Do your sales seem to be frozen? Slushy sales may be the result of outdated content marketing strategies.
Content marketing is more important than ever before. Content marketing has six times higher conversion rates than other approaches to marketing, according to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI). The technology that makes content marketing possible is evolving at a blistering pace, though, and the content marketing strategies that were hot just a few years ago have now gone a bit cold. As always, businesses and organizations are constantly on the lookout for the latest, greatest trend to keep their goods and services on the front page of every search engines. High visibility through content marketing boosts bottom lines, so staying current is essential.
Here are the top five hottest content marketing strategy trends your organization cannot afford to ignore.
5 Sizzling Content Marketing Trends for a Hot Bottom Line
1. Content marketing plan
Gone are the days of throwing the virtual spaghetti onto the walls of social media to see what sticks – creating a documented content marketing plan is what’s in these days.
CMI says 62 percent of the most successful content marketers have a documented content strategy, compared with 16 percent of the least successful marketers. Successful content marketing requires a content calendar populated with delightful and engaging content that leads qualified prospects towards the sales funnel.
2. Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) can gather and interpret large amounts of data that helps organizations understand the needs and preferences of their intended audiences. AI also helps organizations and businesses build better content marketing strategies to do a better job of meeting those needs and preferences. Finally, artificial intelligence can help companies identify highly targeted customer segments and create truly personalized content that will appeal to each of those segments.
AI can also help companies find the perfect writer and content marketing professional to meet almost any need.
3. Influencers
Influencer marketing is not about bribing a worldwide celebrity to post about your organization on social media. Instead, it is about connecting to and partnering with high-profile people in ways that benefit you both. Consider co-creating evergreen content with a person or organization that has influence over your potential customers. For example, if you manufacture barbeque tongs, you may want to connect with grilling bloggers who write for recipe sites, grill and barbeque pit builders, rib and barbeque contests, food critics, and people with popular outdoor cooking social media accounts.
4. Voice control and search
Voice search with Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri, Cortana and others is changing the way people search the internet, which means voice control will revolutionized content marketing. There are already more than a billion voice searches every month, according to statistics provided by CMI, and some in the industry believe that more than half of all searches will be voice-based by 2020. Voice search works when the user asks a question of a digital assistant, and the smart speaker replies with the most appropriate snippet from a website.
Content marketers may want to address this trend by adding “what” and “how” questions and answers to their existing content to increase the chances of creating a snippet for the digital assistant to report.
5. Video, podcasts, audio, and short stories
Content is moving beyond the written word. Each day, people watch about 5 billion YouTube videos and more than 100 million hours of videos on Facebook.
Podcasts are becoming increasingly popular; more than half of people in the United States have listened to a podcast, according to a survey by Podcast Insights. Of the respondents, 69 percent said that podcast ads made them more aware of new products and services. The survey results also showed that podcast listeners were more likely to follow companies and brands on social media.
You can create your own podcasts and videos by planning the content, choosing equipment to record the show, and publishing to iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, your website, trade websites and elsewhere.
While you don’t have to jump on every trend on the internet, it is important to keep your content marketing strategies up to date. Simply putting up a website or maintaining a social media account may not be enough to set your organization apart from the rest. Incorporating at least one trend into your existing content marketing strategy can increase your organization’s digital footprint and boost its bottom line.
For more information on the hottest content marketing strategies, contact WriterAccess.
Lynn H has been a professional writer, providing exceptional content online and offline, for nearly 20 years. In that time, she has penned thousands of articles for doctors, universities, researchers, small businesses, nursing organizations, sole proprietors and more. She writes everything from blogs to white papers; her specialty is putting complex scientific concepts in simple terms. She specializes in medical writing, creating informative and engaging content for professionals in medicine, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, medical manufacturing, chiropractics, optometry, emergency care, plastic surgery and others.
