There is only one truism that will always apply to content marketing: This industry is constantly evolving, and your content marketing strategy must stay closely aligned with the latest changes. Remaining stagnant will drive customers away and slowly but surely shrink your bottom line. Rethinking your content marketing for 2022 is certainly the proactive thing to do but in this day and age, it is also mandatory for success.
Content Marketing Strategy Basics
An article posted on Knowledge Enthusiast describes five ways to revamp your content marketing strategy in the coming year. To start the process, you need to understand where your company’s content marketing strategy stands right now. Has it achieved the goals it was set out to attain, or do the metrics show that your objectives are far out of reach? Analyze the measurable results – good and bad – and determine what needs to be improved.
To get things moving in a better direction, look at your current content marketing team. You need to have a diverse group of content marketing professionals who possess a solid range of interests and skills. They need not all be your own staff members – hiring outside experts can help you develop new ideas that can be to your benefit. The latest content marketing tools can also boost your efforts, but will they work with your existing systems? It is wise to develop a marketing technology roadmap in order to ensure that the new is compatible with the old – the systems have to be able to communicate with each other.
Create a vision of what you want your content marketing in 2022 to look like, and work to create an overall theme for your content. This kind of well-thought-out framework can organize the integrate your content and serves as a guideline for developing an editorial calendar. The theme will also work to strengthen your brand’s voice, and keep it consistent throughout the coming year and well into the future.
Content Marketing Strategy Specifics
Although everyone understands the importance of attracting new customers, Jeff Bullas stresses that customer retention will be a strong focus for 2022 content marketing strategies. After all, what’s the point of getting someone’s attention if you aren’t able to keep it? Websites should be kept up to date, and include product highlights, features, updated informational content and discounts. Also: Do your customers stay engaged after they make purchases, or forget about you afterward?
Augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) are nothing new, but if you aren’t on this bandwagon it is time to hop on. AR provides users with better visual experiences, and if your images do not enhance your content in big ways, your audience will search elsewhere. It is more personalized, fresh technology that incorporates interactive features that create stronger user connections. An obvious example of AI is chatbots, which have automated features to help customers make decisions more quickly while cutting down on your labor costs.
You might also want to think about podcasts as being part of your revamped content marketing strategy. Educational podcasts are more popular than ever; there are around two million of them in existence as of this writing. They have a human touch that can be lacking in text content, and can leave longer-lasting impressions that can influence purchasing decisions.
Optimizing Your Content More Effectively
As Google continues to evolve, its algorithms get better at finding content that has more relevant, reliable information. Growth99 claims that SEO rankings will be even more competitive going forward, and content that is not high-quality will be much farther down on the results pages. Images and videos will play a more important role in searches too, as will local SEO.
Now is the time to weed out content that is off-topic, misleading, useless or redundant. This source also predicts that the snippet sections on search result pages will disappear, as they are thought to provide incomplete and misleading information. They also explain that mentioning the same keyword repeatedly (keyword spamming) will not increase web traffic. The newer algorithms will also consider a keyword’s related words or synonyms, and will categorize the word “excited” as spam.
Content should also be optimized for mobile devices and voice search. It is estimated that 36 million Americans use voice-activated assistant gadgets, so if your technology is not compatible you could be losing out. Jeff Bullas adds that having FAQ content as part of the strategy can be very useful, since people are always voicing their questions and seeking answers. Other trends worth looking into include account-based marketing strategies (ABM) that target companies, data-driven marketing tactics and more thorough documentation of content marketing strategy metrics every few months or so.
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