Emerging Content Marketing Trends

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Content marketing is one of the most popular and ever-evolving strategies. 93% of B2B marketers add this strategy to their all-inclusive marketing plan.
With this, marketers who employ content marketing gain 6x more conversions than those who don’t.
Importance: With that said, content marketing is critical to your SEO and online success. It is especially when consumers find ads and outbound promotions intrusive and deceitful.
Indeed, over 41% of U.S. consumers employ a certain kind of ad-blocker.
By now, we are convinced that content marketing is flourishing and it yields results.
Evolution: However, we must bear in mind that content marketing is evolving every day.
The trends that worked a month back might fail to produce the same results today. Or the trends that work today might fade away a year from now.
For instance, a generic 500-word length article could bring us traffic 2-3 years back. However, today the recommended length of an article is above 2450 words.
So, let’s banish the uncertainty with the top content marketing trends for 2022 and beyond.

Let’s get the ball rolling!

What is Content Marketing?

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Content marketing refers to the process of content creation and distribution, which is centered on a goal to attract, engage, and convert a specific target audience. This content can be in the shape of blogs, e-books, videos, social media posts, etc.
Content marketing efforts attract a specifically defined audience with valuable information.
Unlike ads that pitch a brand’s offering, it answers a user’s query and solves his issue.
70% of consumers trust an article over an ad when learning about a product.

List of Content Marketing Trends

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Trend #1: Reprocess and Promote Content across the Leading Channels

Over 60% of content marketers repurpose & reuse their content 2 to 5 times. Reprocessing content and presenting it in a different form allows you to expand its reach.
This trend can decrease your efforts in producing a new content piece every time. Moreover, you can attract a new audience and do an A/B test to analyze what works the best.
You can repackage your content in many ways, for example:

• Turning your blog content into crisp and engaging infographics. You can share these in your community and on social media
• Converting YouTube videos and sharing as podcasts or blogs
• Adding more insights to your exclusive blogs and turning them into e-books
• Blending two or three relevant blog topics to form an expert YouTube video

More & more SMBs must start using this trend in 2022 and beyond. It will help businesses with small marketing teams to draw good returns from their efforts.

Trend #2: Assemble Content Communities to Lead Confidently

Today, we are witnessing a significant upsurge in the search traffic owing to the pandemic. It has also sparked off business competition online.
Businesses are investing in their content marketing efforts aggressively. And it is challenging now more than ever to get a substantial reach for your content.
The surest way to get the right reach and engagement is through community building.
According to the latest content community trends: Marketers must build specific communities for content engagement and distribution.
Who Is Using it? Many brands like Moz and ProBlogger have been using it for many years now. Active content communities allow businesses to distribute their content material faster. Moreover, communities have a far better reach than individual marketing efforts.
Your audience is most likely to love an inclusive community feels. Masooma Memon, a SaaS content marketer, says, “Folks love this sense of community belonging. It makes them feel valued, so this trend should continue picking up pace.”
A valuable trend that has been doing the rounds is a collaboration with popular contributors.
Collaborate With Influencers: Many brands join forces with influencers and popular bloggers to promote their content.
However, a more beneficial approach is to add these contributors to your community.
They have a significant influence and massive following on blogs or social platforms. And they can give a great boost to your community and content. Thus, allowing you to multiply your brand’s reach up to many folds.

Trend #3: Define Expertise in a Niche Theme and Attract a Specific Audience

For almost the last five years, we have been focusing on churning long-form content. Long-form content like detailed guides, hub articles, and e-books are indeed working for us.
However, one of the most recent shifts is towards niche-specific blogs. These include blogs that focus on a specific audience with the use of long-tail keywords.
Since the search traffic is increasing and more users are using specific search queries, niche-specific blogs gain substantial grounds.
Use of Long-tail Keywords: Marketers are aware of the fact that detailed blogs help them rank better on SERPs. But, now, they can attract a more relevant audience to their blogs with long-tail keywords.
Moreover, long-tail keywords are less competitive than high-volume keywords. Thus, helping your blogs get ranked faster and with lesser efforts.
Using Niche-specific blogs: Niche-specific blogs attract an audience that is looking for specific information. And therefore, the traffic on these blogs exudes a higher conversion rate.
You can easily discover long-tail keywords by using tools like SEMRush, UberSuggest, LSIGraph, etc.
You can also find long-tail keywords via Google Suggest, Google’s related search, etc.

Trend #4: Practice Personalization that is Nothing Short of Delivering Results

It’s 2022, and if you are still churning generic content and pushing it to a huge audience, think again. It may only work if your content topic is widely prevalent or timed correctly.
However, personalized content has started gaining crucial importance. In point of fact, 78% of consumers trust businesses that offer customized content.
Personalize: Over the years, marketers have been analyzing an overwhelming amount of data. And now, there are tools to employ personalization based on this data. Thus, making content personalization more feasible and accurate.
Use of Dynamic Content: As the trend rises, we are most likely to witness more use of dynamic content by marketers. It will help the audience enjoy a personalized experience and deliver higher conversions.
Many AI and machine learning tools are supporting marketers to offer personalized content. And YouTube’s Director Mix helps brands personalize videos for oodles of audience segments.

Trend #5: Employ Webinars and Live Videos

We are witnessing a relentless surge in video consumption rate in the present times. An estimate says that videos will constitute 82% of the total consumer internet traffic in 2021.
Most Preferred Medium: Videos are already the most preferred form of media. 4x times more consumers would prefer a video over an article to learn about a product.
Moreover, brands have started capitalizing on the increasing popularity of live videos.

• Search Engine Journal reported that Facebook Live videos earned 178% higher engagement than regular videos.
• Facebook Live videos earn 3x longer watch time than pre-recorded videos.

Create Brand-specific Videos: Brand-specific live videos and regular videos will gain prominence this year. And they will not just entertain the netizens but will help brands expand their reach.
As per Curata, testimonials and tutorials are the most worthwhile categories for brands. Brands can use these categories to the most out of their video posts.
Webinars Are On the Rise: Moreover, since offline seminars have rolled out of play, the trend for webinars is rising. Thoughtful webinars on demonstrations and expert advice categories are gaining traction.
Marketers can generate huge traction through well-planned webinars. Moreover, consumers are willing to pay for exclusive seminars more readily.

Trend #6: Touch Base with the Featured Experts

85% of consumers switch to expert content regularly or occasionally to learn about a product.
With that said, you must include comments or quote experts in your content. Many marketers connect with subject experts to add their insights into the content.
Authentic content adorned by subject experts or featured experts receives great traction.
And this type of content exudes positive user metrics along with a high conversion rate.
The expert content trend isn’t new but has stepped up a bit in 2022 and is most likely to multiply. It reflects a positive impact on the E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) score.

Trend #7: Start Producing Ultra-localized Content

As content personalization gains significant grounds, localized content becomes crucial.
Users are searching for relevant results, and Google wants to live up to their expectations.
Therefore, unless you localize your content, you are not likely to rank for local queries.
Some important statistics report:

• 86% of campaigns in localized languages outshined campaigns in English. It is both in terms of engagement and conversions.
• 40% of consumers only prefer to buy from sites that are in their native language.
• 49% of Marketers report that geo-targeted ads lead with the highest ROI.

Moreover, the trend is moving in the direction of the axiom - “buy local.” And therefore, brands must start producing localized content. It will help them get the right reach, engagement, and conversions in 2022 and beyond.

Trend #8: Exercise Content Diversity Prudently

We are not heading away from text form content; however, we are welcoming diversity.
Businesses are no longer churning an overwhelming amount of text content. But, they are touching base with the audience over different media channels with diverse content.
Some content formats that have shown excellent growth in the past few months are:

• Live videos and pre-produced videos
• Infographics and image feeds
• Webinars and podcasts
• Press release and forum content

With that said, you can’t limit your content marketing team to a bunch of writers and SEO. Instead, you need to expand it to hire professions with diverse skillsets.
You need experts in video production, graphic design, audio editing, banding management, and strategy development.
You need to establish a buzz for your brand and offering through your content. And therefore, content diversity will play a crucial role in 2022.

Importance of Content Marketing for SEO

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1. It Paves Your Path to the Top of SERPs Organically

Content defines the bedrock of SEO, and content marketing plays a pivotal role in its success.
Content marketing helps you produce and distribute content to attract a defined audience. It is a way of reaching the users by offering answers to their queries.
When a user adds a search query on Google, it looks for the best answers to the query in its indexed data. So, content marketing helps you get indexed into the search engine’s repository.
Further, it allows marketers to target the key search terms (keywords) in the content. And these keywords, along with the context, defines the content’s relevancy for a search query.
So, content marketing allows you to organically rank for search queries. It also means the superior your content marketing efforts are, the higher is your ranking.
You can maximize your content marketing returns by:

• Producing quality content that is relevant and valuable to the target audience
• Getting the right reach for your content
• Producing content that delivers a high conversion rate and positive user metrics
• Creating content that is shared readily and earns high-quality backlinks and authority

2. Content Marketing is Crucial for Growing Your Online Visibility

A major objective of content marketing is to grow the reach of your content.
Some of the most common off-page content marketing efforts are:

• Guest post submissions on relevant websites
• Collaborations with media sites and publishing press releases
• Submitting answers on Quora, Reddit, and other forums
• Contributing to a content community
• Business listing and social media posting

By practicing the above steps, you increase the visibility of your content across the web.
These efforts also help you grow the no. of backlinks to your site and your site authority.
Moreover, as your content is shared across the web readily, you gain higher traffic. This eventually increases your conversions and has a positive impact on your rankings.

3. It Helps You Increase Site Traffic & Conversions

As aforementioned, content marketing helps you rank on the SERPs. And it enables you to increase the visibility of your content online.
Both these factors help you draw increased traffic to your site. And when you attract relevant traffic, you can expect an increase in conversions.
Content marketing is 62% more economical than traditional marketing. And it offers 3x more leads than the latter.
Some content marketing factors you must zero in on include:

• Keep updated with the newest content marketing trends that apply to you
• Focus on growing the relevancy of your content by using long-tail keywords
• Work on content personalization and localization
• Grow your content’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) factor
• Produce diverse content and repurpose your content

These factors will help you increase your conversions or returns from your content.

Top Content Marketing Tools

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1. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is capable of redefining your overall content marketing strategy. The tool offers you various types of insights like:

• You can examine the trending content topics related to your business.
• You can research the influencers that are relevant to your industry. You can also check their recently shared content and plan an influencer outreach.
• You can set alerts to stay notified whenever someone mentions a particular keyword.
• You can also stay updated whenever your competitors add any new content piece.
• You can check your competitor’s content performance as well.

These insights will enable you to create a far-reaching content marketing strategy.

Pricing

• You can try your hands on the tool with a 30-day free trial.
• Its Pro package starts @ $99/month

2. SEMRush

It is a far-reaching tool that equips you with myriad features to plan your content strategy.
Some capabilities that SEMRush offers:

• You can easily navigate through the tool using its left-hand navigation.
• The tool allows you to examine the trending topics regarding your main keywords
• SEMRush offers end-to-end competitor analysis features
• You can assess competitor’s link profile and evaluate the link-building opportunities
• You can also do detailed keyword research for your business
• The tool enables you to generate SEO and content performance reports

Pricing

• SEMRush offers a 7-day free trial.
• The Pro package of the tool starts at $99.95/month.

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is yet another tool that offers you oodles of resources for content marketing. And many of the tools offered by HubSpot are free to access.
Some HubSpot tools that can help you with content marketing are:

• Tools to build forms
• Tools to build popups
• Blog Ideas Generator tool
• Make My Persona tool to build buyer personas
• HubSpot Tools for Infographics Template Development
• HubSpot Email Template Development Tool

These resources will help you with diverse content generation and increasing engagement.
The free resources will help small businesses reduce their dependency on freelancers.

4. Buffer

Social media engagement is establishing new peaks every month. And it has become one of the most constructive content marketing platforms.
In fact, 87% of marketers distribute and promote content on social media. It is by far the most far-reaching content marketing channel.
And Buffer allows marketers to increase the efficacy of social media posting. The tool is widely used by thousands of brands and offers several capabilities like:

• Distribute your content on popular social media platforms simultaneously in one go.
• Schedule posts on various social media platforms through a single dashboard.
• Get a look at the analytics and performance report of your content on various channels
• Engage with your audience directly through the tool’s dashboard.

Pricing

• The tool offers up to 10 post scheduling credits for 3 platforms at a $0 charge.
• Then you can upgrade its capabilities for up to 100 posts for 8 platforms at $15/month.
• You can further extend the capabilities for higher packages up to $99/month.

Content Marketing & SEO FAQs

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Q1. Which Content Marketing Trends are Most Likely to Dominate in 2022?

Some content marketing trends that you must take on board in 2022 are:

• Content communities will help you grow the reach of your content
• Live Videos and Webinars will help businesses gain good engagement and conversions
• Niche-specific blogs will gain good traffic for businesses
• Ultra-personalized content will become all the more crucial
• Users are more likely to trust expert content
• Brands leading with diverse content marketing teams are most likely to benefit
• Story videos and Google Discover will gain considerable engagement

Q2. What are Some Surest Tips to Lead with Content Marketing in 2022?

Content marketing domain is ever-evolving, and there are frequent changes in the trends. However, you must hold on to the best content creation practices.
With this, here are some tips to be mindful of in 2022:

• Repurpose your content to draw maximum profits from it
• Start adding popular contributors to your content communities
• Collaborate with niche experts and request them to contribute to your content
• Create a diverse form of content and promote over multiple channels
• Start creating ultra-localized content that draws better conversions

Q3. Which Content Marketing Tools I Must Use for My Business?

There are dozens of content marketing tools with their different capabilities and features.
However, some of the most definite ones that you should add to your toolkit are:

• SEMRush: Competitor analysis, tracking link-building opportunities, content topic analysis
• HubSpot: Various free content creation resources and marketing automation tools
• Google Analytics: Free tool for content performance analysis, user metrics analysis, etc.
• BuzzSumo: Finding trending content topics, valuable influencers, and creating content alerts.
• Google Search Console: Site audit, analyzing the link profile, and examining crucial search terms.

Summing Up

We are sailing amidst the high tides in the digital world. And there are relentless changes in the content marketing field.
The surest way to capitalize from our efforts is by adopting the latest trends in the field. And therefore, the trends listed above will help you with the same.