Content marketing used to be quite simple, really. Just hire the best ad agency money can hire, tell them what you want, and you’ll likely get the results you need. But that was then. The entire world has changed. Nowadays, content marketing trends are changing so fast it’s never easy to tell which one still works and which doesn’t anymore.

New marketing strategies and trends emerge that practically change how we must draw, connect with, and sell to our customers. However, it’s not always enough to just keep pace with these transformations.

To succeed in today’s content marketing world that travels at breakneck speed, the best approach is staying ahead of the game.

Staying across content marketing trends 2021 can shape the strategic positioning and communications of your business. Customers engaging with your brand on social media, via apps, and through your website can have their experience of your organisation enriched with the integration of these key 21st-century marketing trends. Find out the following.

• What is Content Marketing?
• Examples of Content Marketing
• Why Content Marketing is Important for Your Business
• Content marketing and social media
• Challenges Associated with Content Marketing
• Best Content Marketing Tips
• Content Marketing Trends 2021

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Read Also: How to Create Eye-Catching Content to Crush Your Competition

The vast majority of marketers are using content marketing. In fact, it is used by many prominent organizations in the world, including P&G, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and John Deere. It’s also developed and executed by small businesses and one-person shops around the globe. Why? Because it works.

Here is just one example of content marketing in action:

Regardless of what type of marketing tactics you use, content marketing should be part of your process, not something separate. Quality content is part of all forms of marketing:

• Social media marketing: Content marketing strategy comes before your social media strategy.
• SEO: Search engines reward businesses that publish quality, consistent content.
• PR: Successful PR strategies address issues readers care about, not their business.
• PPC: For PPC to work, you need great content behind it.
• Inbound marketing: Content is key to driving inbound traffic and leads.
• Content strategy: Content strategy is part of most content marketing strategies.

Examples of Content Marketing

Here are five examples of content marketing.

1. Infographics. These are generally long, vertical graphics that include statistics, charts, graphs, and other information. If you need some examples, here are 197 infographics on the topic of content marketing curated by Michael Schmitz, head of Content Lab at Publicis, Munich. Infographics can be effective in that if one is good it can be passed around social media and posted on websites for years. You can get a professionally designed infographic by hiring a contractor on a site like oDesk or if you want to remove some of the risk you can go with a company like Visua.ly. A decent infographic will usually cost you at least $1,000 to have designed, but can cost several thousand dollars if you are hiring a contractor or agency to include strategy and planning, research, copywriting, and design. There is also the matter of promoting that infographic to bloggers and the media. Or you could set up a board on Pinterest and curate infographics on a topic related to your business. That is also a form of content marketing, and it costs nothing but your time. Hey, it worked for Michael.
2. Webpages. What’s the difference between a normal webpage and a webpage that is content marketing? Consider The Beginner’s Guide to SEO from Moz, a provider of SEO related tools and resources. This resource, offered for free, has been viewed millions of times, bringing in countless customers who otherwise might never have stumbled across Moz and the services they offer. Or take a look at a case study from the design firm Teehan+Lax. Most case studies are boring. Their case studies are fascinating. That’s the difference between simply putting content on your website, and content marketing.
3. Podcasts. Michael Hyatt, author of the best-selling book Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World, practices what he preaches. His “This is Your Life” podcast is downloaded 250,000 times each month. As Hyatt elaborates on his blog post 4 Reasons You Should Consider Launching Your Own Podcast, “A podcast gives you visibility in a completely different world—primarily iTunes. I have had scores of new people say they had never heard of me until they stumbled onto me in iTunes.” Hyatt gives valuable information and advice in his podcast–all for free. But that podcast leads to more sales of his books, signups for his courses, and requests for him as a speaker.
4. Videos. Gary Vaynerchuk is a master of content marketing using online video, just take a look at his YouTube channel. He got his start creating videos to promote his family’s wine store and through those videos and other online marketing he eventually grew it to a $45M empire. Videos and podcasts are a largely untapped form of content marketing because people think it’s expensive and hard. But with the falling cost of professional grade equipment creating high quality video and audio content is easier than ever. Amateur video content marketing has been used to sell blenders, launch new dental products, and market Hong Kong visa consulting services. What video could you throw together for your company that might change your fortunes overnight? It might be easier than you think.
5. Books. Like movies, people often think of books as selling themselves, but savvy marketers don’t sell books just to sell books, they sell books as marketing tools. Michael Port’s sales manual Book Yourself Solid is a great read for entrepreneurs, salespeople, and marketers, and while I’m sure Port enjoys selling his book, the book is a tool for driving customers to his coaching and speaking services. Although with self-publishing it’s easier than ever to publish a book, there is still the perception that it’s difficult and that only reputable professionals can publish a business book. Publish your own, and even if people don’t read it you can still use it as a form of content marketing every time you’re introduced as “Author of…”

Those are just a few examples of content marketing.

Why Content Marketing is Important for Your Business

First, we need to understand the four steps of the buying cycle:

1. Awareness. Prior to awareness a customer may have a need, but they are not aware there is a solution.
2. Research. Once a customer is aware there is a solution, they will perform research to educate themselves. For example, a car buyer will try to find out what different types of cars exist, and which one will fit their needs.
3. Consideration. At this point the customer starts comparing different products from different vendors to make sure they’re getting a high quality product at a fair price.
4. Buy. Finally, the customer makes their decision and moves forward with the transaction.

Traditional advertising and marketing is great when it comes to the second two steps. Content marketing taps into the first two stages of the buying process by raising awareness of solutions and educating consumers about a product they may have never considered before.

At my own company we’ve used content marketing to grow more than 1,000% over the past year. Potential clients find our content, find value in it, and by the time they contact us they’re already convinced they want to work with us. We don’t have to engage in any high pressure sales tactics, it’s merely a matter of working out details, signing an agreement, and getting started. The trust that usually needs to be built up during an extensive sales cycle has already been created before we know the potential client exists.

The return on investment for content marketing can be phenomenal if executed correctly. We haven’t spent a dime on our own content marketing, or even that much time. 95% of the success we’ve experienced with content marketing can be traced to a handful of articles I’ve written, adding up to perhaps 20 hours of work.

Content marketing also provides additional benefits in that it supports other digital marketing channels. It provides additional content for social media marketing and contributes to SEO efforts by generating natural inbound links and building up good content on your website that gets found in search engines. In fact, for many companies the bulk of their SEO efforts should be focused on content marketing.

Why is content marketing better than traditional marketing?

Times are changing, and so is marketing. Traditional marketing isn’t personalized and doesn’t allow contact with the customers, which is a huge disadvantage.

Some forms of traditional marketing include printed media, such as magazines, newspapers, and fliers, advertizing via phone calls or telemarketing, billboards, and maybe the most popular type: TV ads.

The fact that TV advertising is the most popular type of traditional marketing immediately makes us realize why traditional marketing is slowing down. Especially younger generations aren’t watching TV anymore because of the rise of streaming services and unskippable TV ads.

Traditional marketing just isn’t the number 1 marketing choice anymore, especially for brands whose audience is young people. Instead, they’re choosing other marketing strategies that enable them to interact with their customers and form a relationship with them.

Content marketing is one of those strategies.

Content marketing and social media

Content marketing is directly related to social media marketing because you can post and share your content on your social media profiles.

This provides you with additional platforms where you can interact with your customers, both publicly in the comments and privately, in the direct messages.

By having social media accounts, you’re enabling people to ask you questions, to which you can respond as quickly as possible, which further cements your relationship with your customer, makes them trust you more and come back for more of your products and services.

By constantly creating content that people find useful and interesting, you’re nurturing your current customers and attracting new ones.

Also, another benefit of content marketing is that it helps with your search engine page ranking, which enables even more people to find you.

It is through content that people find websites, and afterward decide to give them a chance and press the call-to-action buttons, either the newsletter signup one or the purchase one.

Challenges Associated with Content Marketing

In order for a content marketing campaign to work, it requires a strong sense of commitment and patience as it could often take some time before it produces significant results. Moreover, several factors must also be considered as the possibility of risks such as unwanted errors are unavoidable, once implemented the wrong way. That’s the reason why bigger and even some small companies outsource content marketing services from dedicated agencies.

Despite the obstacles that come with this modern form of marketing, strategies and methods can constantly change due to fluctuations in customer preferences, as well as the advancement of the technology itself. As a result, new trends always emerge at any given moment, and things in the practice of content marketing are becoming more interesting than before.

Social media users are now spending an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes per day multi networking across an average of 8 social networks and messaging apps.” There’s a reason why digital marketing is essential — your customers are most likely online in some capacity for a good proportion of their day.

That’s why we’ve created this compelling list of content marketing trends so that you’ll know what’s still hot and what’s not in today’s marketing.

Creating an Effective SEO Content Marketing Strategy

SEO is not only a critical piece of getting in front of the right audiences, but it’s also a fairly cost-effective addition to your marketing plan and particularly important for your content marketing strategy. Pay-per-click, or PPC, advertising is extremely helpful in getting your name to appear in searches and get in front of a broader audience than you might otherwise, but it means that the more people who find you that way (and click-through based on a paid ad link), the more you spend.

This might eventually pay off in ROI of acquiring and keeping a customer, but SEO can be more cost-effective. Good SEO certainly isn’t free and requires time, research, and paying either an experienced employee or hiring an agency, but it’s usually an affordable addition to your long-term marketing strategy.

Here are some things to keep in mind to develop or improve your SEO content marketing strategy.

What matters in your SEO content marketing plan

1. Research your target market

Content matters a lot in SEO – it’s the thing that Google and other search results are looking for and linking to. Any solid content marketing plan will understand what you’re trying to achieve with your content and that means knowing the audience that the content is meant for.

Researching your audience and the market for your product or service is key in developing your content – understanding what drives them is important in knowing how to talk to them and what kind of content to create to resonate with them. Using target market research through a firm or conducting your own helps you identify drivers and preferences as well as demographic info like average age, gender, location, education, and more to help you build a foundation of information that your content marketing grows from and is based on.

2. Research keywords

If you know your audience, you know their challenges. That means you have a better idea of what they’re Googling to find answers for their problems and you know that you want to be on that list of solutions. Much of SEO is keyword-based, so understanding what keywords you need to try to rank for is a key part of the process of developing your SEO content marketing strategy. Keyword tools and research options exist to help you in this important step, including Moz, SEMrush, and Google Keyword Planner.

3. Create quality content

Your target market data and your keyword research help you to start creating the content that will help to boost your brand and engage your customer. Content can include anything from blog posts to whitepapers to case studies to infographics to ebooks to videos and more, but the most important piece is ensuring quality.

Lyfe Marketing notes, “It’s not enough to just sprinkle the keywords throughout your content. If you want consumers to read and take action based on your content, it needs to be of high quality. Additionally, Google penalizes businesses that create low-quality content, which can impact your SEO ranking and ability to reach new leads on the search engine.”

Search engines define quality in a few ways:

• Well written: Make sure there are no issues with grammar or spelling.
• Relevant: Use examples that help connect you to your potential customers.
• Easy-to-read: Audiences are busy, so make your content skimmable with headers and lists.

4. Make updates

SEO isn’t static. Your content and even your strategy may need to change over time to better serve your business and your audience. Regular content audits can help make sure that everything is still optimized. Here are some things to keep an eye on to make sure your content remains successful and connects well to customers.

• Check for new keyword opportunities
• Update stats or facts that have changed
• Add additional content based on industry updates or changes to best practices

Your SEO content marketing strategy is a long-term investment that will pay off over time by consistently helping your audience solve problems and connecting them with a valuable resource – your brand.

Best Content Marketing Tips

• State the objective of your content: What is the intention behind the content you are marketing? What do you hope to achieve? It is very important that you clearly define what your objective is. The reason is simply that the content you generate must reflect your objectives as a business entity.
• Define your target audience before you start to produce content: Before you embark on any marketing or sales drive, it is vital that you first identify who your ideal customer is. This is the buyer persona and depicts the qualities as well as characteristics of those who would be interested in your offerings. This will help you avoid wasting resources like time, energy and money. It makes no sense creating a product without a customer, as demand must determine supply. The end in this “business context” must indeed justify the means.
• Go after specific keywords with your content: Everything rises and falls on keywords in a manner of speaking. Your choice of keywords must be specific and targeted in order to attract the right kind of client. The reason why this is so is quite simple, keywords determine your performance in search engine ranking profiles. Your ranking propels you to the top in searches made and automatically attracts traffic to you, which is desirable. The strategy for making a profit is still universal and applicable today. Simply find a need and meet it in the best possible way. Therefore, the keywords you choose must be determined by, identification of what the client wants.
• Focus on solving a customer’s question with in-depth content: this is one area in which many content marketers subtly overlook. You must make an effort to focus on addressing a customer’s questions no matter how complex. There are actually advantages inherent in doing that. First, prospects whose questions are thoroughly attended to will be satisfied, and that engages them further. This makes you an authentic authoritative source of information, which leads to their conversion into a paying client. In addition, if your content proffers answers to complex queries, it propels you to the top in search engine rankings. This, in turn, attracts massive traffic to your site and portrays you as a subject matter expert. The result is a massive promotion of your brand.
• Produce consistent content: of the strategies that enhance content marketing is the production of content that is consistent. Consistency in this context has to do with content that is relevant, fresh, and trending. Customers often want to get as much information as can be gotten pertaining to products or services that stimulate their interest. In order to attain this, you must maintain the quality as well as the reliability of the information disseminated via your content. A good rule of thumb is to focus 70% of content matter on evergreen material and put 30% of the focus on posts that are trending.

• Include videos and images: Cliché that says that a picture is worth a thousand words. Customers come from all occupations and have different learning modes. Therefore, in order to capture their attention, it is vital your content has videos and images embedded. Clients who are particularly dominant in the visual and auditory quadrant will find content enhanced with video and images quite stimulating. Furthermore, such people are more likely to retain the information disseminated via your content. Consequently, such people are more likely to return and move from the status of just a prospect of being converted and retained as a full-fledged customer.
• Always create 100% original content: Content is king so the saying goes. It is imperative you ensure you consistently deliver unique content. This is because it plays a huge role in determining how your website will perform in Google rankings. In addition, for you to do well in social media marketing (which is a given) the content you generate must be solid. It must be accurate, factual, verifiable, and relevant to issues pertaining to the customers’ demands.
• Appeal to your audience’s emotions: One thing you must know about and seek to address has to do with your customer’s emotional needs. The strategy is to capture the attention of your prospect, tap into their emotions, and continue to engage them. You must understand how to use sales psychology and neuroscience to stimulate emotional responses necessary to achieve certain actions. This could be pain relief or solving a problem by buying your product, for example, a drug.
• Don’t be too content-centric: One of the buzz words often bandied about in the industry is content-centric. However, there is a real danger of overkill with attendant unintended consequences. If you do not take care, you may actually end up disrupting the relationship-building process with your prospect/customer by doing certain things. The negatives include focusing on you and not the audience, being overly absorbed in making sales to the detriment of the customer, incorporating too much SEO methodology in your content, and information overload directed at the audience.
• Monetize your content: You can monetize your content in a number of ways. It all boils down to adopting a pragmatic strategy and drafting a plan, which you then implement. You can use calls to action to direct your audience to a free trial or take visitors to your products page, which depicts your offerings. You can sell advertising space using a pay per click (PPC) ads system. In addition, you can get sponsorship via an individual who pays for dedicated ad space on your website. Furthermore, you can create a high-value asset and set up an eCommerce shop to sell your product.
• Be mobile-friendly: There are strategies involved in achieving this and it is critical for you to apply them to remain competitive. Ensure your site is responsive to give users the best browsing experience. Take care to optimize the speed of your site. According to Google, 53% of visitors to your site will abandon it if it takes more than 3 seconds for the page to open. Ensure your website loads faster by implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). You need to produce a site map to ensure the Google spider crawls through the site properly. Your titles and meta-descriptions should be properly optimized, so your site appears in search results. You should ensure your content has shorter more captivating headlines, should start with the most compelling content, and should make use of more video content.
• Add social sharing buttons: You must ensure that your posts have embedded within the social media sharing buttons. These buttons must be easy to use, as user-friendly as possible, and must be eye-catching. Try to think up innovative ways of inviting people to click on your social share buttons. These could include an end-of-post call to action, which asks people to click on the buttons and share your content.
• Share your content on social media: This is one of the best ways of extending your reach and spreading your business tentacles. A fact you must take into consideration is that billions of people frequent social media channels daily. Therefore, it will be wise of you to leverage the huge number of potential clients the platforms attract. Prospects will inevitably stumble across your business posts in due course. Therefore, you must be visibly present and active on social media.
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Content Marketing Trends 2021

1. AR-powered visuals

Users love augmented reality (AR) filters and lenses offered up by platforms like Snapchat; users can give themselves a puppy dog nose, tongue, and ears or place a pretty flower crown on top of their head — all via augmented reality. And there are a ton more AR filters and lenses users can play around with to create fun visual content.

And did you know that Snapchat gives you the ability to create your own filters and lenses? This means that you can create branded filters and lenses to promote your business to social media users. Taco Bell launched its own branded lens on Snapchat, and it was viewed 224 million times, making it the top campaign in the app’s history. Expect more AR-powered visuals like this in 2021.

2. Conversational marketing

More and more businesses are realizing that the fastest way to move buyers through their marketing funnels is with one-on-one conversations. That’s why conversational marketing will be a notable trend in 2021. When you can have one-on-one, personal conversations with your audience, you not only create a more human buying experience, but you can learn a lot about your audience, which will help you create more relevant content and marketing messages in the future.

Conversational marketing comes in many forms including email marketing, live customer support, customer success programs, Facebook Messenger marketing, chatbots, and more. And with advances in artificial intelligence, chatbots are only going to get better at having life-like conversations with users.

So, if you want to keep up with the competition and learn more about your target customers faster, you need to step up your conversational marketing game in 2021.

3. Podcast

Podcasts have become very popular in recent years and now, they’re one of the most popular content marketing trends, as well.

They’re pretty convenient: not only because they’re informative, but because they allow us to get informed while on the go. People listen to podcasts while taking walks, driving, and walking on treadmills. They’re also pretty great if you need something to fall asleep to.

They can be about literally anything: entertainment, history, sports, books, and maybe most importantly, industries and the events related to them.

More and more businesses are creating podcasts where they discuss what is currently happening in the industry they’re part of. The format is very attractive: they star well-informed people who sit down and have friendly discussions about the current news and trends.

Producing a podcast can be quite expensive because of quality audio equipment, but if you have a huge following, it pays off. You can always ask your readers and followers whether they would be interested in hearing your podcast and you can record a few to see how they do.

4. Live video streams

Live video streams are becoming more and more popular by the day and owe the popularity of social media. They’re one of the most recent content marketing trends and will be one of the main ones in 2021.

Some digital marketing experts even say that live video is a must-have for marketers.

The reason for this is that video is by far both the most popular and most effective type of content when it comes to marketing. There’s a reason why YouTube and TikTok are so popular.

YouTube is the second most visited website in the world (right after Google) and TikTok is the fastest growing social media platform yet.

The reason why digital marketing experts see live streams as a crucial strategy is that it enables businesses to connect with customers directly and in real-time. It also allows companies to show the so-called human factor and prove that they’re much more than just a name.

In live streams, there are no scripts, thus enabling more natural conversations.

Livestreams can be Q&A, where people ask questions and you respond or vice versa, they can be streams of presentations, announcements, events, behind-the-scenes glimpses, and so on.

Use this content marketing trend to maximize interaction with your customers and to show them how genuine your business is and how it works.

5. Natural language and voice search

Voice search is another content marketing trend that is on the rise.

People are tired of typing and they just don’t have the time for it anymore. Instead, they’re using voice search and using the time they would have spent on typing for more useful action.

You can do a number of things to optimize for voice search. Read your content out loud and make sure it sounds natural. Avoid using complicated language and long and over-complicated phrases that no one knows.

Additionally, where you can, use long keywords and questions as titles, because this is how we speak.

When talking to a voice assistant, people aren’t saying ‘content marketing’. Instead, they’re forming questions as if talking to human and saying ‘what is content marketing’ or ‘Alexa, show me examples of content marketing’.

In the second example, the keyword would be ‘examples of content marketing’, a longtail keyword, one of the most important things about voice search optimization.

6. Dynamic content delivery

By now you probably have heard plenty about the importance of personalization. Today, consumers expect to receive emails and offers personalized to their specific needs. In fact, according to statistics from Instapage, 54 percent of shoppers anticipate a personalized discount within a day of sharing their information with a retailer.

But in 2020, consumers want next-level personalization. Enter dynamic content. Dynamic content, also known as adaptive content, refers to web content that changes based on the user’s demographics, behaviors, preferences, and interests.

With personalization, you’re able to deliver content to users that is relevant and interesting to them. But with dynamic content, you can also provide them with the exact content that will encourage them to take the next step in the buying process.

7. Improve content experience

Content experience is the way your content is structured, presented, but also the way your visitors interact with your content.

When we say that content experience involves the way the content is structured and presented, we’re talking about a number of different things.

Firstly, it is important that the layout of your content looks good because statistics show that 38% of people stop engaging with a website if the layout doesn’t look appealing.

To make sure the layout of your content doesn’t scare people away, you can add images to make the reading easier on people’s eyes, and add headings and subheadings where needed (to create breaks in the text and make reading easier). You can also add lists to simplify information and make it easier to digest.

8. Sharing on social media platforms

The number of social media users grows by the day. In 2018, there were 2.65 billion people using social media, and it is estimated that the number will grow to 3.1 billion in 2021.

We already mentioned how important it is to share your content on social media. It allows you to present it to people who are following you, who can then share it with people who have never heard of your business.

Aside from the massive possible reach, content getting shared on social media enables the so very important aforementioned interaction with followers, which allows you to nurture the relationship you have with the current readers and customers, and to reach out to new ones.

9. User-generated content

User-generated content is great because it gives you a break from creating content and also allows you to feature your loyal customers.

By doing that, you’re showing your potential customers how much you value your relationship with your current customers and how important they are to you.

Combine user-generated content with aforementioned carousel posts and you’ll be using two content marketing trends at once.

10. Visual data

We already mentioned how important the content experience is. Visual data is a content marketing trend that can drastically improve the content experience and contribute to the good appearance of content.

If you have Photoshop or another editing program, you can use the data you have to create graphics which will not only make your content prettier but will also make the information easier to understand and digest.

Some websites even create entire articles in image form, giving each paragraph different colors and including cool graphics.

Now that you’re aware of these important content marketing trends for 2021, you can start coming up with a plan for how to implement them into your own content marketing strategy. Start planning for these trends ahead of time, and you’ll be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.