Content marketing comprises of four things - Strategy, Research, Create and Publish. Content marketing improves the ability to engage with your buyer personas, convert more leads, boost brand awareness, and connect with your audience.
Content marketing can be done in many ways but the key is to identify which content marketing strategy is most effective for your business to achieve marketing goals.
Here are some tactics I recommend you should focus on in 2020. While the content marketing trends come and go, but you will see consistent ROI from creating clustered content to build topic authority, striking an editorial balance between search-focused and thought leadership content, and aligning the content with the problems your business solves.
Let's dive deeper into each of these content marketing trends for 2020.
Content Trend #1: Create clustered content to Build Topic Authority
Topic Clusters are groups of related web pages that all link to one main pillar page. Organising the content into clusters helps search engines distinguish the area of expertise and better understand the relationship between these pages. Creating a topic cluster requires three main components:
1. A pillar page - It is the core of the cluster and serves as the authority page for the core topic you aim to rank for.
2. Cluster content or subtopics - These pages focus on longer-tail queries that relate to the core topic in the form of blog posts.
3. Hyperlinks - While creating topic clusters ensure that each cluster touches on all of the ways people are searching for that topic. By implementing a topic cluster strategy you will see 7 to10 times organic growth in a year.
"2020 will be all about building Topic Authority"
Source: Searchenginejournal
Content Trend #2: Multimedia Content
Multimedia content like videos, images, infographics, and audio improves the chances of ranking. Perform a simple search for your target keyword to determine which media format will give you the best chance to rank for that particular topic.
Content Trend #3: Start Thinking Beyond Search and Rankings
You have to keep experimenting with the content to engage your audience. Think about creating content that others are not. Start with an interesting conversation with your audience through social media. This is how you will successfully build a dedicated audience.
Content Trend #4: Continued Rise of Video
Users prefer videos over all other forms of content when learning about new products and services. In a survey, it was found that more than 50% of customers prefer online video while buying anything as it helps them decide which specific brand or product they should buy.
Try making a video part of your content marketing in 2020.
Content Trend #5: Optimize content for Voice Search
Now people are searching online using their voice, instead of typing a query. The text anyone type into Google search is different than how we would speak to a digital assistant. Because of this, you need to optimize your content for voice search.
Content Trend #6: AR-powered visuals
Users love augmented reality (AR) filters and lenses and there a lot of AR filters and lenses users can play around with to create fun visual content. You can create your own branded filters and lenses to promote the business to social media users.
Content Trend #7: Podcasts
According to the report by Statista, the number of podcast listeners has nearly tripled in the last decade and this number will continue to grow as time goes on. Podcast listeners are highly likely to complete episodes of their favourite shows and there are chances of engaging further with the brand in question afterwards. If there is a lot of demand for audio content in your industry then you need to make it happen.
Content Trend #8: No More Random Acts of Content
In 2020, STOP random acts of content that never work. Create less, but effective content that attracts the users. Give your audience a chance to find your content in their preferred channel and format and deliver it to them in a steady over a period of time.
Content Trend #9: The Battle for the Snippet
Snippets provide a brief rundown of the key points within a piece of content. People are now searching for a longtail keyword as they know that Google will likely represent a snippet that will give them the information they need without having to click over to a full website.
Create a solution-focused, long-form content that gives the crystal clear answers to your audience's questions.
Content Trend #10: Customer Journey mapping
Customer journey mapping is a graph portraying your customer's experiences with your organisation across major and minor touchpoints. It helps in understanding the flow of experiences a customer has with an organisation.
According to a study by Altimeter, 73% of B2B companies say they mapped digital customer journeys, compared to 55% by B2C and 56% by B2G companies.
Source: LinkedIn
Here are some things you can implement in your content:
1. Try publishing surveys, research reports, or focus group results.
2. Think about creative ideas to share the latest industry trends that matter to your audience.
3. Focus on building backlinks to boost authority.
4. Identify poor-performing posts and share them via other distribution channels to see if they are more successful among audiences there.
5. Keep your blog content fresh by updating all topics, search intent, and statistics that aren't relevant anymore.
In 2020, your content should be a lot more than just read or watch. AI is a must in content marketing. One of the most popular ways to use AI is through chatbots on the website. Chatbots life found that 85 percent of consumer interactions will likely be handled without human agents by 2020. So make sure that you get on board with chatbots.
Are you familiar with any of these content marketing trends you can expect in 2020? Contact Appiness Interactive, Digital Marketing Firm in Bangalore, and let us know which one you are already using, and which ones you're most excited to try!