With the latest changes on Google and then last week with Facebook. Content marketing is held in high esteem with both these platforms. In 2018, your website and blogs will be given higher placement if your content is deemed to be useful to readers.
The more content you can produce, the better your chances of being seen. Using keywords in your content will allow the search engine spiders to find you and your business.
Content is not just written information anymore. Videos play a big part in content these days. Infographics and images provide a variety of way to keep your customers attention.
Your content can now be about every phase of your business. Your sales department, service department and your question and answer or troubleshooting department. If your customer can benefit from knowing it, you can make it into content.
Edgylabs.com provides their take on 5 marketing trends in 2018
5 Content Marketing Trends You Shouldn’t Ignore in 2018
Stay ahead of the game by understanding the content marketing trends of our brand-new 2018.
Content marketing is all about creating relevant content that targets a specific audience. It is widely used by many well-known organizations such as Microsoft, P&G, and John Deere, just to name a few. Small businesses also use it to get more web-based traffic as well as retail customers by linking to Google My Business and other GPS map apps.
Over the years, content marketing has become a prerequisite to the success of most marketers whether in-house or from a marketing firm. Because of its web-first identity, content marketing is much like the Internet itself–constantly changing and hard to nail down. For this reason, you have to stay up-to-date with content marketing trends.
The average blog post has 1,142 words–how long is your content on average? #contentmarketingClick To TweetHere we have outlined five content marketing developments that you should try for 2018.
1. Longer Content
Every day, consumers look for solutions to their problems from posts that, hopefully, also offer value and depth.
To look at the nuts and bolts of how content creators go about crafting these posts, most often, it is advisable to not publish anything under 500 words if you’re looking to draw web traffic. Yet, even when posting content just over 500 words, this will usually only attract a few days of traffic at most.
From a survey conducted by Orbitmedia, the average number of words created for a post is 1,142. Every year, more and more bloggers gear towards creating longer content. Bigger posts attract more customers which result in higher ROI.
2. Quality Content and Consistency over Quantity
Long content doesn’t necessarily mean that you will gain more customers. Quality content that answers the what, when, where, who, why, how and all the other questions that your target audience has is much times better than a long post that only answers one of the many problems the customer has.
Google search algorithms run extensive comparisons to see how original your content is. If you write a long post that takes many quotes from other pages, or, even worse, plagiarizes pages, it won’t be prioritized as well as a long, original post.
Establishing a decent number of blog followers means that you have people waiting for you to release some content. To that end, make sure you publish posts at a consistent pace to provide lasting value.
3. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing focuses on collaborations with influencers to promote your brand and products. A sustainable influencer marketing is a cultivated relationship with marketers, influencers, and audiences. It doesn’t end after payment is given.
The relationship between influencers and their audience is built on trust and transparency. Because of this, an influencer’s recommendation can convert more customers.
4. New Content Formats
Content doesn’t necessarily mean blog posts. Content can also be video (live or recorded), audio, infographics, and games. In 2017, video content was king. An example of this is live streaming where marketers can directly answer questions from the audience.
Audio content is another excellent content type that you can use. Podcasts are the most common examples of audio content. The growth in popularity of the podcast is hard to overstate.
In a report, The Podcast Consumer 2017 by Edison Research and Triton Digital, 40% of the population surveyed say they listen to podcasts.
40% of people surveyed listened to podcasts in 2017Click To TweetHowever, the meaning of content is about to get broader. Chatbots, smart speakers like Amazon Echo, and even augmented reality provides marketers innovative new ways of telling stories.
5. Attribution and ROI
This seems obvious, but a marketer should know how to calculate ROI. From the B2B Content Marketing by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute, only 35% of marketers can measure their ROI. 55% of those measure theirs regularly.
Only a few marketers know the actual value of a visitor, a form submission, or a new subscriber. Awareness when it comes to ROI and accurately measuring it contributes to a marketer’s success.
