Overview
Have you ever heard content is king on the internet? If you want to market your business online, you need quality content? The challenge is how do you create great content?
The matter becomes more complicated when we realize content needs change over time. How do you identify content trends over time? How can you then match these trends to your audience needs?
This article addresses how to identify top content trends you can use to improve your content marketing strategy.
5 Content Trends
1. Audience
The first thing you need to know is what does your audience want. Start by discovering where your audience hangs out.
If you use social media marketing, ask your audience whether they spend time on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn? Find out if they use industry forums or read blog posts from experts in their industry. Others might spend time watching YouTube or Vimeo videos.
The more you know about your audience hangouts, the more you understand what they like and do not like.
Use this information to segment your customers. The specific segments help you solve specific problems for them with your products or services.
The more you study your customers online, the better your content marketing results.
One way to do this is by creating multiple landing pages. For example, many large ad spenders have multiple landing pages to test which content their audience likes best.
This accounts for the fact why only 4% of large digital advertisers have one landing page. They know the more pages they create, the more data they can use to generate more leads.
The leads enable them to segment their content even more to the right customers.
2. Trending content topics
Shout advocates creating evergreen content to build your search traffic, we also create timely content pieces as well.
For example, we do seasonal articles like Tips for Marketers During Easter Holidays and Why It’s Already Too Late for Christmas Marketing Campaigns.
To help us identify content trends, we use content marketing tools. Use tools like  BuzzSumo and SEMRush to study these trending topics.
Studying content trends by asking how relevant content pieces are to your content marketing goals.
3. Keep it Simple
Content should be easily digestible. If people need to think too much about content, they will move on to something else.
While your company might not be in the entertainment industry, you should not go out of your way to bore them either. Keep your content interesting and short, so users get more value.
Simplicity keeps visitors on your site longer, so you can build profitable relationships with them.
4. Promote your content
Content marketing by itself is haphazard. However, when you combine it with other promotional efforts you see the greatest returns.
The biggest trend in content creation today happens with promotion. While Google picks up your content, it becomes increasingly hard to rank your content without some promotions plan.
Fortunately, you have a lot of options. This includes paid strategies like search and social ads. Your free strategies include social media sharing, email marketing and connecting with influencers.
It is important you do not let your content sit in a bubble. Make the content part of your larger marketing strategy. Connecting promotions with content helps you accomplish this goal.
5. Mobile Content
The final trend deals with mobile-friendly content. Google’s switch to mobile-first indexing is one in a long-line of moves related to how users interact with content today.
As consumers spend more face time with their phone, we must create content for this platform.
To do this, we have two suggestions.
First, make sure your content loads quickly. No one cares if your content is epic if the page loads at a snail’s pace.
We can write an entire article on website speed. Oh wait, we did! Our website speed guide strategies improve your traffic and engagement.
Second, Use Google AMP. Google created this platform to help mobile articles load in less than 2 seconds.
It can help with your mobile search traffic and when users stay on your site longer because they want to see your content you can get a boost in the rankings.
WordPress sites can set this up with a plugin like Google Amp for WordPress. It is easy to do and provides lasting benefits for mobile website traffic.
Final Thoughts
Content needs change on a constant basis. If you want to get the most out of your content marketing strategy, you need to update your content to reflect customer’s needs.
Use the trends we discussed above to build a solid content marketing strategy for your company.
If you still need help identifying the top content trends for your specific business schedule a free consultation with our content marketing agency today.
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