Content is King

Content marketing has long been regarded as one of the twenty-first century staples of marketing. Engaging and informative, this form of marketing has the ability to present thoroughly researched information and excite the target audience at the same time.

But what are the upcoming trends that will allow the game to change in the years to come? It’s time for you to find out by reading this content marketing article.

What is Content Marketing?

Prior to actually getting to know what the new trends in content marketing are, it’s fundamental to understand what content marketing is all about. Content marketing is basically a type of marketing that’s actually focused on the creation and distribution of content for a highly-targeted, internet-addicted audience.

The main goal of content marketing? To use intellectually stimulating and informative content to entice and engage users, getting them to be in tune with a blog or website.

That specific platform will then be used to sell ideas, products, merchandise, services, etc. This is definitely one of the most widely-popular types of marketing.

Why? Since the internet has allowed users to explore written content in many different formats and channels, the power of content has been used to increase customer retention, time on page, lower bounce rates, and sell products to a targeted audience.

Now that we’ve approached the topic of what this technique is, it’s time to move forward and understand what are the hottest content trends around.

New Content Marketing Trends

1. Strategy is Everything

Now that the game has matured into a hyper-relevant marketing form, companies will begin to use this method to achieve specific goals.

But what will set different companies apart? The delineation of a detailed content marketing strategy.

This means you must first decide what’s your aim with content in order to be successful. Indeed, you should be able to understand what is the main driver of your content marketing efforts.

Is it Search Engine Optimization? Is it lead generation?

Upon knowing what the focus is, content enthusiasts should be better able to customize strategies that are tailor-made and goal-oriented. Content will play an increasingly important role when it comes to customer acquisition and retention.

However, a fine-tuned strategy must be at the forefront of any content marketing initiative.

Why? Because, according to recent research, 65% of content marketers have a thoroughly specific strategy delineated. Without strategy - and the right set of tools needed to implement it - all efforts will be fruitless.

2. A New Marketing Funnel

Marketing funnels filter clients, sometimes irrespective of their specific qualities and interests. As the world of marketing becomes more customer-centered, target audiences must not be made to feel ignored by businesses at the end of the customer journey.

What to do? Use content to increase the chances for brands to stay top-of-mind. The funnel as we know it is done: it will become a never-ending story told by the companies to the users.

How to engage customers, then? Through highly-targeted content marketing techniques. You must be able to be on-point when it comes to the post-sale, allowing customers to feel part of an ongoing relationship which will increasingly promote further customer interactions and sales.

Customers who are shown brand-made content are much more likely to think about a brand or product when shopping. In addition, customers who feel enticed by the stories told will also feel more inclined to recommend the brand to their friends and acquaintances.

Through content, brands will cease to be mere vending machines and begin to become true customer partners. Pricing is changeable, but a thoroughly well-crafted, content-powered customer retention strategy is not. In fact, it can really make a difference, since customers love brands which form lasting bonds through strategically sent content.

3. Personalized Experience

What is content without personalization? Not much. This really is a major trend that will take customer experience to a whole new level.

When customers enter a website, they like feeling that site is catered to their needs. When they are greeted by name upon reaching a landing page, customers are more likely to continue the purchase, since the feeling of personalization is proven to stimulate people to purchase.

Personalization makes people feel special and also helps them understand whether or not the company they want to buy from has a customer-first mentality. Personalization is now being used in many different parts of the world and for different purposes. In fact, research suggests that 94% of digital professionals believe personalization to be fundamental to success.

Moreover, on the authority of recent studies, personalized marketing converts much more than generic marketing. How much more? 400%.

How to use personalization in the future? You must be able to use tools to accurately gather customer data such as average spending budget, buyer history, name, email, phone number, etc.

Once businesses have access to this data, they can quickly start the personalization efforts, nurturing their customers. You could also show different content to different users, basing your decisions on heat maps, user experience history, the specific customer journey, how the customer navigates the website, favorite items bought, type of products purchased in the past, etc.

Personalization makes customers feel special, guaranteeing higher conversion rates and sales through customer-oriented content.

4. The Sub-Brand Ideal

In the early days of marketing, people believed they should cast as wide a net as possible to catch a lot of customers. Those days are over.

Now, the name of the game is narrow targeting. That’s where sub-brands and niche content marketing come into play.

If you want to be successful in 2019, you need to leverage niche marketing. This is a result of both marketing saturation and maturity. With people creating more content than ever before, competition will become a major problem.

What to do? You must be able to find highly-specific niches you should focus on to sell products.

The idea of creating expanded content that is super-specific is not only important but crucial to the success of any content strategy.

How to go about it? You need to identify sub-niches in your specific industry.

You must be able to ponder upon new angles and perspectives of the same tried-and-tested problems facing the target audience. Once you are able to identify a concrete list of sub-brands and sub-niches, you can start devising a content strategy that takes specification into account to increase conversion rates and optimize businesses.

5. Influencer Marketing 

Influencer marketing is the reason why Instagram has become so successful in the past 5 years. Customers consider influencers to be recommendation kings. What they say matters, and what they help sell is a certified solution to their problems.

Based on the latest consumer research, more than 90% of customers trust recommendations - even when they don’t personally know the customer who is recommending the product.

The human aspect is remarkably important. It helps buyers feel a great deal of trust and security since they know someone out there has also been satisfied by a specific product.

Influencer marketing helps drive traffic, increase sales, and that’s why you must be able to incorporate it in a well-crafted content strategy.

How will businesses use influencer marketing in the near future? They will go for in-depth interviews with social media influencers, leveraging the power of storytelling to sell products.

Nowadays, influencer marketing looks like a couple of insightful sentences on a social media feed, accompanied by a photographically shiny image of a specific influencer showcasing a product. In the future, content will go deeper and explore the lives of influencers, tell pithy stories, and then sell the specific product in a more or less obvious way.

Readers are done spending time canvassing through huge blocks of text that fail to actively showcase the human value. Moreover, they are searching for authentic stories they can get immersed in. That’s why influencer-powered content marketing is going to be a tremendously important trend in the future.

How can you use this trend to the max? You can identify specific influencers - quality over quantity - that share your brand values as well as people you happen to have a specific target audience in common with. Then, you should be able to use the authority of these bloggers and social media influencers to craft stories and lengthy articles that manage to get customers fully interested.

You should:

• Make sure to identify influencers that share your common values
• Reach those influencers through effective marketing campaigns
• Work on creating in-depth interviews in which the product is shown
• Share those interviews bearing a multi-platform philosophy in mind

This is how to leverage the power of influencer content marketing.

6. The Importance of Customer Success

Clients must be at the forefront of any strategy. In the future, customer-oriented content marketing is going to be all the rage. Even though sales teams already use content to improve customer relationships, they will now be leveraging content to improve customer success strategies.

Customer success is basically how companies help their clients get the most from their services. Today, personalization is key, which means marketing teams must ensure their efforts are on-point, contributing to more instances of word-of-mouth marketing, developing a customer relationship that allows companies to stand apart.

How can content help you become more successful in the realm of customer success? It can allow prospective customers to know how to use products, show how social media influencers have taken advantage of the service being advertised, and basically let readers know why the product being sold tells a story and responds to a need in an optimal way.

Customer success is going to be simply vital. Indeed, a strategy that fails to take target customers into account will never succeed in 2019.

The Ultimate Summary

From social media influencer marketing to the increasingly almighty customer success, from a perfected strategy to a complete reshaping of the marketing funnel, content marketing efforts will have to take many different trends into account.

In order to be successful with content marketing, you must be able to come up with a new approach to the game, leveraging the power of content to tell evergreen stories, form a lasting bond with preferred target audiences, and ultimately reach new clients through the written word.