A good marketer will be aware of the upcoming content trends 2021.
It’s vital to stay ahead of the curve and be prepared with an effective content marketing strategy.
The Content Marketing Institute define content marketing as “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”.
Essentially, you’re focusing on providing useful content which your target audience will relate to and by doing so, your business should benefit from more loyal customers, increased sales, and savings on costs.
What are the expected content trends 2021?
Content marketing encompasses a vast range of different methods of communication, it’s a critical aspect of any business’ marketing strategy; thus, there are different types of content trends.
1. Video Content
Video marketing has continued to grow in recent years. Now with the impact of COVID-19 resulting in even more meetings and events being held virtually, video has become increasingly popular and commonplace, particularly within our working environment.
More people than ever have become familiarised with video, making it an effective way to engage with your audience, create additional income streams and generate leads for your business; not to mention it’s become much easier to execute.
Video streaming, both live and pre-recorded sessions, have become the new norm for consumers and creators alike; it’s now expected from many consumers.
YouTube is the second most popular search engine behind Google, businesses need to keep up with consumer demand for more and more video content.
2. Growing Competition
Despite the challenges that many businesses have had to face throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, for some it has encouraged their business to make the all-important move online; if you are not online, you do not exist as a business.
It’s essential to invest in online marketing, particularly with so many businesses competing for sales, you must put in the time and effort to create engaging content to ensure it stands out amongst the crowded online world.
3. Visual Content Trends
This is definitely a trend which is likely to stick around for a while. Visually led platforms continue to engage people and communicate with them in a dynamic and interactive way which they can relate to.
As a marketer, it’s important to be looking at all of these visual led channels such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat; take advantage of custom, branded imagery for your content creation.
4. Purchasing via Digital Content
Another impact of COVID-19 has meant more of us are spending more time at home and generally more time online. Trends for digital content mean that this is an extremely important part of the consumer’s purchasing journey.
It can be a challenge to grab the attention of your consumer, however, it can be even more challenging to keep their attention.
As web-savvy consumers, we expect quick, relevant answers and solutions, otherwise we’ll go elsewhere. Businesses should be creating content which fulfils this need to have an immediate answer, make these answers easy to find and create your content in a problem/question format to make the consumers’ journey even smoother.
Additionally, you must put serious focus into ensuring you’re mobile friendly; this doesn’t just mean having a mobile friendly website. You can create specific mobile lead generation forms with a simpler ‘call to action’ than what you might have on a desktop.
Streamline your consumer’s digital journey by creating a clutter-free conversion system, this can be achieved by one-click options such as ‘Buy Now’.
5. Content Remarketing
If you want to keep your website visitors engaged and drive them towards a sale rather than just reading your content and leaving, it’s important that you take advantage of content driven personalisation.
This is one of the fantastic website content trends which will encourage your returning site users to revisit and continue what they were doing when they last left your website. This allows you to really personalise their experience on your website and encourages continued exposure with the potential for a sale.
You may find it useful to team up with a personalisation technology partner for your content driven personalisation, particularly if you don’t have the in-house expertise.
You can look into advanced advertising with Facebook Ads and Google Ads, use AI-based writing tools to factor data into your content creation process, create email campaigns based on past engagement data such as page visited, link clicked, etc.
All of this will prove to be effective for your business if managed correctly.
6. Multi-Channel Marketing
As a business, you need to keep up with consumers rapidly adapting to all kinds of new technology as well as becoming quickly accustomed to new channels.
Adapting your content so it’s personalised for each platform is a great way to stay engaged with your consumers; it’s likely that you’ll have slightly different demographics across each platform so you must cater for this.
By using a variety of channels, you’ll be reaching a much wider range of potential consumers, in addition to increasing your brand awareness and exploring different campaigns across different channels, giving your business exposure in more areas.
7. Consumer-Led Content
The customer should always come first, they’re who you make your product or service for, thus consumer-led content will help you to win with your consumers and improve your exposure with search engines.
This is one of the Google trends for content marketing, the more your content answers the user’s specific needs, the higher your ranking will be with Google.
To help you create this fantastic consumer-led content, you of course must understand what your consumer is looking for, what do they need?
Conduct research by engaging with your community, once you know who they are and what they need, you can design content which is specifically targeted towards them; put your audience first.
These are all important content trends you need to know to ensure you’re running a successful business throughout 2021 and for the foreseeable future.
Posted on Friday, April 16th, 2021 in Digital Marketing.
