Blog

By Luke Fitzpatrick

For digital marketers, the new year offers the opportunity to improve and strengthen their marketing strategies. This could mean staying up to date on the trends that could be shaping the world of digital marketing for small businesses.

With the chaos of 2020 behind us, it’s time to take a look at what to expect in 2021. Let’s look at seven of the content marketing trends to adopt this year:

1. Value-oriented content is becoming more important

At this time and age, web users see a lot of content on the Internet. With the sheer amount of blogs and content uploaded every day, you can expect people to get picky about what content to consume. At best, they choose an article that has information they haven’t read anywhere else on the internet.

Remember that you are not the only one offering your products in the market. You need to make sure that you stand out from your competitors. If you give away general information e-books or guides, they are less likely to reveal their contact information to access your offers.

The best chance of gaining your customers’ trust is to offer content that creates value. First, think about how your product will affect their lives in the long run. If you focus too much on promoting the product yourself directly, chances are your audience will skip it and look elsewhere for information they need.

For example, when you sell a fruit juicer, not only can you produce content about what it is and how it is used, but you can talk about the health benefits of consuming fruit juices. You can also talk about how using the fruit juice is helping them, time, effort, etc.

Use specific examples and, if possible, what your customers say. Reading other people’s experiences with a product or service affects how consumers view your product and thus helps you convert them into customers.

2. Video content will continue to dominate in digital marketing

Videos are one of the most effective media for getting your brand across. People are very visual and many consumers prefer to consume information in the form of a 2-3 minute video rather than scrolling through blogs.

When HubSpot conducted a video marketing survey in 2017, they found that 54 percent of their 3,010 consumers in the U.S., Germany, Colombia, and Mexico would love to see branded videos. These video marketing stats from DepositPhotos in 2017 are also worth considering:

• 90 percent of consumers say that watching a video helps them make purchasing decisions.
• Adding videos to your website’s landing pages can result in 80% more conversions.
• Just mentioning videos in your email marketing subject line can lead to a 19% increase in open rates.

If anything, it tells us that if your brand isn’t using video marketing, you can start now. Videos are easy to consume and keep your audience hooked.

With events and face-to-face interaction still limited in 2021, live video events like webinars will be a way for businesses to generate leads, partner with influencers to promote their brand and ultimately grow their bottom line.

3. Consumers will prefer hyper-personalized content

Personalization has long been a digital marketing trend and it will remain so in 2021. However, as customers get smarter, using your customers’ first names may not be enough to improve their experience. If you want to generate more traffic and increase conversions and therefore sales, you need to know what your customers want.

This is where the concept of hyperpersonalization comes into play. Hyperpersonalization is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to collect data from your web visitors – their activity on your website, products they view frequently, and more. The more data you have, the better personalized content you can serve your audience.

You can collect this data using third-party software like Google Analytics, HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, and more. You can use the data to create personalized emails, pop-ups, and other content tailored to your audience preferences. For example, if one of your web visitors has left their cart after shopping, you can send them a follow-up email after a few hours to remind them to complete the purchase.

4. The current authority becomes more important

Search engine algorithms will place more emphasis on expertise and authority when it comes to ranking websites on the search engine results page (SERPs). The current authority speaks about the website’s depth of knowledge when it comes to a specific topic. This is usually achieved by writing longer, high quality content.

The reason for this is that with extensive content you will be able to discuss a topic in more depth. In other words, you are providing your consumers with more information that will ultimately help you gain their trust. If other websites find your content valuable, they can use it as a reference and in turn you will get backlinks – another important SEO ranking factor.

5. Voice searches will affect how content marketing sounds

The advent of Siri, Alexa, and Cortana took people’s strategy to the next level. Today screenless search is something that millions of people in the US do every day. By simply asking the AI-powered voice assistant, they can have the answers spoken to them without even looking at or touching the device.

If you’re looking to improve your content marketing strategy in 2021, optimizing your content for voice search is not just an option, it’s a necessity.

The easiest way to tweak your content is to write your product description so that it simply answers questions. Obviously, this is causing the way content marketing is going to sound to change the way we write, rather than exactly the same as we speak. When optimizing voice search, you need to make sure that your content adapts to natural language.

As you write, try to use full sentences of long-tail keywords in your content. You can also use the search for “near me” to target more targeted and local searches.

6. AI-powered content will dominate

The beauty of artificial intelligence is that it can do a lot of things for people. AI proves this statement in content marketing. It helps gather customer information for personalization, but can also use that data to generate targeted content that they can send to consumers. From captions to summaries, AI-powered tools can help you develop this.

One tool, in particular the OpenAI Company’s GPT-3, is known for generating high quality content. It pulls information and references from all over the internet which it then uses to create content. AI driven content will help build your website’s authority over time.

Chatbots are also AI-controlled and are getting smarter every day. Now stores can use their chatbots to help their customers place orders, check out, and track them. Companies can also use chatbots to provide information quickly and thus further support your company’s content marketing strategy.

7. The atomization of content will be one thing

With human movements still limited due to COVID-19, the diffusion of content will be slightly different in 2021. Marketers would need to use what they currently have to expand their reach. This is where content atomization comes into play.

In content atomization, a long piece of content is broken down into five or more pieces of content. Each of the articles is discussed in more detail and perhaps presented from a new angle.

For example, if you’ve created an eBook guide on your juicer, you can select some of the sub-headings individually and build content on them. You can publish it as a blog or newsletter. You can also convert your eBook into shorter, more digestible content like an infographic.

Continuous production of content will be vital to the advancement of businesses. The content atomization allows them to maximize what they already have and turn it into something more engaging and fun for the audience. It also benefits them so much that they no longer have to spend on content creation as they are just reusing old content.

Final thoughts

You may have heard the saying “content is king” a hundred times, but in 2021 it will remain very true. As people continue to search for new ways to access and consume information, marketers need to adapt to these content marketing trends to ensure they are delivering the content their audience needs at the right time.

Small business digital marketing has come a long way since then. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is for business to survive; they have to be ready to adapt to change. Content offers marketers the opportunity to reach their audience. If you get it right, your strategies can only help convince consumers and convince them to turn into paying customers.

About the author

Luke Fitzpatrick has been featured on Forbes, Yahoo News, and Influencive. He is also visiting professor at the University of Sydney, lecturing on cross-cultural management and the pre-MBA program.