The 7 Biggest Content Marketing Trends for 2021 and Beyond You Need to Know About

Listen to this content! Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

The estimated reading time for this post is 20 minutes

Forecasting content marketing trends for 2021 and beyond, with everything that’s happened, can seem premature. But we are living in unique times. While the long-term impact of COVID-19 economically is an entire topic on its own, it does looks like the worst of the pandemic is finally getting over.  It’s time to ‘girdle your loins’, plan for what’s coming ahead, and take decisive action. Trend-forecasting can help you do just that.

Quickie Overview of Content Marketing Trends for 2021

The quickie overview is that there are really no surprises here. 2021 is just going to be a natural progression of what’s been evolving over the past few years in terms of:

• Content that’s high on expertise and thought-leadership
• Increased development in video content
• Increased focus on search intent
• The rise of content-fuelled communities
• Development of personalized content
• Development of User Generated Content (UGC)
• Further exploration of potential in AI/ML and NLP

If anything, expect businesses to increase spends to focus on at least one or all 3 of these core areas depending on the size of the business and the resources available.

Here’s the more in-depth version with data, the reasons why, and how to leverage these trends effectively:

1. Topical Content Expertise Will be Critical

Statistics highlight the relative importance of long-form content for improved visibility in search engines. While 1500-2500 and above seems like the ideal length to aim for, there are no rules given that the length of the content is just one aspect of popular content. One of the more crucial aspects to consider in content creation is how useful your content is to the intended reader.

How-to-guides and informational/educational content perform better than other types of content for businesses. Here are 3 crucial reasons why this type of content performs the best:

• Readers share more of content that’s educational.
• High-quality content that is relevant and long-form ranks higher in search engines (as a general trend)
• Content expertise highlights that your business is trustworthy and knows what it’s talking about. In effect, this gives consumers a strong reason to want to buy from you
• It increases brand awareness simply by making you more visible

More and more businesses are understanding the value of putting out high-value educational content and so it really is a hard-fought battle to secure the top spots on search engines and stay put there. Topical content expertise then will become much more important in your content marketing efforts.

So, what can you do to establish topical content expertise?

• Structure and develop long-form blog posts (over 1500 words) regularly for your site as part of your content marketing efforts
• Relevance is key when writing content. Think about who you’re writing for and how your content will benefit them
• Cover every possible item under the sun related to the topic that you think will help your reader. A good tip is to thinks in terms of what, how, why, and when, when constructing content. For example, if you’re writing about SEO, think about incorporating sections that deal with what SEO is, why a business needs SEO, when a business should staring using SEO, and how they can go about incorporating SEO. Then create sub-sections under each title.
• Incorporate as much of original research and statistics to back up statements. Think less of vanity metrics and more of targeted insights
• Collect insights from SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) and thought leaders in your space
• Come up with original perspectives and delve deeply into why you’ve decided to take the particular stand
• B2B marketers could look into developing downloadable White Papers and Case Studies that showcase research findings as well as ‘before-and-after’ using the product/service transformation stories

2.Will Video Finally Kill the Radio Star?* – The Undisputed Rise of Video Content Marketing

The Buggles went so far as to predict the death of the radio as early as 1979 in their song ‘Video Killed the Radio Star.’

“Video killed the radio star,” they sang.
“Video killed the radio star, In my mind and in my car.
We can’t rewind, we’ve gone too far”.

But reports of the radio’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. As of 2021, radio is still very much alive, especially in its modern-day cool avatar – the Podcast. While the popularity of podcasts continues to rise, video content marketing is very much the star looming on the horizon in so far as content marketing trends are concerned.

What is Video Content Marketing?

Video content marketing is simply using video content to drive marketing efforts. For this purpose, video content would always incorporate video as the medium of transmission and examples of these would be Vlogs, Webinars, Lives, and video testimonials.

Why is Video Marketing Relevant?

Video is hands down the most popular mode of consuming content in 2021. If you’re an entrepreneur or business considering dipping your toes into video marketing, here are some data-driven insights into why video marketing is a must-do as part of your overall content marketing strategy:

According to Wyzowl, in its State of Video Marketing Report 2021,

• 69% of respondents preferred to watch a short video when learning about a new product or service, while
• 84% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video.

In terms of ROI, Wyzowl goes on to state:

• 86% of video marketers say video has increased traffic to their website.
• 84% of video marketers say video has helped them generate leads
• 78% of video marketers say video has directly helped increase sales.

Award-winning online video maker Animoto did a survey from the marketing perspective in 2018. Here’s what they found on the ROI:

• 88% of marketers are satisfied with the ROI of their video marketing efforts on social media
• 80% of marketers feel good about the ROI of video ads posted on social media.

Also, refer to OmnicoreAgency’s blockbuster list of video marketing-related statistics for more compelling hard data. Here are a few snapshots from the guide:

Best Practices to Effectively Leverage Video Marketing for Your Business

Here are some tips and best practices to effectively leverage video content marketing for your business:

1. Identify your target audience – This is really about figuring out who you’re making the videos for. What is the user-persona you’re targeting – age, demographics, gender, occupation, level of education? Understand the type of lifestyle (for example, habits and interests) that your audience will most likely have as this will influence their purchasing decisions. This will help you refine your content so that you’re sharing material that your ‘target audience’ would find most appealing.
2. Have an end-goal in mind – Before you create a video or series of videos, ask yourself what you want to achieve out of the exercise. Customers typically go through 3 different stages in the purchase cycle – the awareness stage (which is about discovering a product or service), the consideration stage (which is about assessing options in terms of benefits or engaging actively with the brand), and the conversion/decision stage which is when the customer should ideally go ahead with purchasing your product or service. Typically a customer needs to be exposed at least 7 times (according to industry lore) to the benefits of your offerings before being convinced enough to proceed to the purchase stage. The information that you provide at each stage will have different intentions.
3. Narrow down the specific channel you will use – The core criteria here is – is this the place where your typical customers would hang out? You may need to test across a few different video channels to identify where you are getting the best results and scale from there. You also have to try and test different types of content to see which one takes the best. YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest are places where you can source organic traffic using free or paid options.
4. Create Relevant Content – This boils down to doing homework and a lot of it.  Happily, most of the homework is already done for you. If you look through YouTube using the keywords applicable for your specific niche, you will easily be able to identify top-performing topics. But the key really is about how relevant your content is, and the answer to this is based on two factors – whether you’ve stuck to the topic without meandering and answered the question, and also how much value you’ve provided. How long your content needs to be is debatable. Most industry pundits argue in favour of short content, but the fact that people can binge-watch their favourite TV shows or movies for hours at a time ( I quite liked The Alienist, the Sinner , and the Stranger 🙂 ), throws this baby out with the bathwater. At the end of the day, the content has be presented in an interesting and engaging manner deploying marketing best practices. The consumer should want to keep coming back for more.
5. Think about doing live video – Without a doubt, doing live videos is one of the hottest content marketing trends to come out in recent times.  Lives are interactive and engaging and most importantly, they’re live – no cuts, no retakes, and everything’s raw and unfiltered. In fact, that’s part of the reason why live video streaming is so popular. It’s as real as real gets and the audience gets to chip in as it happens.
6. Develop a means to measure performance – Once you’ve mapped out your goal, the next key step is to figure out how you will measure and track your performance. Most mainstream video channels like YouTube,  have their metrics built into their dashboard so you can see how you’re doing.
7. Rinse and repeat across other video channels – Once you’ve found a strategy that works on one channel, its time to scrutinize other potential channels for video marketing. The purpose of doing this is to expand your reach. Not all your customers are going to be in all places all the time.  Right?

3. Laser-targeting Search Intent – Following the Money

Focusing on search intent has been around for ages as far as content marketing trends go. But with competition as fierce as ever and Google’s efforts to make search results smarter, search intent has become singularly important for the content marketer in 2021.

Search intent is simply identifying what a user is looking for when they type terms into Google’s search box. One of the reasons why Google is the most popular search engine in the world is because it constantly aims to provide results that are relevant to what the user is looking for.

Why is Search Intent Relevant?

Being able to identify user intent helps you create the type of content that the user is looking for. There are typically 4 different types of search intent:

• Informational – Informational content is any type of educational content or content that provides information. Here customers have specific questions, for example, What is SEO?, Who is Warren Buffet, How to Make Baked Alaska?
• Navigational – Navigational content is when the user has a hazy idea of what they want and they throw in some phrases on google in the hope of ending up somewhere useful. An example of this is when a customer searches for a specific brand but end up somewhere else. Yup, not the best type of search intent to target.
• Transactional – This type of content relates to the actual process of buying i.e. the consumer is ready to buy. Typical search engine queries of this nature start off with, or include terms like ‘buy’, ‘sale’, ‘discount’, ‘cheap’…etc. For example, ‘buy [product name’] online’.
• Commercial – This is when a person is looking to buy but needs more information before making the final decision. So they will compare different products and look through reviews and comparisons online.

There is another type of content which relates to local searches, which marketers do treat differently. But for the purpose of understanding intent, you could consider the content as falling under any of the above 4 types.

Creating the type of content that users are looking for invariably results in increasing your traffic. But leveraged correctly it can also help with next-level goals like conversions. In other words, search intent is where the money really is.

How to develop search intent-friendly content

• The easiest way to assess search intent is to reverse-engineer from the perspective of your keywords. When you type your keyword on Google, what type of results do you get? The thing with Google is that they’ve developed delivering on search intent to a fine art. So your top 10 list is a pretty good indication of what the user is expecting or want when they type the specific terms.
• The next part of the process is developing content that matches the popular results. If the top 10 results are all literally how-to-guides, then you want to look at developing another how-to-guide. But your guide should be unique, cover all the essentials, and find content opportunities or gaps that the top rankers missed. At the same time, your content has to be original and provide a fresh perspective.

The process that I’ve outlined above is pretty basic. In the real world, you would take into consideration tools and analytics and do a little more in-depth research before diving in. I will cover this topic in more depth in another article.

4. Building Content-focused Communities

Creating content-focused communities is probably one of the biggest content marketing trends that have emerged in the recent past and already in use by some of the biggest brands in the world. In simplistic terms, a business creates an online community for consumers who can share information and knowledge with one another while simultaneously engaging with the brand. Contrary to popular belief, communities like this work exceptionally well for B2B buyers as well. Communities just work. Period.

Why are online communities relevant?

Content-focussed communities have several benefits across the board for businesses:

• It helps you create a formidable and water-tight content strategy. When users engage in communities you get insight into what’s popular and what’s not topic-wise, consumer behavioural trends, and also understand what content performs the best in terms of user engagement.
• Being able to refine your marketing efforts in this way helps you save costs and get significantly better ROI overall.
• It literally is one of the best ways that consumers can engage with your brand particularly if you’re employing best practices in the form of interactive content – surveys, and polls, for example
• You can test how well a potential product or service will do by engaging your community members as part of product development and testing and soliciting feedback at every stage of the process.
• It helps heighten brand awareness and increase the level of customer support which you can provide to your customers

There are multiple online community software tools,free and paid, that you can use to set up your community such that it plays pretty much on auto-pilot. Some of the most common features that most of these software tools provide include:

• Membership management inclusive of the development of feature-rich user profiles
• Content management
• Event management
• Donations management (for nonprofits)
• Customisable platform and user interface
• Gamification
• Content moderation
• Content personalization
• Email marketing
• Customer engagement solutions and interactive content (chats, blogs, lives, polls, surveys..etc.)
• Integration with social networks and across multiple devices
• Ability to create mobile apps
• Online payments
• Analytics and reporting
• Media libraries
• Customer support
• Notifications to consumers via multiple channels
• Smart networking capabilities for members including exclusive customer experiences
• Ability to include consumers throughout the entire cycle of new product ideation and development
• Security

Here are some examples of online community portals developed by top brands in the online space that you can draw inspiration from:

Example 1: Apple (Big Tech)

 

Example 2: FlyerTalk (Aviation)

 

Example 3: Lego Ideas

 

Example 4: Sephora’s Beauty Forum

 

Example 5: Philips Netforum (for medical professionals)

5. Personalized Content 

Consumers are bombarded with marketing messages at every stage of the buyer journey. There is nothing unique or clever to this strategy, and consumers have wizened up. They’re getting better and better at drowning out the noise and sifting the wheat from the chaff.  The next-level strategy here is content personalization.

What is Content Personalization and Why is it Important?

Content personalization is when a business looks at user data in terms of visits, behavioural trends, and preferences; and uses the insights to create targeted content which would be more liked and preferred by the user. In a sense, it’s also about relevance but drilling this down to an individual level.  This can be a complicated process from a manual perspective but there are plenty of automation tools available in the market that can help you achieve this with minimal fuss.

Personalization is a great way to get a customer’s attention. Creating content that appeals to your customer specifically makes for a great user experience and encourages customers to keep visiting. If feels like somebody in the company is actually paying attention to you as an individual.  Pardot had the following compelling data to share on personalized content marketing:

• Businesses that personalize web experiences see an average 19% increase in sales. (MarketingProfs)
• 71% of companies fail to personalize their websites. (Dynamic Yield)
• Personalized marketing emails receive 29% higher open rates and 41% higher click-through rates. (Experian)
• 70% of companies don’t personalize marketing emails. (Experian)

These statistics give us two major insights – there is tremendous potential for businesses to tap into personalized content, and personalization offers an opportunity to exponentially increase ROI.

Here is a visual representation of how different customers view what content personalization means courtesy Concured:

Personalisation leads to an increase in sales and conversions even for B2B buyers, increased customer engagement rates, and helps elevate the brand’s visibility and sheer ‘likability’ factor.

6. User Generated Content (UGC)

User Generated Content (UGC) is any type of content that has been created by users/contributors and consumers and posted online via any of the social networks or community forums. This can be in the form of text (blog posts, testimonials, news…etc.), visual (images), video (YouTube, Instagram…etc.) or audio (podcasts, audio files..etc.).

UGC has a different kind of magnetic draw simply because the content is being driven by the average person next door and not marketers. The difference is a little something called ‘trust’. It’s easier to trust a person who seemingly has no vested interest in sharing content about a brand or service.  Plus you can relate to them.

The Benefits of User Generated Content

UGC is a powerful way to boost brand visibility, increase organic traffic (zero to minimal cost), enhance consumer loyalty, and drive customer engagement. You also gain access to trends and new insights courtesy of your target audience. It is a cost-effective way to leverage consumer sentiments to drive sales.

How to Drive Powerful User Generated Content

There are many ways you can drive UGC, and the more creative you can get, the better. Here are some typical ways businesses influence the mass creation of UGC:

• Polls and Surveys, the more interactive the better
• Contests ( Encourage members to share images and stories revolving around their experience with your brand in exchange for prizes, as a specific example)
• Bring on board experts for lives or podcasts to address consumer queries ( Q&As) or to provide informational content
• Highlight member contributions or interview members who have developed a strong following on the platform (its a bit like influencer marketing but super-targeted with a specific business focus). In other words, make the customer the story.

7. AI/ML/NLP-fuelled Content Marketing – Leveraging the Power of Automation

It’s only a matter of time before AI (Artificial Intelligence), ML (Machine Learning), and NLP (Natural Language Processing) start to dominate the realm of content creation and distribution. They have flipped the world of traditional marketing 360 degrees on its head.

According to Search Engine Journal (SEJ), “in 10 years, AI-generated content probably will be the norm. In 20 years, robot content creators might take over the reins entirely.”

With that said,  AI has considerable scope in the context of content marketing particularly for time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks such as data analysis, the actual creation end-to-end creation of content, and distribution to scale. Here are some of the biggest trends as they relate to the infusion of AI and ML in content marketing:

Benefits of using AI-driven content marketing tools

AI (Artificial Intelligence) can help you deliver high-quality content that produces bottom-line results on your marketing metrics and help you do this fast. Here are just some of the ways AI-driven content marketing tools can benefit you :

1. Generate topic ideas for content –  AI and ML tools with predictive features can automatically and intelligently sift through target audience interests and competitive analysis to generate topics for content. Coming up with blog topics ideas traditionally can be labour-intensive. This list contains several examples of blog topic generators that use these concepts, albeit, on a fundamental level.
2. Auto-generate content – AI tools can also help you create outlines based on in-depth research of keyword and search intent data the way Frase does or create content drafts that require minimal editing the way MarketMuse does. Both examples are discussed in a little more detail below.
3. Auto-optimize content/Measure performance – AI/ML tools can help you by suggesting topics and keywords that have a proven track record of performing well on search engines. You can further refine content with these tools plus score your content with inbuilt rating tools.
4. Personalize the content experience: Chatbots are a well-known example of leveraging AI/ML and NLP to personalize the user experience. From a sales perspective, AI-powered algorithms track user behaviour  (likes, shares, wishlists, add to cart..etc.) on the platform and recommend products and services to the user.  When  you’re constantly bombarded with images of products you’ve previously liked, they become more prominent in your mind and you may progress to the actual purchase. E-commerce sites like Amazon and Flipkart are great examples of this scenario in practice.

Specific use-cases of AI / ML & NLP driving content marketing trends

Here are just a few examples of AI-driven content tools that are available in the market today:

• FRASE 

Frase has a lot of interesting features that make it a valuable addition for content marketers who want to save time but still get more done. Frase can generate everything you need for an article including outlines, headlines, FAQs, statistics and news. It can help you set up a customisable content brief from a specific keyword with guidelines on tone, style, and SEO recommendations. The Frase Topic Score also helps you score your content against those of your competitors and optimize them accordingly.

• MARKETMUSE

MarketMuse works through the entire lifecycle of content generation from planning to creation.  It provides in-depth analytics and guidelines for finding opportunities for content pages and topics using AI-driven analytics, competitor research, as well as search intent.  Aside from content marketing strategy, content creation, and content optimization, it can also generate a preliminary first-draft article. which the company assures us, will require minimal editing. This type of automatic content generation is a specific example of using NLP. NLP or Natural Language Processing is how computers analyze, interpret, and manipulate the human language.

• PATHFACTORY

PathFactory enables you to nurture consumers in real-time through micro-personalised content at every step of the buyer/customer journey and also get 360-degree insights into the hows, wheres, and whens of content consumption. In other words, it helps engage consumers in an intelligent manner while giving you usable intelligence into how much time is being spent by a ‘user or an account on every single asset and web page‘

And that brings us to the end of this article. Also, check out the Content Marketing Institute’s 100+ content marketing predictions for 2021 here. What do you think is going to be the biggest content marketing trend for 2021 and beyond? Lemme know in the comments below, I love to hear from you!’