We’re at the point where we’re done with the year and excited for the upcoming one. As digital marketers and small business owners, we tend to look back to plan our marketing strategy ahead of time.
We look at what worked and what didn’t, including the biggest technology trends affecting content marketing.
Content marketing is an integral part of a small business’ strategy, especially if you’re in the eCommerce industry. Content includes web copy, social media, email marketing, ads, and videos.
Today, we’re here to look at digital technology trends impacting your content marketing strategy.
Which trends impact your content marketing?
Out of the many trends we’ve seen this, the one’s stand out the most are:
- Artificial intelligence
- Voice search
- Skills gap
- The classics
Bots are rolling out as one of the leading digital trends. Along with AI and other machine learning technologies, it’s helping advertisers create more personalized content for their subscribers and email list contacts.
The rapid increase also creates a skills gap in the workplace because it’s hard to stay on top of new and trending trends. Whether you’re a small business owner or a marketer, it crucial to keep you and your team well-versed with the latest technology.
But this doesn’t mean you should forget and disregard the oldies but goodies, because marketers still rely heavily on them, according to Content Marketing Institute:
- Social media (85%)
- Email marketing (82%)
- Analytics (77%)
- Marketing automation (68%)
- Workflow/project management/calendar tools (60%)
- Content creation/optimization (56%)
- Content management (56%)
What trends should you incorporate into your small business?
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
They’re for us. They’re not here to steal our jobs.
The data machine learners and bots gather are critical to personalize your content based on your target audience. You’ll be able to better segment your email campaigns. Guaranteed.
Voice Search
We now have Siri, Alexa, and Google that we utilize when our hands are preoccupied with driving or slicing onions. Voice searches are longer than our regular than online searches. It involves more than three words.
A typical question is something like, “What’s the weather today?” This means your copy resembles natural language.
When you do this, your content appears on top of Google’s results page.
Content marketing is more than meets the eye
This includes:
Social media
You need to understand each platform to gain a better understanding of how you can maximize its format.
Take Instagram Stories, for instance. It’s taking over the app when it comes to publishing content. Stories are growing 15x faster in January 2019, with around 500 million daily active Stories users.
Email marketing
Nothing is new with email marketing. But in this fast-paced digital world we live in, it’s still one of the best options to reach your demographic. Email campaigns still provide a very reliable ROI $44 for every $1 spent.
Video marketing
Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok, there’s no escaping this growing trend.
Don’t believe us?
- YouTube has about 5 billion videos every day.
- Facebook has about 8 billion daily video views.
- TikTok has 850 million active users.
Podcasting
Many people have zero to little time to read a blog because we’re hobbled by long commutes and traffic jams. But this is the perfect outlet for podcasts.
Statista’s study suggests that around 50% have listened to a podcast:
The future of content marketing
There’s so much new technology popping left and right that it’s hard to predict industry trends in the next couple of years. But here are some things small businesses can incorporate into their marketing strategy.
We need to rethink content marketing. The whole social media machine is churning content like crazy. There’s more of it out there on multiple platforms than we want.
“Publish less. Publish well,” Justin Lee suggests. He wants to refocus on publishing content only when we have something worthy to say.
What you can do instead is to:
- Update meta titles and descriptions.
- Refresh some of your copy, headlines, and CTAs. Improve their quality.
- Check to see if the links are still current and still working.
There will always be new content marketing technologies. The crucial thing to know is understanding each one and knowing which ones your business can leverage.
Successful content marketing doesn’t rely on technology. It’s the innovative, creative people that you surround your small business with.
So, when planning future strategies, make sure the content you create adds value to your readers. You should also be able to adapt to new technologies and always be current with all the updates.
Send us a message if you’re ready to take your content marketing strategy to the next level.
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