Content Marketing is not at all a new concept in the Digital Marketing Landscape. Rather it has become more important than ever.

As we enter 2019, technology is enabling more intelligent content to be created, while consumers are demanding more facts before they make a purchase. This is putting more pressure on marketers to tailor content that informs, rather than simply sells.

While we may not know what the New Year will bring, one thing is certain – content marketing is here to stay. It isn’t, however, staying the same–new tools emerge, thought leaders put new spins on old marketing tactics and individuals and businesses find new ways to cut through the online “noise” to make an impact. Content marketing connects your brand to your customer. Your work is either going to touch people’s hearts and minds and connect with them in an emotional way or it will miss the mark.

There’s a reason Seth Godin calls content marketing “the only marketing left” – it’s authentic, useful, and perfectly suited for the internet generation. But while few can doubt the effectiveness of content marketing, the channels, tactics and tools marketers use to create and distribute content will continue evolving in 2019 and beyond. What content marketing trends should you watch out for? How should you change your marketing strategy to keep pace with these changes?

In this article, I will let you know the Top Content Marketing Trends for the year 2019.

Content Strategy

Today, many businesses don’t have a content strategy at all. But while that’s bad news for them, it can be great news for you if you start developing a content marketing strategy that aligns with your business goals.

That being said, it’s important to understand that a content strategy is not just an editorial calendar that you plan a few weeks or a month in advance. Rather, it’s a documented strategy that involves:

• Setting goals for your content marketing strategy, particularly goals that will align with your overall business goals so that any content you product helps you reach more business goals (generating more traffic, more leads, making more conversions via your website, blog or email and so on)
• Establishing KPIs (key performance indicators) for measuring your content marketing ROI
• Audience segmentation for increasingly personalized content
• Content repurposing strategy
• Content curation strategy
• Different strategies for different customer acquisition channels

Voice Search

Another big trend we are seeing is interest in voice search. More and more consumers are using voice search technology by Google, Amazon and others, so it’s natural that brands would want to be sure their products or services are mentioned whenever corresponding questions are asked.

Fortunately, optimising for voice search can be as straightforward as incorporating common customer questions and their answers into your website’s content. This has the advantage of improving your overall SEO as well, given Google’s shift towards prioritising natural language responses in the organic results.

To do this well, think about how your target customers might alter their search queries when doing a voice search. That might mean using more words, being more descriptive in your content or focusing more on the long-tail – anything that most closely mirrors the natural language they’d use when speaking.

Cloud Storage

The rise in intelligent content depends very much on the existence of the cloud. Imagine a business has hundreds of pieces of digital media, each with different elements, all tagged using scene, facial and object recognition. If this data is stored intelligently on the cloud, the business can rapidly deploy and share owned assets. Connecting this content library to marketing teams, agency teams and their relevant digital marketing platforms is core to being agile, efficient and ready for 2019.

Create Quality Content

About 78% of consumers say that personally relevant content increases their purchase intent. Your content needs to be original and relevant. It’s pretty simple. Create your own content. Use your own ideas. If you’re short on ideas, hire a consultant, writer or agency to help you create them. No more lazy marketers copying the hottest viral headlines and topics, and fooling themselves into thinking they’re “making it their own” or adding their own personality – when in reality, they’re almost word for word copying and pasting.

Consumers and decision makers are getting smart at avoiding clickbait, and they’re seeking for real content that can help solve their problems quickly and easily. They want you to earn their trust. Our greatest asset as humans is time. Respect the timeline and mindshare of your readers, viewers and listeners and they will love you for it, and they’ll reward you with organic reach and amplification of your brand as they share your amazing content with their friends and colleagues.

Video and Audio Creation

If you haven’t already started using video in your marketing, 2019 i Haven’t started a podcast? Haven’t tested using a bot to provide better customer service? Maybe 2019 is the year you do these things also. The secret to success in 2019 is going to be having the guts to try new things without becoming immediately addicted. Try new formats and mediums, but also be willing to ditch them fast if they are not working.

If you’ve been doing mostly long-form content, it could be beneficial to test out shorter, bite-size formats, like stories on Instagram and Facebook. If you’ve primarily focused on short format video and content, try testing longer form content that can rank well in search, increase traffic and offer SEO benefits. Just as I mentioned in trend #2 above, original and relevant content is key to success.

Don’t “do video” just to do it, don’t do a podcast just because everyone tells you to do a podcast. Instead, take the time to plan out a solid content strategy that attracts your ideal customers, serves your current audience, and works towards your broader goals. If video is what’ll help you do it, then go for video. Have fun with formats that you maybe haven’t as used so deeply in the past, and don’t get stuck on the shiny object, thinking “it has to be live” or “it has to be fancy.” The only thing that really matters is that it has to provide value to your audience.

Effective Communication with the Audience

Learning how to leverage brand storytelling is a skill not all marketers have mastered. Many think it just means they are entitled to talk about themselves more or that they need to get other people to talk about them more. Wrong.

Brand storytelling goes much deeper into who you are, and why you’re doing what you’re doing. Brand storytelling is more about the experience you create, and how you engage your customers, as opposed to bragging about yourself. Big difference.

What’s the story behind your brand and success? What are the hard roads you’ve traveled to get to where you are? How did those bumpy roads then create amazing experiences for your clients, and why?

It takes around seven brand touches for someone to remember you and your brand. Maximize every touchpoint to create experiences that matter, and are based on an intent to truly shape the people and businesses your organization reaches.

Role of Artificial Intelligence

AI is already heavily impacting content marketing and most likely, Artificial Intelligence will change content marketing in big ways over the next few years. A lot of powerful AI technology already exists; however, it’s not highly accessible. As this changes over the course of these next few years, that’s when we’ll truly see the impact of Artificial Intelligence on content marketing.

One of the biggest ways that AI will affect content marketing has to do with analytics and machine learning. Artificial Intelligence can gather and interpret huge amounts of data, amounts that would take months of work from dozens of people, while AI can handle it in seconds. So, what does this mean, specifically, for content marketing?

For one thing, it will allow marketers to build better content marketing strategies. The more data you have about your audience and their interests and preferences, the easier it will be to create and deliver the types of content that they actually want to see.

What’s more, with all of this data you can also build powerful, highly targeted audience segments; this in turn will allow you to create truly personalized content for each of your audience segments: personalized based on their personality traits, their shopping behaviour, their interests, their location and their needs, among other factors.

Keeping your audience interested

One of the major content marketing trends for 2019 should be to add value to your customers. Your customers don’t have a lot of time to read and be engaged with you. So, you must provide value up front and early.

Keep them interested and entertained throughout your content whether it be on your blog or on your social network channel. Give them reasons to click and read or watch more. Make it more about their needs be fulfilled earlier in the process. Too often we tend to write with teasers in the beginning and don’t add the “meat and potatoes” until the very end. Many today (especially from the younger generations) will not take the time to read or watch until the end unless they find the value of their time in the beginning.

Distribution of content

Your work won’t get finished by publishing content to the company blog or social media channels. You also need to be looking for ways to integrate the usage of your content into other organisational departments. And that means producing more than just top-of-funnel content.

If you’re producing middle and bottom of funnel content, which you should be doing, share it with your sales team so that they can integrate it into their cadence or nurturing sequences. Make sure your customer service teams are aware of any content you’ve created that answers customer questions. Add it to your onboarding sequences, where appropriate.

Other departments aren’t going to do this automatically. You don’t just need great content, but you also need a way to effectively disseminate it between departments and integrate it into other peoples’ workflows.

Content Customization

The best results from content occur when that content is tailored as closely as possible to a person’s needs. So, what marketers do to make that happen? Most people these days understand that marketers are tracking their movements online. So, they put that data to good use. It can be expected that dynamic forms that ask progressive questions during subsequent opt-ins are going to be big this year, as will micro-targeted content generated based on customer data and served up to small segments of target customers, rather than to broad audiences.

Conclusion

Content marketing is widely used by a large majority of marketers and businesses. There is a lot of content to compete with and, unfortunately, it’s easy to feel this competition when your content isn’t appearing in search results or in your audiences’ newsfeeds. In order to perform well this year and generate great results from content marketing, stay on top of these trends and use them to create an effective content marketing strategy.