketing a basic business requirement.