Top 11 Content-Marketing Trends You Should Be Aware of in 2022

4. Developing Video Content

Entertaining, engaging, highly informative videos are an effective way of getting viewers excited about a brand. High-quality videos improve the customer experience by revealing your brand’s personality and connecting with viewers, which could explain why consumers increasingly prefer to learn about products and companies by viewing videos rather than by reading text.

However, with so many videos online today, the big challenge for businesses is creating content that captures viewers’ attention and simultaneously sets their brand apart from the competition. If you lack the in-house resources that are necessary to produce high-quality videos, consider bringing professional scriptwriters and videographers on board to write and produce your videos.

5. Creating Audio Content

The number of podcasts continues to grow because listeners enjoy the convenience of learning or being entertained while driving to work, doing errands, or exercising. Content-marketing podcasts are capable of increasing customers’ awareness and loyalty, as well as conversions.

Creating podcasts is relatively easy. The necessary equipment is inexpensive, and recording a podcast requires no special training. If you aren’t sure about what topics your podcast should cover, consider converting blog posts or videos into podcasts. Invite guests to participate in your podcasts and volunteer to participate in theirs.

6. Incorporating VR and AR

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are becoming increasingly popular in content marketing. VR technology lets the user view a 3D world through a head-mounted display and is useful in gaming as well as digital-marketing applications. VR is vital for marketing in the metaverse. AR lets ecommerce shoppers project real objects onto a digital image so they can virtually try on clothing and eyeglasses or try out furniture and paint colors in their own environment.

If you haven’t used AR or VR to immerse prospects or customers in your brand, now is the time to incorporate these technologies into your marketing strategy.

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7. Adding Shoppable Links

Today’s consumers are always in a hurry so the worst thing a company can do is to make the purchasing process more difficult or time consuming. One way in which you can improve your brand’s cachet is by shortening the sales journey—enabling users to shop directly from whatever place they first learned about a product or service—whether a Web page, image, ad, or social-media post. Selling when customers are most inspired to purchase enhances the user experience, increases your conversions, and cultivates brand loyalty.

8. Increasing Personalization

While email marketers have long customized content by addressing their intended recipients by their first name, this trend goes much further. I’m referring to the personalization of each customer’s experience by tailoring it to his or her needs and desires.

When you undertake personalization properly, each visitor sees a unique ecommerce page—one that incorporates the user’s browsing history and provides lists of recommended and complementary products. You can obtain the necessary customer information through deep data analysis, artificial intelligence (AI), the customer’s Web-browsing history, and other methods.

9. Establishing Partnerships

Marketers often build or augment their audience by leveraging the existing, well-established audiences of other brands. Let’s consider a few ways in which you could do this. Publishing guest blog posts on your Web site might bring visitors to your site who are part of that author’s audience. Establishing contacts and building relationships with key social-media influencers exposes your brand to the influencer’s audience. Responding to social-media posts that are relevant to your brand or product also gets your name in front of your target audience.

10. Tailoring Content to the Buying Stage

Creating content that you’ve tailored to each stage of the buyer’s journey is vital. During the exploratory phase of this journey, the customer is searching for a type of product or service that would solve a problem or meet a need; while at the later stages, the customer is more focused on comparing product features and benefits before making a final purchasing decision.

From the beginning steps to the final stage of the buying process, your content’s goals progress from increasing prospects’ awareness through blog and social-media posts, videos, and podcasts; promoting research and evaluation by sending email messages to customers and sharing ebooks or whitepapers with your site’s visitors; and giving reasons for customers to buy by providing product-comparison guides, case studies, and samples or demos.

11. Focusing on Value-Driven Content

Today’s consumers expect their preferred brands to do more than just offer their products and services. People want to do business with companies who are honest, empathetic, transparent, and committed to social and environmental causes. A marketing strategy in which a company creates trustworthy content, takes the time to build relationships with its audience, and helps improve its communities ensures that they’ll see results in the form of customer loyalty and increased revenues.

Conclusion

Creating effective content is the best—and maybe the only—way to market your products or services all day, every day. Perhaps that is why 67% of marketing executives who responded to a 2021 survey said they plan to increase their content-marketing budget in 2022, while only 5% anticipated spending less on content marketing.

If you’re among those marketers who are planning to increase or at least maintain your content-marketing expenditures this year, be aware that you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck if you incorporate the trends I’ve discussed in this article into your content-marketing strategy.