Top 10 Trends that can Shape Your Content Marketing

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About Content Marketing Trends:

You write well but have a limited audience. If you want to have more sales, or more conversions and leads that means you need to tighten or change your content marketing strategy. This blog would help you stand out among your competitors.

But before sharing some concrete and simple marketing strategies, let me define what content marketing is?

Content marketing is the process of publishing content that has greater public consumption and that reaches the audience in a timely manner. Such content should deliver what the audience needs.

Types of Content:

Content is not only a written form, it also includes:

• Infographic
• Podcast
• video content
• animated story type of content
• blog
• social media posts

Why Type of Content is Important in Today’s Business Environment?

Well, the obvious fact is that customers of this digital era are no more ignorant. People want to know before spending the money. The customer of the 21^st Century has a versatile choice spectrum. One may need one thing in a particular product or service, but some other person may prefer to buy or use something else.

The product of a particular brand may have all the tastes and features of a wide spectrum of customers, but they may not know. Therefore it is the Content Publisher and Strategist’s responsibility to bridge the gap between the customer need, and the available features in any brand.

Content publishers or strategists keep a close eye on the reviews of customers about the product that they might have used. They evaluate and inform the producer to optimize a particular product according to the customer’s flavor and need.

Therefore the role of Content Publishers and content writers in this era of competition and online businesses is inevitable. Content marketing is different than an advertisement. In the advertisement, you simply inform the potential customers, while in content marketing you are going to provide a consulting opinion in the form of a detailed description of the product or service. Content Marketer or Strategist not only inform the customer but also educate them, as they are aware of a particular customer need. Advertisement. In fact in content marketing what we do is to let the customer know what they needed and here is what they got.

So in simple words, content marketing is a sort of cycle that repeats itself in a manner as shown in the diagram below:

Content Marketing Trends:

Content marketing trends in marketing mean the best ways to adapt to reach customers and get a competitive edge for your business. This blog is all about effective content

 Content marketing trends and strategies to help businesses reaching out to more customers through content.

1. Trust and Credibility:

Trust and credibility are the golden principles for any business. If you win the trust of your customer, you don’t need any brand ambassador. Your customer will be your promoter. Once you earn the trust, you become credible. Though getting trust and becoming credible in the market is tough, but retaining the name of trust and credibility is tougher than earning. You educate your audience, therefore authenticity in your content is essentially important. Your content should give the feeling to the audience that you’re concerned about the customer and absolutely not about the brand that you are writing for.

Why would someone read your content, or why someone in such a busy life would play your promotional video?

The answer is, people need useful information. People need authentic sources and information.

The best example of building trust and credibility through content marketing trends is that of Henry Harvin. As a skill development academy, Henry Harvin not only trains exceptionally, but they provide unique customer support. This individual provides customized support to every potential customer. They have an effective content marketing strategy as well. They train youth, then provide internship support, and through their internees, they develop content marketing trends for the promotion of their courses.

To develop credibility and trust one should necessarily consider the following points:

• Be honest and never hide something from your customer/audience
• Appreciate your customer in terms of the outcome that you get when they reach your content
• Share your happy news with your customer. For example “ It was because of my valuable customer that I attained 10,000 subscription”
• Listen to your customer carefully and try to give personalized attention
• Focus on the results that matter to customer. Make yourself accountable to your customer. Even if necessary apologies for any experience that might have hurtled your loyal customer.

2. Customization / Personalization:

When you deal with customers, they are not the same. They can be classified into various categories. Therefore before producing any form of content, one needs to have information for a particular group of customers. This information may be collected by reviewing the comments of the users of a particular product or brand, or it can be found by doing research. The main aim would be to get into the fact that what are the likes, dislikes of a customer. What he or she says about a particular product.

Once you’re equipped with this knowledge, then frame your content in a realistic manner according to the needs of the customer.

I am not saying that a brand may not have the features wanted by a customer, and you as a content producer cheat him/her by telling them that these features are available. By doing so you lose trust. As credible content writers, we need to write for those brands and services which deserve our time. Which deserve to be used by valuable customers.  The more you know about your audience, the more loyal your customer would be to you. People are different. Due to the diverse nature of human beings, you may come across audiences who are harsher and whose words may hurt or irritate you, but remember this is the point of time if you are still positive and polite that means you are successful in your ultimate objectives.

Do the following:

• Answer the each and every question of the client
• If you cannot manage time, better to tell the customer to reply later
• Don’t take the help of automation to write emails to your clients, rather deal a human like a human
• While emailing use names of the customer.

3. Effective Visual Presentation:

People are busy nowadays, therefore a picture or image really speaks louder than a word. But that does not mean that images or infographics should take the whole space of your content. This simply means that your content should be augmented by relevant, simple, and appealing images along with credible content about your subject matter.

A global media company FORBES says that 91% of people prefer to like graphics, images, or pictorial presentations than traditional content. The reason is the tough 9 to 5 routine of most of the people.

Along with the visual presentation, your content should equally be supported by interactive content. For example, you can embed a sort of quiz or questionnaire related to the content. Or your content can have a video as a testimonial that tells the important aspect of your brand in a summarized form.

The visual effect can be enhanced by using animated graphics or videos too.

While creating visual effects one should be careful about:

• Don’t decorate more than needed
• Don’t add blurred images or infographic
• Give credit if you use images or infographics from other sources.
• Display images, graphs or statistical charts if any in a proper manner
• Adopt uniformity in the overall structure of your content presentation
• Write content which is according to the level of your audience. Simplicity in language is more appealing than using complex language.
• Your content should be portable as long as various devices are concerned. It should equally be displayed on mobile set, tablet, laptop or desktop in the same manner.

4. Interact Live with your Audience:

Interactive content has become essential these days. People live digitally. No one is far away from anyone. Therefore to shape your content marketing trends & strategy, you need to go live, answer the chat rooms, answer surveys questions, and have a meet-up with your loyal customer.

This strategy gives a sense of ownership to your audience. Your customer starts believing that he or she is being heard. Famous writers do have a fan group and they interact with them frequently. When you become a brand, you are no more a private entity, you become an asset for others, and therefore you have to act accordingly.

5. Go According to your Established Mission, Goals and Key Performance Indicators:

Before any activity, one should have a plan for that activity. Content writing and its marketing is a complex phenomenon. Therefore a vision, mission, and goals should be set prior to publishing your content.

As the best content marketing trend you need to have to answer the WHY, WHEN, WHOM, HOW, AND WHERE answers before planning to write or market your content.

The best content marketing trick which is tested is that the content writer and marketer should stand in the shoes of the audience. You need to feel the need and pain of the audience. You have to be aware of the pain points of the customer. Once you are fully aware of your audience, then you can benchmark your KPI’s or key performance indicators. You can set your goals as a writer or content producer.

The content marketer should behave like a customer or audience and should answer the WIIFM or what is In It for Me?

Therefore the goals and objectives of your content marketing strategy should be the outcome of a strong vision, mission, and goals, which address the concerns of your customer.

6. Aware yourself about your Audience through Searches, Feedbacks, Chats & Reviews:

Customer review is an integral part of the digital era. It is also essential for content reach.

Before producing content, there should be thorough customer reviews. You need to know about your audience and potential customer. This is possible by reviewing the customer’s feedback. The fact of the matter is that people believe each other more than they believe the businesses.

Researching not only about the top trends for your content marketing, but to know the feel and taste of the customer as a post-usage experience is extra-ordinarily important and useful. The customer should define your brand.  Research shows that 90% of buyer’s decisions are influenced by the customer review. Assuming yourself as a customer, one would surely listen to someone who has availed service or used a particular brand. In a similar passion customer service effectiveness is also an important performance indicator for the promotion of a brand. According to the research conducted by the Aspect Consumer Research Index, 76% of the customer judges their own value in the eyes of the brand through customer services support.

Go through the chartrooms and social media outlets to know your customers. Note down the pain points of your customers. Keep a diary for example an online tool like Evernote or Google doc to keep noting important aspects and concerns of your customers.

7. Brand Storytelling:

Storytelling is not only a marketing tool but also a strategic tactic that enables marketers to retain users for a longer time than expected.

Stories are always remaining longer in the memories of human-being. Therefore storytelling has been a hot topic as a marketing strategy. Stories add a flavour to your content. It engages the audience. It attracts the audience in such a manner that a reader has to go through all of it.  Through stories, the audience develops an emotional connection with the brand that you are writing about. If you write an effective narration of your brand in the form of a story, it would sensitize the audience that you produce content for them. While producing content remember to address the following.

• Tell the audience who are you.
• Let them know why do you write for them
• Inform them why should they read it
• Describe your credibility in shortest possible way
• What are the core values of you as a content developer and why do you write on a particular brand or service.

While writing an effective narration of your brand story, the best strategy is, to be honest, and offer more than what you have. This would give the real impression to your audience that you value them.

8. Research and Competitor Analysis:

The reading span of human beings is shorter than 10 seconds according to the research. Therefore engaging the audience to read your content is always tricky and hard. You have to do research for this purpose. You need to provide authentic, credible information in the form of statistical data, graphs, infographics, etc. to keep the audience engaged with your content.

The research adds value to your work and provides a feel of authenticity to your content. Through research, you actually fulfill the ultimate goal of educating the customer on what they need to know. This is important that if you quote someone in your own writing, you need to give the original writer the credit by linking to the source site.

Competitor analysis is an integral part of any business strategy. This analysis is also quite helpful for a content developer. When you analyze your competitor in a critical manner, you can easily pinpoint the good and bad points about the content that your competitor produces.

This helps you find the gaps within your own content. You can easily do competitor analysis by finding the traffic to pages of your competitor. Focus on the following areas while analyzing the content of your competitor.

• Top ranking pages
• Keywords used
• Structure of the content
• User’s feedback
• Reviews
• The use of images and infographic
• Which content type is more effective
• Relevancy
• Page linking methods

9. Bring diversity in your content:

Diversity brings recognition to more audiences. Stagnancy is not something appreciated. While presenting your content you need to be diverse. Keep changing your tone and style to give diversity to the readers. Bring diversity by adopting the following strategies.

• Arrange a virtual seminar with your audience
• Periodically produce podcast
• Expansion of your social media outlets
• Make videos related to the content produced and link the video within the blog post or any writing
• Don’t stick to one particular brand or service. Write on any product or service of the related niche that is worth writing.
• Use concentric strategy, in which you add more brands or services to write content on. That does not mean to write on anything which you might not be fully aware of. For example if you are a tech writer, don’t write only on mobile phones, also write on mobile accessories.
• Also adopt horizontal diversification strategy. This strategy emphasize to write on topics that may also attract your existing audience
• Keep changing formatting and writing styles but do remember to keep your originality and recognition intact.
• Remember that content diversification does not mean upside-downing your content creation strategy. Stick to your goals and try to bring diversity
• Avoid repetition in your content
• Be unique in displaying images, infographics, or statistical form of data
• Use appropriate style for each social media outlet. That means publishing on Facebook will not be the same as publishing on LinkedIn.

10. Include Testimonials:

According to Wikipedia, testimonials are the statements made by your audience about your brand, service. As a content writer, my testimonial would be the benefits that my client got by taking help from the content I produced. Testimonial creates a context for the potential customers to be attracted to your content.

We believe each other more than the business itself. Therefore testimonials humanize

our brand identity. By adding testimonials to your content you will get the following benefits.

• Credibility among users increases with testimonials
• You will become trusted by more
• It increases leads and traffic to your page
• Testimonials have a retaining power, more specifically if a testimonial is a video message ( of not more than 2-3 minutes), it compels the audience to be on the page to watch and know
• Testimonials tell your client how the problem was solved

Testimonials can be used by the following manner:

• Make a small video from one of your most loyal client
• Display the sweetest statement made by one of your audience. You can find it anywhere in comments, or chartrooms or from social media accounts

11. Use advertisement Social Media Effectively:

Content marketing through social media means utilizing the available social media outlets to promote your brand, service, or to make yourself as a brand of content creation in the online space.

Besides social cohesion and connectivity, social media has a greater role in businesses nowadays. Therefore most of the businesses may be small ones or larger ones utilize social media to promote themselves. Content marketing is no exception.  Like other businesses segments, content marketing is also strategized in the same manner for social media. You need to identify your consumer/audience, then reach out to them and engage them with your brand or service. Occasionally do live interaction with them. Share useful information with your customers other than the particular business you own. Effective use of social media can make your followers your fans. Your brand, product, or even service can easily be availed by many through social media.

As a content publisher and marketer, you need to design an effective social media strategy for the marketing of your content. The summary glimpse to design a social media strategy for content distribution and marketing is listed below:

• Define and set your goals for social media content marketing
• Identify your potential consumers and their groups on various social media platforms
• Use social media boosting paid advertisement to get into maximum of your potential consumers
• Plan which content to be shared on which medium and how to share them.
• Re-structure the same content for different social media outlets
• Keep analyzing the outcome of already shared content. May be some of your pages show good results and some other are not performing well. Identify the reason and re-shape your social media content strategy
• Always be there. Don’t be absent for a longer duration even if needed to do so. Leave a message for your followers and explain the reason.
• Let your potential consumers know prior to the arrival of something new to create curiosity.
• Add share buttons to your contents to be easily shared.
• Read the reviews and answer the chat rooms discussions if any regarding your product.
• Provide FAQ’s with each content to create an ease for your consumers.

Conclusion:

Content marketing trends may be different from one organization to another, but their real essence for all is the same, and they all aim to get to the potential customer to the best of their efforts. Content production and content publishing is one aspect but to reach it out to as many customers as possible is another very important dimension in the digital content writing profession. You may be writing amazing content but if the reach of the content is limited, then there is no public consumption, and ultimately you become disappointed. With all these strategies SEO efforts are needed at any cost. Best usage of keywords, and optimizing your content is of course important.

Therefore a content publisher needs to be updated and find out the best content marketing trends and apply them to promote content.

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