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• 7 Trends To Watch Out for in Content Marketing
• Content Marketing Practices for Increased Efficiency
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The Best Practices for Internet Marketing in 2021 and Beyond

Every business out there seeks to have content that generates leads and drives traffic to build their audience. It is, therefore, a great idea to make your users feel special by curating an effective internet marketing strategy that gives them exclusive access to information or content.

Internet marketing is a somewhat new type of marketing that gives customers free media-type content in exchange for their attention. While traditional marketing disrupts the customers to get their attention, content marketing provides the customers with the content they want. In exchange, they grant the website permission to advertise and market their product or service.

Content marketing essentially makes people interested in what the content provides instead of interrupting what they like as a commercial advertisement would. Content marketing is evolving and becoming a clear top choice for marketing styles. Consider the following statistics:

• Content marketing costs 60% less than outbound tactics and generates thrice as many leads.
• More than 40% of Americans use ad blockers. Since the content isn’t an ad, content marketing is an effective way of reaching your audience.
• 70% of consumers would rather learn about a product from an article instead of an ad.
• 72% of consumers prefer watching videos about new products instead of reading about them from an article.

Although content marketing works exceedingly well, it is constantly changing, as with everything digital. Strategies and tactics that might have worked the previous year might not necessarily do the trick and deliver robust results today.

Companies, therefore, have to stay on top of emerging trends. They have to pay attention to what the competition is doing that is working and where people spend most of their time online. So what are the emerging trends in content marketing in 2021, and how do you leverage content marketing to your company’s advantage?

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing refers to a strategy that centrally focuses on providing your target audience with high-quality content relevant to their needs or interests and building a solid relationship in the process. Your business needs to capture your audiences’ attention and maintain it to convert leads into sales.

Producing valuable content is a great way to capture your audience’s attention in the digital world with the goal of driving customer action.

7 Trends To Watch Out for in Content Marketing

1. Building Communities

There are many eCommerce stores out there, so the priority is to have your company get noticed. The best way to achieve that is to develop a community. Community marketing is more about engaging with your consumers to build brand trust and loyalty while reaching a wider audience and less about getting quicker sales, making this strategy like an investment in future sales.

Building communities allows businesses to reach a wider audience with fewer resources. Most experts believe that high output demands and limited resources will be the major push for this trend in 2021. Communities give people a chance to come together and collaborate while learning about new things.

It also gives you the chance to offer networking opportunities, community downloads, discounted items, and webinars. The kind of inclusion that community marketing provides fosters a sense of community with and among the audience and allows businesses to expand their reach, which is excellent for metrics and brand awareness. People love being part of something and feeling valued. Therefore, industry experts predict that this trend will continue picking up pace.

2. Streaming Video Content

Many companies have switched from in-person conferences and meetings to video streaming. Many brands have hosted their events online or had online discussions while live streaming events within the past year.

Streaming videos has become a great way to generate leads and engage audiences. It has also become easier to execute. Consumers nowadays like consuming information and knowledge quickly, and what better way to do so than with video marketing?

People don’t want to go through a long slideshow presentation and instead prefer to ask questions and interact with experts on various platforms in real-time via a livestream. The chance to be a part of a small group of people asking questions personally is highly appealing.

3. Long-Tail Keywords

In the past, marketers focused on long-form content. However, recently marketers have stepped back from lengthy and detailed article guides and have started focusing more on niche long-tail keywords. The switch in focus came about since long-tail keywords are specific and tend to have less competition while bringing consumers to exactly what they’re looking for.

Additionally, using long-tail keywords on your site makes it easier for Google to rank your content. This ultimately translates to more organic traffic to your website, which is excellent news for content marketers pursuing a competitive niche.

4. Repurposing Content

Repurposing content has lots of benefits, including saving you the time needed to create new content, allowing you to interact with a different audience, and enhancing your organic search. There are various ways to repackage content into other formats, including turning blog posts into newsletter content, embedding videos in your blog, and transcribing videos to distribute them in your newsletters.

Repackaging content allows you to use your best-performing content for newer uses while reaching a wider audience with fewer resources.

5. Personalized Content

Consumers nowadays love highly personalized content and user experiences. They almost immediately lose interest and reject any generalized information that doesn’t add value to them. Keep in mind that competition is getting more challenging by the day, so generating sales from your content might not be easy.

Most consumers may come to your website to find answers, and once they do, they’ll leave to complete their tasks. This is where personalized, dynamic content comes in. Personalizing content is all about motivating your returning users to continue with whatever they were initially doing before leaving your website.

Say, for example, a user read about half of an article on how to grow apples. You can offer them a free apple-growing guide or checklist on your site via an email, if they’ve subscribed to your mailing list. You can take advantage of eCommerce solutions that will allow you to create content-driven personalized experiences to engage your users further.

Below are some content personalization techniques you can adopt to help you personalize your content for your returning users:

• Set up marketing automation campaigns based on how users engage with your content.
• Take advantage of Google and Facebook advertising.
• Make on-demand content channels that provide the user with automatic content when requested using intelligent self-learning chatbots.

6. Data-driven Content Marketing

Audiences today like consuming content that’s backed up by facts. Content nowadays incorporates a blend of data and creativity. If you’re thinking of going this way, then you have to keep two things in mind. The first is how the data will help you determine how much of your content connects with your target audience and the second is how these metrics can drive your content creation process.

You have to keep track of the engagement rates, conversions, and traffic to your website. Data-driven content marketing has resulted in the development of tools that provide great value when it comes to campaign tracking, insights, and automation of content production.

7. Less Focus on SEO

Previously businesses believed that using many keywords on their website led to high search rankings and engagement. While SEO today hasn’t entirely gone out of style, many brands are focusing less on jamming their websites with keywords and instead on using high-quality keywords.

As we advance, businesses will spend a considerable amount of time creating an airtight SEO strategy and researching keywords to optimize their content. Here is how you can go about the SEO tactics:

• Create a list of keywords that are relevant to and prevalent in your industry.
• Look up the keywords you’ve written using a keyword research tool and find out what keywords are popular with your audience.
• Research which keywords create more engagement for your competitors.
• Use the information you’ve learned when creating your content.

Content Marketing Practices for Increased Efficiency

There is no doubt about content marketing’s effectiveness on lead generation and traffic conversion. Every company wants content that provides them with engagement. To cut back on costs, you need a plan in place that will be the most efficient when it comes to delivering results for content marketing. If you’re wondering how you can take advantage of content marketing for increased efficiency, here are 11 ways to go about it:

1. Give Your Customers the Content They Want

A lot of businesses and brands make the mistake of centering their blogs around their companies. Although this might prove helpful on some fronts, it’s a problem if you’re looking to convert leads into sales. Consumers usually care about what your blog can do for them. An excellent way to approach this scenario is by giving them valuable information that they want, and in exchange, they give you their attention.

The content you put out can be entertaining or educational, depending on what your products and services are and the needs of your audience. Ensure that your blog provides the consumer with what they want in exchange for their valuable time.

2. Promote Your Products Less and Write Content More

If you want to give your consumers value, you should write content that benefits them while occasionally promoting your products. Customers are more interested in posts, articles, and guides that directly help them achieve their own goals. By creating content around your customer’s needs, your audience will reward you with engagement and lead the conversion upwards.

If you run a baby products company, instead of simply listing the features of your products on your site, offer tips and resources for parents. By hosting articles about babies and raising them, organic traffic from those articles will lead consumers to your product pages. In this scenario, an article with tips for putting your baby to bed could end in a checklist of products that includes and links back to your product’s webpage.

With this type of approach, your users will be more engaged and thus more likely to come back for more. This way, whenever you launch a new product, they’ll want hear what you have to say about it and try it out for themselves because of the since of community your brand provides.

3. Research the Kind of Content That People Want

It can be tough to understand what people want to read about, especially since people are always wanting new and different information. A good way to find out what your consumers need is to visit other websites within your industry. Research on their blogs and see the type of engagement that their posts get while keeping an eye out for extreme reactions. By learning from the competitors first, you can avoid some negative reactions to your content that may have been unexpected before the content is published.

In internet marketing, social media posts can run the show. If you write a post about a social media post, it can offer a temporary boost in traffic to your site. However, it is vital to consider how the post fits into your industry and brand as well as how your audience could receive it before creating content around it.

4. Special Content

Stand out from the rest to be noticed. A great way to do this is to create unique content for your consumers. Give your consumers exclusive information that they won’t be able to find elsewhere. This will have people visiting your site for your content, follow it on social media, and sharing how to get it with others.

You can develop an actionable plan for your team to create this content while you make your main content. Doing so will ensure you get more value from the talent you’re paying for and give your content a consistent and unique look and feel which will engage the audience even more.

5. Behind the Scenes

Give your consumers a behind-the-scenes glance at how your business works. You can do so by putting extra pictures and videos on your site to tell your brand’s story. Bring your brand to life for the audience and show them the work that goes into making the products or services you offer different from the competitions’.

To connect even more with your audience, focus on values you have in common with them. For example, if your business produces pet supplies, tell the audience about your team’s pets with your brand’s products in the background of pictures or used in the videos.

6. Conduct Q&As

Conducting Q&As helps add to your content’s value by answering questions that your audience asks after viewing it. You can use Q&As to collect data to use later in your content creation, such as creating videos or articles to answer complex questions. This is also an opportunity to introduce the audience to the team within the brand by having them answer certain questions that pertain to their departments.

You may also ask your consumers questions to encourage engagement with the brand and learn how to serve them better based on their experience with your brand so far. The best part is that you’re providing valuable content while learning from your consumers. Ask additional follow-up questions, and if they ask you any questions, ensure that you respond as promptly as possible.

7. Prioritize on Value

Value brings about trust, and if consumers trust you, there is a high likelihood of them buying your services or products. For your content to have value to your audience, it has to help them achieve their goals, answer their questions, and provide reliable information. In content that is centered on value, it’s important to keep the marketing subtle. Rather than actively sell to the audience, show them how the product or service works while you are using it and give them reasons why you use that one.

For example, if your business sells hair products, show your audience your hair routines. This provides the audience with authentic content and a connection to you while showing your products in use. This gives the viewer the ability to see what the product does and chose to try it for themselves without commercializing the experience.

8. Create a Bond With Your Consumers

Creating a bond with your audience aligns with content personalization and all companies can do it. The first step is to create high-quality content that speaks to them directly. This encourages consumers to view your brand as more than just another company. The next step is to engage with the audience after the content is released.

Consumers love it when businesses and brands interact with them on social media. Whenever they get responses from their favorite brands, they feel special and see that your brand views them as more than simply a means to a sell. If your brand is tagged in a post where your products are used, like it and engage further with an encouraging comment. You could even comment a link to an article that applies to that product’s uses, driving the engagement further and showing the audience you care.

9. Use Humor To Your Advantage

Well-placed comedy makes content more engaging and keeps viewers tuned in longer. Adding humor is a great way to draw people’s attention to your products and services so that you can convey your message to them. Humor can make content easier to engage with and more approachable, but some forms of humor don’t work well for some audiences.

It is important to know your audience’s sense of humor and maintain the balance between important information that meets their needs, and sly remarks to have them slapping their knees.

10. Be Innovative

Every company is trying its hand at content marketing. The more creative you are, the higher your chances of beating the competition, however, you need to find the balance between creative ideas and your consumers’ needs.

For example, if your business sells musical instruments online it must compete with brick and mortar stores also selling musical instruments. An innovative solution would be to have playlists where popular songs are being played on that instrument as sound samples or to create playlists that show the instruments’ range for the consumers.

11. Consistency Is Key

Consistency applies to both the content and frequency of your interactions with your audience. When a consumer follows your content, they become accustomed to coming back regularly and finding fresh content. If you have to stop posting regularly, let your audience know as far in advance as possible. A break in consistency can even be substituted by bonding with your audience if you tell them why the break is happening. You could even create new playlists from older content to entertain them while you’re away.

Another thing to note is that content needs to be consistently high-quality. If you don’t think the post the same quality as the previous posts on your website, it’s best to hold off on posting it until you perfect it.

Schedule a Call with Us

There is a vast difference between being active on social media and creating content. Do your research before you post. Create content that resonates well with your audience. It takes time and effort to curate the best content marketing strategies. Learn from more prominent companies in your niche to get a feel of what they’re doing right and how you can emulate that in your business.

Remember, good content speaks for itself, but it needs optimization so that people can find it easily. At CopyPress, we understand how important your brand is to you. Therefore, we take our time in creating and optimizing your content so that it appeals to your audience.

If you’d like to know more about producing great content or how to optimize your content schedule a call with us by filling out the form below and we will give you a demo of how our products and services work for you.

jross

CopyPress writer

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