6 Content Marketing Trends for Your 2019 Strategy
2018 has seen content marketing becoming even more imperative in top digital marketing strategies. From SEO to lead nurturing, content marketing has proven its worth in money-making — though the performance relies much on the quality of the content and the distribution tactics.
As much as the audience is exposed to so many contents today, content marketing will continue to rise in 2019. In fact, content marketing industry was estimated to be worth more than USD 400 billion by 2021.
Content marketing strategy and implementation being so dynamic, we need to be agile and keep a lookout for the existing trends. These are six trends that will make content marketing a bigger lead generator than the past years.
1. Voice Search
Talking to voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Android’s Google Assistant, as well as voice-enabled speakers like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, has become a habit for more users than ever. Not a surprise that 20% of Google searches are by voice.
People run search differently without them realizing it. Instead of “best consultancy firm”, voice-searchers tend to use question-based queries like “what is the best consultancy firm?” Asking with natural language leads people to use a complete sentence form rather than keywords or phrases like they did in traditional search.
Actionable:
As its population grows, we should tweak our SEO strategy to favour the voice-searchers, too. Consider utilizing question-based sentence on header tags or as focus keywords of the content.
2. Chatbot
In recent years, significantly more businesses have embraced the use of chatbot, for customer-facing functions (e.g. sales support, customer service) and internal processes (e.g. HR, back-office operations). Spiceworks found that by end 2019, 40% of big companies already use chatbots to engage with their customers.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning technology help businesses lead the customers towards the desired goal more effectively. Chatbot is known for its capability to provide quick answers to FAQs and to collect information from the customers. However, proper training and chatbot configuration can drive more transactions, too.
Actionable:
A chatbot should be carefully designed so that it’s intuitive for the users and able to lead the users towards a particular action completion, e.g. set up a meeting with a financial advisor — instead of just deploying a chatbot to answer FAQs.
3. Integration with Lifecycle Marketing
Content marketing has been supporting sales in nurturing leads throughout the customer journey. Leads in different buying stage have different objectives, thus reading different contents that help them achieve their objectives.
Presenting contents relevant to each customer’s journey helps the brand be seen as relevant and likeable. Such relevant contents provide the customers with the information they need as they move from a prospect to a lead to a customer to a returning customer. The more relevant the content is, the more effective it is in convincing the customers and eventually driving transactions.
Actionable:
Take time to understand your customers in each stage of the customer journey — their needs, wants, and motivation to purchase a particular product. Understanding so will help us pick the right topics to write and whom to deliver the content to.
4. LinkedIn for content distribution
Even a very well-written content is useless if it doesn’t reach the intended audience. That said, content distribution remains an important aspect of every content marketing strategy.
2019 is also the year to jump on the social media bandwagon if you have not done so. Social media gained so much business traction in 2018 and will continue to grow in 2019 — especially LinkedIn who sees 145% user base growth.
Actionable:
Find out where your target audience gathers information from in great details. For example, don’t stop at knowing which social media channel they are on, but deep dive into which groups or accounts they follow. With regards to its performance in 2018, you may also try LinkedIn as one of your main distribution channels — such as through LinkedIn article and groups.
5. Long-Form Content and Video Marketing
BuzzSumo’s research figured that people tend to share longer articles on social media, hence increase the readership. People perceive lengthier articles — over 2,000 words long — as more trustworthy, and consequently, those contents are ranked higher by search engine.
Another research by Aberdeen indicated that marketers who ran video marketing drove revenue 49% than those who didn’t. It noted that video has become extremely helpful in shortening the sales process.
Actionable:
Pay attention to the content format as it largely affects how the reader may perceive us. While long-form content displays our credibility and authority, video marketing conveys ideas in a more compelling and comprehensible way. Give these formats a shot and see how they work for you.
6. Content Strategy
Content is a tool to achieve very specific business goals. It could be for — but not limited to — lead generations, customer acquisition, SEO, and thought leadership. Therefore, It’s crucial to develop a robust content strategy and executable tactics to maximize its effectiveness.
Actionable:
Start with determining the objective of your content and develop the strategy accordingly. For example, content used for SEO purpose will need to incorporate keywords and backlinking strategy to the whole content strategy.
Any thoughts? Let’s talk about it!
