Can you name a business promotion tool more powerful than content marketing? We bet you can’t because it’s an anchor of contemporary marketing and the very first thing consumers get in touch with when exploring your brand. The benefits of content marketing are gigantic as you can expect it to help you raise brand awareness, build customer relationships, generate leads, drive conversions, and inspire customer loyalty in the long run.

However, keep in mind that only a well-executed content strategy guarantees to deliver the results we just mentioned. You need to prepare for it seriously and embrace state of the art tools and tactics in order to promote your products or services properly. Our goal is to help you with that, so keep reading to see the top content marketing trends for 2020.

Content marketing is full of interesting features that can maximize the visibility of your business. This is what a typical organization can expect from content campaigns:

• Content creation generates over three times as many leads as traditional marketing forms and costs 62% less. When it comes to content creation, we can’t miss SocialBee’s AI Social Post Generator. It helps users produce captions and content ideas for their social media. It comes with an extensive range of prompt templates, which can be personalized to suit individual preferences and tone of voice. Once generated, the content can be edited, customized for each network, or scheduled to be published.
• Nearly 80% of search engine users are only focusing on organic results, thus proving the importance of high-quality content.
• 90% of marketers worldwide use content campaigns to reach customers.
• Decision-makers love it, too, as 80% of executives and business owners prefer to receive information about a company through articles rather than advertisements.
• Over 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each day.

The privileges of content marketing are obvious, but how can you achieve the targeted result? The answer lies in cutting-edge trends, so let’s check out our top 10 picks.

Long-Form Blog Posts

Blogging is a quintessential content format because it helps readers to solve common issues and learn everything about a given topic. However, the days of short and keyword-flooded articles are long gone as the average Google first page result contains 1,890 words.

The reason is simple – users demand quality articles that really explain the problem they are facing. Instead of keyword-stuffing, now you need to come up with interesting topics, make a good plan of writing, and perfectly execute your idea.

Make sure to cover everything from headlines to article structure to conclusion as each element can make or break your hopes of driving website traffic.

Attractive Visual Content

Although being omnipresent, blog posts are by no means the only content format you should use in daily work. On the contrary, the human brain processes visual information much faster than plain text and so you should design and publish lots of visually-appealing content.

There are many options to combine here, including infographics, memes, GIFs, animations, illustrations, charts, tables, sketches, and similar. Each of these formats has its own pros, so the only real dilemma is to prioritize and choose one type over the other at exactly the right moment.

Mega Creator helps content marketers to create custom illustrations for their campaigns

Live Video

Video content falls into the previous category, but it is so dominant that it deserves a separate chapter. Of course, you must be aware of the sheer power of videos in modern marketing, but 2020 is when you should take the extra step and focus on live streaming in particular.

How come?

Well, the idea is to make your video messages even more attractive by going live and letting the audience join the conversation. You can start discussing any niche-related topic and then invite viewers to post comments and ask you questions.

That way, you will encourage user engagement and drastically increase watch times because the majority of followers will be waiting for you to answer their questions.

User-Generated Content

Speaking of user engagement, one of the best ways to promote your business is by inviting fans to craft brand-related content. It’s an excellent communication method because you earn tons of relevant content while investing little to no personal effort whatsoever. All it takes is to organize and promote a social media contest, while your fans will do the rest on their own.

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) is a cutting-edge trend that threatens to win over the marketing universe. Ever since the Pokemon Go frenzy, it seems like everybody is trying to add AR to their content marketing strategy. And for good reason as AR adds a new layer of information to the existing context.

Take the IKEA Place mobile app for instance. It gives potential buyers the opportunity to actually test furniture before conducting a purchase, which elevates the user experience to the whole new level. You can do something similar because AR is now widely accessible and easy to deploy.

Content Optimized for Voice Search

You probably know that search engine optimization and content marketing go hand in hand, but the latest trend is to redirect focus from text-based SEO to voice searches. Namely, the number of consumers who use voice assistants keeps growing every day, which means that more people rely on Siri, Alexa, and similar tools while searching for content.

Your job is to respond quickly and embrace a new way of thinking. What does it mean content-wise? To put it simply, it means your content should answer users’ search questions briefly, concisely, and directly.

This is important because people mostly use voice assistants to discover relevant information within seconds. You can help them discover your content instead of competitors’ by improving the FAQ page and by answer the basic 5W+H questions (who does what, where, when, why, and how?) in each post.

Conversational Marketing

Modern businesses are also turning to so-called conversational marketing, a new trend that promotes one-on-one communication between brands and consumers. It is quite a big deal because customers now expect you to personalize interactions and tailor communication so as to fit your previous conversations.

How can you do it? The number of options is huge, but the usual suspects include communication channels such as email messages, live chat, Facebook Messenger, and chatbots.

Broad Usage of the Best Content Marketing Tools

No marketer is capable of planning and administering entire campaigns on his/her own, which is why we strongly recommend you to take advantage of the best content marketing tools. Luckily enough, the Internet is packed with all sorts of useful plugins, platforms, and apps.

Mega Creator to create custom collages for blogs and social networks

All you have to do is to choose the right tools and improve the efficiency of your campaigns. Some of our favorite digital marketing platforms include the likes of Google Trends, Grammarly, Canva, Survey Monkey, CoSchedule Headline Analyzer, Meme Generator, etc.

Outsourcing Some Activities

With so many content formats and communication channels available online, many digital marketing teams are struggling to keep track of everything in a timely manner. This is exactly why one of the hottest 2020 trends is hiring remote workers and implementing applicant tracking systems.

Namely, you can find talented marketers online and recruit them quickly on a per-project basis. Freelancing platforms such as Upwork allow you to analyze each candidate thoroughly and identify professionals who can contribute to your campaigns with all due knowledge and efficiency.

Performance Analysis

This is not exactly the latest content marketing trend, but it remains extremely important in 2020 (and beyond). A successful marketing department cannot afford to rely on sheer guts or intuition while planning new projects, but rather analyze earlier activities to gain precious insights.

A simple tool like Google Analytics can help you to reveal the pros and cons of each campaign, content format, communication channel, and many more. The bottom line is that you need to use these insights to eliminate malfunctioning features and focus on content creation elements that make the biggest impact on your target audience.

Conclusion

Content marketing is one of the most important business promotion tools of our era, but it keeps evolving year after year. It means that only agile and dedicated marketers can keep track of all the novelties and outperform their competitors in the long run.

In this post, we discussed the top content marketing trends for 2020. Have you ever thought about adding some of these elements to your content strategy? Which one do you believe to be the best? Make sure to share your questions and ideas – we would love to see your comment about this exciting topic!

About the author: this is the guest post by Susan Saurel, a content marketer at Papersowl and a thesis help author from Houston, Texas. She is an expert in social media, but she also loves exploring email marketing trends. 

Title image from Marginalia pack on Ouch, free vector illustrations library

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