7 Content Marketing Trends for 2022 Every Marketer Should Know

It’s no surprise that content marketing is a powerful marketing tool that helps businesses achieve their conversions and sales goals. Creating high-quality, engaging content and solving your customers’ pain points is a result-driven strategy that convinces your potential customers to come back for more. According to statistics, content marketing is a cost-effective tactic that generates 3X more leads compared to traditional marketing tactics.

With a powerful content marketing strategy, you can attract, engage and retain customers and convince them to become your loyal customers. The ultimate goal of creating informative content is to maximize user engagement, increase brand loyalty and enrich your website rankings.

Brands that use content marketing experience 6X increase in the conversion rate than those who don’t use this effective strategy. Today brands are creating educational articles, informative videos, webinars and crafting personalized social media marketing campaigns.

If you are optimizing your content marketing strategy, here are the latest content marketing trends for 2022, you should follow to achieve the desired results.

1. Leverage AI to Create Personalized Content

2. Visual Storytelling

3. More Podcast Production

4. Optimizing Content for Voice Search

5. More Video Content

6. Harness the Power of Webinars

7. Re-Optimizing Content for Search Intent

Content Marketing Trends for 2022

1. Leverage AI to Create Personalized Content

Artificial intelligence isn’t new, this amazing technology is making exceptional changes in the digital business world. Many established brands are already implementing artificial intelligence to personalize their website design, emails, social media posts, and other types of content. AI-powered content has the potential to deliver a personalized customer experience and fulfill their needs and demands right away.

Businesses can adopt advanced AI methods that are relevant to their niche, product or service. AI technology helps brands to create personalized content to drive engagement, conversion and loyalty. Content that provides real value and meets the audience’s expectations creates a great impact on purchase decisions.

It is strongly advised to use AI to strengthen your content marketing strategy for 2022 and perform more tactical tasks. With AI-powered tools, you can create different types of personalized content, including:

· Personalized emails

· Retargeted ads for social media

· Personalized quizzes

· Location-based offers

· Utilize gamification in mobile apps and websites to collect data and boost engagement

2. Visual Storytelling

In this digital age, it is impossible to ignore the growing importance of visual storytelling. The growing trend of searching for and downloading content in visual form has made it indispensable for marketers to create more visual content. Today, more and more brands are creating videos, images, infographics and illustrations to tell their brand story.

Visual storytelling is one of the best content marketing trends for 2022 that helps marketers to connect on an intellectual and emotional level. It is the simplest and smartest way to help potential customers understand what’s the point of your brand’s existence and remember the message your brand wants to convey.

If you are not using the power of visual storytelling, now is the time to start posting images and videos on social media platforms and blogs that your customers can connect with. Whether you tell your brand story with video content or use powerful images, visual storytelling makes your content marketing game strong and effective.

You can use social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to share your visual stories. A study has shown that Facebook video posts have the potential to get 135% higher organic reach compared to image-based posts. Similarly, sharing or scheduling a tweet with an image can generate more engagement – 150% more retweets.

Source: Digital Marketing Philippines

The use of images and videos within blog posts also increases the chances of social sharing and increases website traffic by 48%. Keep in mind, consumers view hundreds of posts per day, the key is to create visual content that they remember. You should use high-quality videos, images and beautiful graphics in your content marketing strategy to drive emotions and motivate potential customers to take action.

3. More Podcast Production

Today, podcasting has become a unique and effective medium to reach your potential customers. Your target audience can listen to you while driving, working, cooking, walking, etc. which allows brands to establish a connection with your audience. Marketers are using this effective strategy to deliver relevant content to reach their target audience.

Podcasts are gaining huge popularity day by day. According to Statista, in 2019, more than 88 million people in the United States listened to a podcast monthly and the number is expected to surpass 160 million by 2023.

Many established brands including Sephora, Basecamp, eBay, Buffer, Blue Apron, etc. are harnessing the power of podcasting and connecting to their potential customers. You should produce more podcasts to strengthen your content marketing strategy in 2022 and connect with more consumers.

Reinforce your content marketing strategy by creating more podcasts that allow you to:

· connect with an audience who are interested to tune in

· supplement your brand’s blog and video strategies

· Available on demand, regardless of the day it airs or days after it releases

· Earn potential customers’ audio attention and become part of their daily routine

4. Voice-Activated Content

It’s no surprise that voice is the future of online search. Optimizing content for voice search is a sensible strategy to supercharge your content marketing efforts. With the advent of Alexa and Siri, consumers are using spoken search commands to look for the desired product, brand or content instead of typing a keyword in the search bar.

Therefore, you need to use strategic keywords and phrases and optimize content in a way that enables search engines to crawl, index and rank. You need to optimize your content in such a way that can also rank high in voice search results. Make sure your content is specific and concise to increase your chances of appearing at the top of voice generated search results pages.

In order to provide the best results according to user intent and create the best possible user experience, you should optimize your content for voice search.

· Focus on long tail keywords

· Use location-based queries

· Create conversational, concise content

· Structured your FAQ page

· Create Who, What, Where and How questions

· Anticipate all the possible user questions and answer those questions in your website content

5. Harness the Power of Webinars

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more brands have started using virtual events to promote their products or services. Webinars are undoubtedly an interesting and informative platform that can deliver valuable content to your target audience. Basically, it is an online presentation that allows marketers to share multimedia content to convey their point of view. Adding webinars to your content marketing strategy can create a more pleasurable experience for your buyers.

Many brands are using webinars to create meaningful relationships with their potential and existing customers, while some are using it to create brand awareness. Webinars are a perfect medium to showcase the benefits of a particular product or demonstrate the reasons to choose your services.

If your brand never hosted a webinar before, now is the time to follow this amazing content marketing trend and make the most out of it. Hosting webinars allow you to:

· Deliver more valuable content

· Create a unique position in the market

· Become an industry expert

· Interact with your target customers

· Reach your potential customers live and afterward

· Live contact with your target audience

6. Re-Optimizing Content for Search Intent

According to recent statistics, Google processes more than 40,000 search queries every second and approximately 20% of queries are unique and have never been asked before. To strengthen your online presence, your brand needs to make sure the website is at the top of search results when potential customers search for information relevant to your product or service.

In order to get the top position in the SERPs, you need to thoroughly understand the consumers’ search intent. Analyzing search intent allows you to create content that is specifically tailored to fulfill the needs of your potential customers.

Several studies have shown that pain and pleasure are the two fundamental driving forces that encourage users to type a query into a search engine. However, informational, commercial, navigational and transactional are the most common types of search intent. Therefore, content marketers are advised to create a meaningful connection between the search intent and content. With proper keyword optimization, you can create a better user experience.

Integrating keywords into your content will help you create valuable content for your users, which will help you generate qualified leads to your site and keep customers on your web page. When you optimize your content for search intent that creates value for readers will give your website an SEO boost.

Follow these important steps to optimize your content for search intent:

· Carefully match the content format with the search intent

· Add FAQs section in your website content

· Categorize your content by search intent

· Optimize content for passive and secondary intent

7. More Video Content

According to recent video marketing statistics, by the end of 2022, approximately 82% of all global traffic will be video content. A survey suggests 78% of people watch videos online every week and 55% of consumers watch videos on a daily basis. This is why creating more video content has become indispensable for brands to fulfill the demands of modern shoppers.

Video is the most powerful medium that helps brands connect with potential customers and build deeper relationships with your target audience. In fact, video content is a crucial part of your content marketing strategy that can better convey your brand message and promote your products or services.

Creating informative, educational and interesting videos can be used to drive brand awareness, boost conversions and improve customer retention.

Ahrefs, a famous SEO tool is making the most of video content and using this strategy to attract new customers and educate current customers. They create videos on different SEO related topics and educate people on how their product can help improve their SEO strategy. Undoubtedly, this strategy works well for the brand and helps them drive more conversions.

A Brief Recap

Brands need to adopt the latest content marketing trends for 2022 to gain an extra edge in the digital business world. A well-planned content marketing strategy that includes all the emerging trends will help you create better content and deliver an incredible user experience. Making some important tweaks to your content marketing strategy will help you attract more users, drive more sales and achieve your marketing objectives for 2022 and beyond.