Why is content marketing chosen as the most important advertising tool by almost all well-known global brands today? The answer is simple: modern Internet users are fed up with advertising texts that immediately encourage them to buy, so that they simply ignore them.
Buyers today want to incrementally make purchases or commission services because they know they trust the company.
In addition, content marketing has a high return on investment, provides the basis for running all marketing campaigns, increases brand awareness and improves reputation. It increases conversion, helps engage with potential customers, and helps, which is important, to set any business apart from the competition.
What type of content should the brand produce?
Let’s start with the basics: What content should definitely be on your website?
Short format content
These are large, meaningful sentences or texts that can become a highlight of the advertisement and decorate your content marketing.
This includes slogans designed to be remembered by the customer (the famous “Just do it” is a wonderful example of content marketing), microposts on Twitter or Instagram, digests, and checklists and lists.
Content in long format
Even though the internet is now trending towards short texts, long articles are a must. Great articles give relevant information with a touch of uniqueness and help solve potential customers’ problems. In addition, according to search engines, they have a positive effect on the reputation of a website.
This category includes expert interviews, opinion sharing, storytelling, case studies with analysis and numbers, success stories, research, life hacks and more.
Interactive Content
Interactive content is of great value: it brings the customer into interaction with the brand and helps to get unique information about the leads. They give rise to further communication, inform the public about the company and its product.
These are all kinds of polls, games, widgets and FAQs.
visual content
It’s easy – post branded photos, event images, illustrations to enhance the text and fill it with vivid meanings, infographics, funny GIFs, memes, posters, and postcards.
By the way, ignoring trending formats like podcasts and videos is one of the biggest mistakes to avoid. Without them, web resources are like Clodhoppers that confuse the customers.
user content
A very special category is the category of posts created by customers themselves. You can warm up users by actively responding to comments, encouraging likes, reposts, questions, and new topics.
How to develop a content marketing strategy
1. Decide on a goal
Content should not be created on its own and just for show. It’s important to understand exactly why your project needs the information you’re about to publish. Otherwise there are a lot of texts and videos, but you don’t get a useful effect.
If you want to increase and diversify your traffic, post more useful SEO-optimized content on your own website and third-party resources. If you want to establish yourself as an expert, publish case studies with the results of your work, research and experiments, interviews, instructions, guides and reviews.
2. Make a portrait of the target group
Content is not created for everyone. It is a tool that should be aimed at the target audience. The more accurately the portrait of the target group is presented, the more correctly you can communicate with them, influence people’s decisions and motivate them to take the actions you want.
3. Analyze your competitors
You should know who is the best in your market and strive to repeat that success. Research what types of content your competitors are using, where you can find information about them and their products, and how they interact with their audience. In other words: innovate best practices.
4. Define your content distribution channels
You can post content to both internal and external channels. We recommend that you work with content in parallel and use different types of distribution channels to achieve your content goals. At a given development stage, focus on the option that works best.
Which content marketing trends should follow in 2021?
1. Work together to promote content
Throughout 2020, brands, bloggers and influencers have come together to co-create and promote content. In 2021, collaborative content promotion remains in effect. First of all, it is an opportunity to exchange audiences and advertise on different social platforms, creating the word of mouth effect.
2. Produce more video content
Video remains the most effective form of content thanks to the rise of streaming platforms and of course the pandemic.
Consumers love with their eyes, so short entertainment and informational videos are in vogue. Also, more and more brands are starting to attract audiences through challenges and videos in the format of user-generated content. Videos can be in the form of reviews or recommendations on how to use the product and adapt to the UGC.
Augmented reality is another trend in video content that is increasing audience loyalty.
Don’t ignore live streaming as normal offline events are gone from the game. In 2020, such content became much more important than before. And this trend will continue in 2021.
3. Improve the quality of the content
People prefer to stay on pages that have a practical and engaging structure and content. To increase ROI, you need to focus on user experience. For example, if the target audience uses your resource more often from a mobile phone, immediately adapt all content for mobile formats. Pay attention to the usability of the video content – remember that not everyone is always comfortable watching with sound. To improve the experience, you need to insert the following text using a subtitle editor.
Also pay attention to the versatility of video formats, so that any person with any computer and browser can watch them. For example, if your PC supports MKV format, you can use MKV video editor to edit it, but in the end, it’s better to convert the footage to popular MP4 format.
4. Produce and test content with artificial intelligence
In addition to being a great content generator, AI can examine consumer behavior and search patterns, as well as run social media data and blog content analysis to understand how customers are finding your products and services.
5. Double SEO Spending
Some trends never go out of style. In terms of content, this trend is SEO. A solid SEO strategy and keyword research will be even more crucial to a successful content strategy in 2021.
last words
Now it’s time to create a content marketing plan for the next year and test different new trends. Don’t ignore them and remember that digital content marketing is a long game and its success does not come overnight. The longer you practice, the more benefits you will see. So try all possible strategies and find your own Klondike. Much luck!
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