Top Five Content Marketing Trends For 2021
Whilst it is known that content itself is a consistent element within the realms of marketing – the way content is created, distributed and consumed continues to drastically change over time.
Staying on top of these trends can help put you ahead of your competitors and cater to the needs of your audience.
One major trend that is increasing in importance is the developing consumer-personalised content. Utilising emerging and innovative techniques will only aid in fostering positive relationships between you and your audiences.
Not to mention – a memorable content marketing campaign for years to come.
Change is an inevitable process in all schemes of life. It’s therefore important to try and account for said changes where possible and readily prepare yourself. And the same applies to marketing in the sense that we should monitor consumer behaviours. And hence, attempt gauging an understanding of which content resonates with our prospective audiences.
Consumers traditionally shift their routes and methods to discovering, consuming and their sharing preferences when it comes to content. Having a deeper insight into these aspects assists in curating the relevant, higher quality, and rather innovative content that they seek.
Here are 5 perfect Content Marketing trends to equip you for not only connecting – but also engaging your target audiences for 2021.
1. Data Driven Creativity
In an increasingly data-driven world, it’s no surprise to see the prevalence of data as it takes lead as a key-consideration when making business decisions.
Data can assist in forming the foundations to exceptional storytelling by providing valuable insight into consumer behaviours. And ultimately, crack the code for the type of content which will resonate with your target audience.
This can be explored through the execution of a marketing campaign incorporating data-founded, personalised content or offers. And when combined with creative ideas – it can act as a catalyst for exceptional content that hits home with target markets through personalisation and relevancy.
2. Conversational Content Marketing - Using AI
As content marketing continues to evolve, marketeers and audiences continually mould ‘content’ into something that is not meant for consumption – but also to be experienced.
To deliver a truly user-bespoke user experience, embracing emergent marketing technologies, like those AI-driven ones, is a promising step when preparing marketeers for future trends. AI is a mutually beneficial field for both consumers and businesses alike.
Customers can get personalised, real time support, and businesses benefit by saving time, money and valuable resources.
AI paves the way for customer service to thrive in the new age, as exampled by an emerging utilisation of highly intelligent Chatbots.
Chatbots are the modern-day answer to customer support assistance, with an efficient ability to answer and resolve customer enquiries in a matter of seconds.
With increased usage, they will continue learning more about consumers by acquiring the information users themselves provide. And by analysing user actions, search patterns, and pulling data from social media information, their assistance capabilities are bound to eventually stretch beyond mere customer personalisation.
3. Omni-Channel Strategy
The consumer’s online journey is almost characteristically omnipresent in a sense as it exists everywhere and spans across all channels, platforms and devices. And so must our content and campaigning reaches.
Regardless of where it is accessed and how customers engage with said content, they should always expect a seamless experience.
Have you ever come across any content collateral (let’s say a blog-post’s feature image perhaps?) that instantly drew you to the company?
The appeal where the tonality, colours, and holistic display of brand all culminated to quench exactly what you sought?
But once you left this blog section to check-out the app, you were only faced with disappointed …
This initial appeal that the blog imprinted on you – was only an impression that the company wasn’t consistent in through-out all its platforms and material. Naturally, you’re just left frustrated. This is an exact causality of neglecting an implementation of an omni-channel strategy.
Omni-channel strategies simply refer to the approach of providing customers with a unified brand experience.
One consistent across any-and-all customer touch-points with a clear-cut content stratagem focus.
By integrating an omni-channel strategy into your 2021 content marketing plan, you can ensure relaying a consistently branded marketing messaging for customers browsing on different platforms, devices and channels. The messaging will ultimately all exist under the same ecosystem.
4. Live Video Will Dominate
Traditionally, content marketing has always existed in the form of writing. Whether that be blog content, newspapers or case studies.
However, there is a notable shift in preferred content mediums as we head into 2021.
And that is ‘video content’ – specifically live video.
Live video is already among the leading content forms, but the slow growth is brought about from a lack in participation. There is a perceived value in live video due to its untouched nature of providing real time insights. This is valuable information that is also genuine, transparent and entertaining.
And stemming from the previously emphasised importance of enhancing user experience and their brand relatability, live video can effectively deliver on these targeted attributes and provide a memorable and impactful experience.
Brands have the capability to creatively execute live videos and retrieve shared opinions from viewing audiences in real time.
This ability to entice measurable engagement is an attractive insight for digital marketers, as it opens-up multiple avenues for taking the campaign and stratagem to next.
5. Micro-Moment Marketing
When looking at user experience in content marketing, there is a great deal of value emphasised on every moment a visitor spends browsing your site. The faster the consumer can effectively understand what you’re trying to convey with your campaign, the better.
Micro-content is easy to interpret, highly informative and traditionally relevant to the consumer. The convenience of being able to quickly locate the information you need in the right format and at the right time, is of high value for consumers and a trending 2021 need.
Micro-moments occur when people turn to a device, most commonly a smartphone – to act on a need to learn, do, discover, watch, or buy something. They are intent rich moments where the consumers’ expectations are to locate the relevant information immediately.
Contextualised for content marketing – this can be explored with micro-video and micro-blogs. Micro-video content can be seen in YouTube advertisements in which marketers aim to create advertisements that draw audiences to the brand/product/service in 6 seconds.
When carried out successfully, this tactic can aptly successfully capture a large audience.
Micro-blogging is moreover effective and rather prevalent within Twitter’s social media platform. With a text threshold of 280 characters, the information is short, concise and hence attractive to consumer eyes if pitted against a 1000-word blog post.
Image Source: Think With Google.
The Verdict - Emerging Content Marketing Trends In 2021 ..
Ultimately, the most important element pertaining to emerging 2021 content marketing strategies – is to be able to create content which is interpretable and relevant for your desired audiences.
The personalisation of content can drastically improve the way your audiences engage with your content and therefore your brand and organisational offerings.
It’s undebatable that these predicted 2021 trends and years thereafter, are invaluable insights into the emerging content marketing tactics.
And if you consider the modern-era’s emerging technological products and capabilities in accessing relevant data for gaining market insights – content marketing should be a definite key consideration for weaving into your 2021 marketing plan.
You can gear up for your content marketing this 2021 with our top-10 content tool recommendations to make your life easier – or with our guide for content writing mastery and more!
