Content marketing is the process of conceptualizing, creating, and distributing content to your target audience to create a buzz about your brand to improve its brand awareness. Content marketing often helps businesses increase their brand awareness, convince the target audience to prefer your brand, and drive enormous ROI.
One astonishing fact about content marketing is that it constantly evolves to stay relevant with the current generation. As the mindsets of every generation vary, content marketers come up with new tricks and techniques to reach out to their target audience.
The pandemic has changed the way we used to do things. And it certainly has changed the way of content marketing. And this article is written to keep you updated with the latest content marketing trends. But before that, let us look into the fresh content marketing statistics to remind you why content marketing is essential for your B2B business.
- 47% of buyers view three to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep.
- Video is the most commonly used form of content in marketing, surpassing infographics and blogs.
- 70% of marketers are investing actively in content marketing.
Pro tip: Top three channels marketers prefer for distributing content are Social Media Channels, Email, and Websites.
#1 Interactive Virtual Events
People tend to attend more events that are hosted online compared to in-person events. There is a 34% increase. (HoloFair)
As mentioned above, the pandemic has changed the way we do things now. During the pandemic, there has been a steep rise in virtual events. Round tables, large conferences, exhibitions are all being conducted virtually.
With the increase in creative ways of attracting remote event attendees, virtual events have become a landmark in the marketing paradigm.
A study says that 45% of companies host virtual events to increase engagement with their target audience, and 19% of companies host virtual events to increase their brand awareness.
#2 Videos are becoming more mainstream
80% of video marketers claim that video has directly increased sales. (Wyzowl, 2020)
Well, this must be pretty obvious for an intelligent person like you. Videos make learning very easy. An average modern consumer (including me) prefer video content over written content. Videos aren’t new. They have been here for quite a while and will continue to increase their dominance in the future over other forms of content.
What you can do is create explainer videos about your product/service. Or narrate your brand story via videos. And various seasoned marketers’ have asserted that videos have seemingly increased the conversion rates for B2B businesses.
And the most important part comes now – Google loves SEO-optimized videos. When you invest some time in SEO optimizing your video by creating a great thumbnail, attention-grabbing title, and useful content, videos will bring enormous organic traffic to your website. Helping you rank better in Google’s SERPs.
#3 Podcasts (B2B)
75% of Americans age 12+ (approximately 212 million people) are now familiar with podcasting. (Edison Research).
This means marketers who aren’t using podcasting as their marketing strategy are missing out on a massive audience with the potential to become your customers.
Also, just like videos, podcasts are an easy way of consuming content. When compared to videos and blogs, they need your undivided attention to consuming the content. Whereas people can listen to your podcasts from literally anywhere – home, gym, while driving, work. Especially for commuters, podcasts are the most preferred way of consuming content. As they spend a significant amount of time traveling, many professionals prefer to make the most out of it by listening to informational podcasts.
Podcasts are a great way of building brand affinity. Just like Netflix, podcasts also give a binge-worthy experience to their listeners. Wherein subscribers wait and get excited about the release of new episodes of your podcast.
#4 Long-Form Content
Long-form content is not just limited to long blogs. It also includes content forms like e-books, whitepapers, guides, tutorials. If you are wondering what the length of your content must be? Then anywhere between 2500 – 3000 words can be considered as long-form content. It wouldn’t be a loss even if you push it to a whopping 10,000 words unless the quality of your content is good.
Writing in-depth content makes you appear to be more expert at the topic. It gives out a good impression of the extent of services/products your business can provide. When your long-form content is high quality and provides some helpful information, users continue reading it until the end, which signals that Google ranks better on SERPs.
#5 Utilizing communities on social media
While the whole world was forced indoors due to the pandemic, it worked as a catalyst to give rise to online communities. Marketers across industries are building communities where like-minded people belong. Building communities to distribute their content has proven beneficial as it helps marketers expand their reach.
And the hot topic trending right now is subscription-based communities. Wherein subscribers need to pay for accessing the content distributed in the community. You wouldn’t believe me when I say that these kinds of communities are flourishing with more and more people willing to pay for accessing the content while there are free resources on the internet.
Conclusion
Well, there you go! Follow these latest trends to stay relevant to the current content marketing environment. You must have come across the famous phrase by bill gates – ‘Content is King’, it is going to remain true in the coming years. Content will always remain as a king, but the forms of content may sure change. Just the way we saw videos transcend infographics and blogs. Stay updated with the latest content trends and stay ahead of your competitors.
