With the dawn of each new year, marketers are finding new ways to better attract and engage with current and potential consumers. Staying current on what's new and next helps ensure that your strategies are current and effective. As we look to the year ahead, we are already seeing some trends in content marketing.
We took a deep dive into content marketing and how it's about attracting and engaging your potential consumers by educating them with high-quality content. Not only is content marketing a powerful tool to drive sales and business growth, but it also allows you to establish trust and build meaningful connections with your audience by providing valuable solutions to their problems. With the constant evolution of innovative technology and communication channels, content marketing shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Chatbots & Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is being used increasingly by nearly all businesses, whether you know it or not. It serves as an opportunity to meet your company's bottom line and allow you to allocate your time more efficiently. For instance, chatbots used to be seen negatively whenever they popped up on a website. Well, not anymore. Should you be looking to implement an AI Chatbot? Chatbots have come a long way from the newest bot called ELIZA in 1966. Created by Joseph Weizenbaum, the chatbot laid the fundamentals for future innovations using preprogrammed responses, phrases, and keywords (though it didn't pass the Turing Test, i.e., the test of users believing they were interacting with an actual person). Fast-forward a few decades, AI interfaces like Siri, Alexa, and Google are becoming more mainstream. Chatbots are now widely used on websites because they allow businesses to have more conversations with visitors and interact like never before with sophisticated conversations that sound much more real than previous efforts.
Unconventional Influencers
Engaging with those who interact with your business naturally and consistently can work wonders for your content strategy. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram make it easy to capture moments in nearly real-time to share with your audience. While showcasing customer interactions is beneficial, it's not the only way to showcase your business's activities. Employees, customers' family members, visitors, and others can all play a role in influencing your brand. These influencers often have a residual effect on your marketing efforts. For instance, posting a picture of your employee of the month on Facebook can demonstrate that your business values its employees and is a great workplace. Even if the team member isn't a potential customer, their family or friends who see the post might be.
Data-Driven Strategy
Data has become more valuable than ever in content marketing. The success of your content creation is not left to chance but rather a result of researching what works and what doesn't. With numerous analytical tools, marketers can consistently evaluate their content strategy. Blogging is an essential component of a robust strategy. By analyzing performance metrics like bounce rate, time per page view, and entrances, marketers can gain insight into how to refine future content. The data behind content marketing offers a unique perspective into the potential consumer's mindset and helps drive them toward purchasing.
Topic Clusters
If you're familiar with content marketing, you've heard about pillar pages. But what about topic clusters? Topic clusters have become part of SEO strategies for creating good content around a specific topic containing keywords relevant to a particular pillar page. What's driving this change is how people make inquiries on Google and other search engines. It used to be that people would search just one word or two in a search bar like "Florida Hotel." Nowadays, people are searching for more precise phrases like "What's the best hotel in Florida?" Marketers want to ensure they're not just writing about one topic and squeezing in as many keywords as possible. It's about breaking down one topic into several subcategories to create effective content that will keep the search engine algorithms happy and answer the question or solve the website visitor's problem.
Personalization and Interactivity
Those visiting your site or engaging with your business want to feel special. As we discussed earlier, they don't want a chatbot giving them a perfunctory answer that leaves a lot of gray areas and much to be desired. How content is becoming interactive and personal is crucial to engage with potential consumers. For example, according to WhiskData, there's a 26% increase in open rates of emails with personalized subject lines (e.g., including the recipient's first name). It shows that personalization can go a long way in garnering someone's attention! We're seeing marketers take interacting with consumers to new heights that benefit both parties. Polls and surveys are a great way to engage because you're not only getting a visitor's attention, but you're also getting their contact information and valuable data. This can help you to further re-target your consumer to continue providing them with the content that they want.
There are countless opportunities for marketers today to build an engaging experience for those who come into contact with their business. From cutting-edge technologies like AI, to data-driven strategies and personalization, content marketing is an excellent foundation for unmatched ROI.
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