Awesome Content Marketing Trends Dominating The Digital Marketing World In 2021

“Content is king.”

This has, is, and will most probably be forever true in the digital marketing world. Businesses and organizations that have invested in their content have reported to be reaping high returns on investment in recent years. However, to ensure growth, marketers need to be in tune with the ever-changing content marketing landscape.

Remember, what worked a few years ago may not be as effective in 2021 and the coming years. This is why it’s important that you keep yourself updated with the trends and changes based on technology trends, which can help you adjust your strategy and get a leg up on the competition. With over 24 million e-commerce sites, you need to work harder and smarter to get noticed.

What are the most popular content marketing trends in 2021?

Just like everything else in the digital marketing world, content marketing will continue to evolve and stay on top of the trends, technological advancements, and consumer demands. Change is inevitable. This is why it’s important to adapt to change to stay afloat in the ever-evolving digital marketing arena

1. A community built on trust and loyalty

In a sea of content, you will need to work smarter to continue to reach a wider audience and remain significant online. One of the most effective ways to do that is to build a community. While this marketing technique doesn’t guarantee a quick sale, you get to reach more people by engaging customers and prospects to build trust and loyalty.

Aside from keeping on top of your social media presence and blog posts, you should start building a community with your followers and current customer base. You can start by sending out monthly newsletters and ensuring that your subscribers are at the heart of your business. Aside from that, you can also offer networking opportunities, webinars, community downloads, and discounted eBooks and tools.

2. Dynamic and personalized content

Today’s consumers want a highly personalized user experience, which means that generalized content or information is almost always rejected.

When the pandemic broke out last year, people had more time in their hands, allowing them to scrutinize everything that’s served to them, including online content. A B2B report made last year revealed that customers appreciate brands that prioritize their needs. People prefer relevant, trustworthy, and educational messages that help them throughout the buyer journey, especially when it comes to making buying decisions.

Through personalized content, you’ll be able to recommend products and messages that are relevant to your customers. You can also guide customers where they want to go by presenting them with the next best calls to action. This will allow you to align your customers’ interests with your desired action to ensure you’re taking into account the value of your business.

A majority of marketers agree that personalized content has a powerful impact on their businesses. Additionally, 85% of respondents from a 2019 survey revealed that consumers now expect a personalized marketing experience. This means that you’ll be missing out on a lot of opportunities if you don’t keep up with this trend.

3. Long-tail keywords in long-form content

A lot of marketing professionals are careful with using long-form content as online users don’t want to spend a lot of time on a page and read boring useless articles. You don’t want your content to be labeled “TL; DR” or Too Long; Didn’t Read. What you need to ensure when creating long-form content is to ensure that it will keep readers engaged and entertained from start to finish. How to do this? For one, you should make the content cover in-detail topics that will make readers not want to stop reading.

Now more than ever, you should give your content creation more thought. Long-form content is an excellent way to cover broad and trending topics. One way to generate more ROI with your content strategy is to use long-tail keywords that are easier to rank higher on Google. This is because they are more specific and have less competition. As a result, you can get more organic traffic, which is good news for you if you want to improve your ranking in a competitive niche.

You can use Ubersuggest, Semrush, Wordtracker, or Moz.com to find the best long-tail keywords for your business.

4. Videos to effectively and efficiently communicate

Incorporating videos into your content makes it more interesting, more compelling. Research says that adding videos to your content makes it 50x more likely to generate more organic traffic. Because most users find videos more informative and enticing, pages that contain videos rank higher in search engines.

Aside from that, integrating videos from your YouTube channel will keep people longer on your website. You’ll also be able to earn more revenues since videos can show numerous ads. It’s definitely a big win for your business since you’ll be able to connect with more customers, foster trust, and earn cash from the ads.

5. Repurposed content across different channels

Over time, your site’s old content can get stale and lose some of its SEO value. This doesn’t mean that you should keep publishing new blog articles until you’ve built enough cache. According to Semrush, “Repurposing content is a way to use your previous blogs and revitalize them so they work harder for your SEO.”

How to do that?

A blog post is written for a specific intent and audience. To repurpose such content, you can revise the post to add more value to it. This means that you should change the content to reach a different segment, reinforce the message, or keep up-to-date with the trends. Repurposing can be altering the whole intent of the article, changing it into another type of content, or other similar methods. Transforming an old blog post into an eBook is one way of repurposing old content. Doing so will allow you to reach more people, which your old content couldn’t do. This will also save you a lot of time and money since you don’t need to create a blog from scratch.

To know which content you should repurpose, first, you need to determine the purpose. You should repurpose some of your content if you want to bring in more qualified leads now instead of getting more subscribers in the past. You should also avoid repurposing a blog that’s completely outdated or has become irrelevant. Choose evergreen content that allows you to expound on the topic and make it current so you can post it across your social media profiles.

6. The “Discover” feature

Google’s “Discover” feature, also known as Google Feed, is an intelligent feature that combines relevant content and news with photos and other visuals. Google uses Artificial Intelligence to understand users’ search history, allowing the search engine to offer content that users are more likely to engage with.

Discover is found on Google mobile pages and in mobile Chrome tabs. Over time, this special feature has become more sophisticated. Only indexed content that meets Google’s guidelines can appear on Discover. These include: 1) unique and timely content, 2)  outstanding and engaging content, 3) authorship details, 4) high-quality images, and 5) descriptive titles that are not clickbait.

7. The “Stories” feature

Instagram and Facebook Stories are becoming increasingly popular as an effective marketing strategy. For one, they make for fantastic social media content that allows businesses to reach a wider audience. Similarly, there is the Web Stories on Google feature, which is a web-based version of the Stories format that combines audio, video, images, animation, and text to create compelling content that can be seen by more people.

Posting great content will help your business open new opportunities to connect with new followers or customers and establish trust and lasting relationships with them. With at least 500 million people logging in to social media platforms on a daily basis, it’s only wise that you take advantage of the Stories feature to increase engagement and revenues.

8. User-generated content to create an adaptable content strategy

To get the most engagement and conversions, you need to experiment with different types of content. This is where you will need user-generated content or UGC.

UGC is not a new trend but still works well for growing businesses. It can help you make your content more fun and engaging, as well as show products in an authentic way and reward customers for their loyalty. User-generated content is not only popular in social media, but is also quite useful in advertisements and web copies, including shopping carts.

Experts even suggest for companies to include more of their customers’ stories in their content marketing campaigns to better align their content with their audience. According to content marketing specialists, UGC is more compatible with today’s setup where a majority of consumers are working from home. Customer unboxings, podcast interviews, and the like are great user-generated content that can add a personal touch to your content. And since businesses and consumers have become more reliant on content to make informed decisions, it’s only wise for you to focus on creating content that is interesting, positive, relevant, appealing, and personalized to your target audience.

9. Influencer marketing

There are millions of influencers around the world, which proves that these people are quite effective in promoting brands. Moreover, it is proof that a majority of buyers trust an influencer’s recommendation over a brand.

Nowadays, brands go for quality over quantity. They have shifted from getting as many endorsements as possible to focusing on an influencer’s quality and trustworthiness. To improve your influencer marketing strategy, first, you need to plan your campaign well. This should include choosing the influencers to promote your brand carefully. Run a campaign to attract the right influencers and build relationships with them.

10. AI-powered content

AI-powered content is the biggest game-changer yet in the digital marketing world. Google is using AI to ensure better matches to search engine queries using its RankBrain algorithm. Similarly, API GPT-3 and Contentyze take data and create summaries and even full blog posts. All of these have allowed marketers to accomplish more when it comes to content creation.

Jumping on these content marketing trends

When planning your content marketing strategy for next year, make sure to keep these content marketing trends in mind. Focus on providing high-quality, relevant, engaging, and personalized content that most consumers expect from the brands they use nowadays.