If you are using online marketing to grow your business, then you probably know very well that it’s an industry that changes constantly and that you need to redefine and update your strategy regularly to keep up with the trends. But, among all these changes, one thing has remained constant: the importance that content marketing plays in your overall marketing strategy. As a concept, content marketing has been around for many decades, because of a simple reason: it builds trust in your brand and shows what you’re all about.
But add the internet and search engines to the equation and content marketing has since become a highly competitive, dynamic industry that’s always under some kind of metamorphosis as the technologies themselves are rapidly evolving.
As a marketer, blogger, or business owner, you might already be familiar with the latest content marketing trends, but a valid question may come to your mind: where do we go from here? What’s the future of content marketing?
We at Australian Internet Advertising have asked ourselves the same thing and this is what we anticipate by putting together our years of experience and the passion we have for digital marketing.
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Building Dialogues with Customers
Content marketing on the internet is based a lot on what you, as a brand, can do with what you’re getting from your audience. People express their opinions, likes, dislikes, and wishes on their social media, or as comments on blogs related to their thoughts.
Creating a two-way discussion on what you’re writing/vlogging or posting about is one of the keys to content marketing for the future. Further, we will list some of the main ways you can do that in the present context when search engines are competing for traffic, customers are bombarded with content and AI software writes better and better articles.
Organic Reach Might Not Be Enough Anymore
This might come as big news since organic reach seems to be one of the pillars of good content marketing, but the latest studies and common observations indicate that Google has been prioritising products from its own trust. The first Google search results page has been enriched with various types of entries that never really get you out of Google: “people are also asking”, Google dictionary, carousels, and so on are all elements that you can see on SERPs and that are stealing a chunk of market share from the companies.
This has been one of the major blows for organic traffic lately, but let’s say this didn’t exist and you could still rely on Google to get them fast to where they need to be. You are still competing with billions of blogs. Your ideas are most probably covered already by another company in another blog post.
If writing short articles often seemed to be a perfect solution until recently, this type of strategy is not going to cut it from now on. But more on that later.
Email Marketing Seems to be the Victorious Underdog. Again
Email marketing has been up and down on the list of “things that work best” in content marketing. But it has always been there. And according to future predictions, email marketing is going to have a very important role for companies, allowing them to focus the interaction with the audience on the content and use the content as a means of getting the reader deeper into the sales funnel.
Because social media is so oversaturated with huge amounts of content and derailing conversations, email marketing will be more effective for content creation and promotion, especially with the high degree of customisation that is possible today in an email newsletter or a welcoming email, for example.
You Don’t Have to Write More
Not so long ago, working hard in content marketing meant generating as much content as possible around the topics of interest for your audience. Writing short articles on a daily basis, going around the same subjects will not give you the same good results in the future, because all the repetitive stuff eventually becomes ballast.
From now on, marketers and business owners should focus more on creating different types of content and approaching ideas that are daring, new, and original. The best way to put it is in the words of Andrew Davis, best-selling author, and marketing specialist: “Ask a question that Google can answer”.
Whether you are an expert answering that question with tons of compiled data, first-hand experience, and in-depth analysis of the topics, or you are a visionary starting conversations that will bubble up towards new ideas, create content that offers more than what is already out there.
AI and ML Will Be Increasingly Used
Artificial intelligence is already a well-known tool in digital marketing. It’s been successfully used in A/B testing, SEO, and content analysis. In the future, machine learning and AI will allow marketers to focus on the nuances of content creation and the more abstract approaches, while their AI will do less challenging tasks in a much, much shorter period of time than they were dedicating before.
Bringing AI into the equation will make content marketing easier, or maybe more challenging. There will be more time to improve the user experience, explore new ideas and approaches, and so on. Essentially, it all comes down to offering the end-user what they were looking for in the first place.
Final Thoughts
To conclude, to be successful in content marketing you will have to create value-driven content that brings something new to the table, and diversify the channels you’re using in your content marketing strategy, no matter what form of content you are choosing. In the long-term, creating high-quality content is what keeps your audience with you.