Content Marketing Trends

1. Content Marketing Trends We are roughly in the fourth quarter and we have come to that time when we're assessing what worked and didn't work for us in terms of content this year before we started laying out our plans and budgeting. While throughout the year we tried and tested various content marketing strategies, unfortunately, some of them didn't work for us. But this does not end our journey in digital marketing. There is a lot in store! Here are 7 trends that promise to win: UGC vs. Staff content B2B marketers are increasingly getting better at finding ways to source their own digital content rather than developing their own. As of the second quarter, Facebook had 1.71 billion monthly active users, and a fair share of them are indulging in creating and creating content on a weekly basis. Likewise, although it is clearly not at the same level as the Facebook platform, companies are encouraging their users to create valuable content by promoting the use of blog content and forums the company runs, customer and prospective polls, social media channels, and guest-contributing editors content for their audiences. Put that extra effort into content marketing, maybe now is the time to think about ways you can get users to create your own content. This approach is one of the brightest content ideas ever. I think already local and global Just general content and good purposes no longer work for all audiences. Since we are steeped in different content marketing examples every day, offering a niche type of content to the audiences is a little tricky. The content marketing agency must realize that in order to capture the attention of its audience, its content has to stand out from the crowd.

2. Now how do you do that? One effective content marketing strategy is to create and promote niche content assets. By doing this, we've seen that a niche content marketing campaign has come to mean great content translated, segmented, and customized to reach your potential customer. We still see campaigns, especially on the B2B side, where the engaging English content portion is used for lead generation campaigns in countries across Europe or the Far East where creating content in local languages will be more effective. The companies that score much better - by a factor of 10 or more - are the ones that have localized their content marketing strategy. Second, audience segmentation is a content strategy that successful marketers use to raise their brand awareness for everything from email drip campaigns to retargeting for specific target audience groups. Finally, personalization - this moves specialization to another level in the content marketing plan, where the content is not only in the language in which the audience feels more comfortable, and the messages are specific to the buyer persona as well as the content The blog or visual content is customized for them based on 'target data' . CONNECT WITH A CONTENT MARKETING SPECIALIST Videos and podcasts as starters for favorites Video has been one of the biggest winners of the content marketing plan, and now it looks like the podcast is making a strong comeback. With the increase in download speeds and the ubiquity of mobile devices, visual content seemed to surely emerge from being one of the most promising media formats to be effective and extremely popular. Adding to the appeal of the video is the ease with which you can download and watch podcasts at a user-friendly time, and we assume we have another winner in the pipeline. Marketers discovered that both videos and podcasts are now powerful formats for engaging different segments of their audiences and launching a successful content marketing campaign.

3. Quality vs. Quantity Every year we regret the abundance of bad content - either because it was created without the audience's understanding, or some marketers are using the spray-and-pray method for content marketing. Either way, we see massive amounts of content daily and that volume only increases. It also means that poor- quality content gets less attention than it did before and that bad content or even mediocre content does not provide the ROI that marketers hope to get from their campaigns. A quick and easy way to measure the quality of your content is to look at your audience's responses - this could be the number of likes they receive on social media or their open and click rates if you use email marketing. Therefore, it will be an important consideration to focus on the quality of the content you are looking to produce rather than looking to increase the different sizes and shapes of the content you produce to meet your multi-channel outreach requirements. Paid vs. Membership access It was a good time where we could just focus on SEO or get an outside company to do digital content marketing for us, and sit back and watch the leads flock to. Then came social media, and with it the awesome potential of our content marketing plans spreads overnight based on legions of users flocking to the most popular social media platforms daily for news. Unfortunately, this is a declining trend with organic growth options offering limited potential. For example, Facebook recently severely limited the visibility companies can achieve with organic reach itself. To achieve the same levels of reach, other platforms also provide more paid options and force the marketer to increase their use of paid promotions to achieve the same visibility. This could mean budgeting for the paid component of social media promotion, as well as upgrading your content marketing strategy to look for alternative distribution channels.

4. Interactive vs. Static content One-way static content stands behind its best years. Even with an increase in the levels of niche in-house marketing activities taking place, there is a limit to the amount of customization that can be made in the content production side, aka marketer. Enter interactive content. By creating content that is encapsulated with interactive tools such as a test, diagnostic questionnaire, or game, users can now design the piece of content they see based on their responses in real time. This 'stimulus' of traditional content marketing is one of the most important trends and we expect it to continue to grow exponentially. Account Based Marketing No discussion of Marketing Trends would be complete without at least acknowledging the steps ABM has made this year in terms of technology growth to support it, media hype created to promote it, and increased adoption rates of ABM's approach by marketers. While the success of the ABM adopters is still mixed, there is no doubt that ABM's approach contains valuable suggestions for even the most traditional marketers to generate demand among us. With the increasing levels of niche content being created, ABM approaches require more customization of content for key accounts - both prospective and existing customer accounts. ABM's strong growth as an approach being applied by the best marketers around us will continue to grow with the advent of new technology that supports ABM. As you make your plans, you can look at the Seven Trends here to see how they can help make your plans more robust. Some marketers will ride the wave of these new trends, while some will deliberately choose to reverse trends and try different ways to innovate. There will be winners and losers on both sides. Future trends look a lot like the past - thus by increasing understanding trends, we hope that as you move into the new year you are better equipped with better and more efficient content marketing plans.