In our recent post regarding how users are searching in 2016, we mentioned that consumers love to research. According to the Mintel flagship report, more than 70 percent of shoppers require input from friends or online reviewers before they make any purchase.
However, research is no longer a chore endured only to find the best products. In fact, researching has become somewhat fun, as long as businesses and writers keep their content engaging and entertaining.
Developing appealing content across your channels is important in the New Year. Therefore, having a strong focus and a defined goal at the beginning of the year can help guide your content strategy. These simple tips and trends in content marketing will help avid researchers to find you and stay engaged with your content.
Develop a Branded Content
Businesses and bloggers are constantly creating new content and ways to produce content that readers will want to engage with.
Building a branded content site isn't a new trend for content. In fact, it has been around for more than a century. Some attribute its beginnings to John Deere, which published the successful content magazine, The Furrow, in 1895.
Today, several content-branded sites have become extremely popular or even as experts of their industry. For example, Adobe’s CMO is one of the most popular websites to provide marketing advice and tips.
This year, you should start developing branded content for your business. Creating branded content will help you strengthen your brand and drive more traffic to your site. Best of all, you can stand out in your industry as an expert and provide helpful tips for your readers and customers.
Try New Platforms
No one can deny the power of the company blog, but the Internet is never a stagnant thing, and 2016 will bring many changes to traditional content publishing. Various new platforms for content are emerging, and you should be willing to explore new venues to find new audiences.
For one, Facebook’s “Instant Articles” is a new opportunity for your business to publish content directly on the platform. Facebook has always been a great place to share content, photos, and links with friends and families. The new addition of Instant Articles will be a great way to create interactive articles directly on Facebook.
Additionally, consumers are hungrier than ever for easily digestible, visual content, and delivering more than the written word may be essential to your survival in 2016.
Virtual reality technology? Oculus Rift? Although these types of technology still seems to be a little far away before it becomes widely popular, staying informed about the possibilities of technology advances that influences marketing is crucial.
Get Help from Experts
Who writes your content?
Sometimes, it may be easier to write your own content, but experts in the industry are skilled to create content that can generate traffic and boost your SEO.
Though it may be cheap to use freelance writers or even robots to popular your site with curated content, but they may not have the skills and knowledge to create content that drives positive results.
You deprive your audience of a valuable resource when you have writers that aren't familiar with the industry. Therefore, you should seek out experts to help you create content.
Be Efficient with Tools
As a business owner, if you're managing your own content strategy, you are probably faced with many tedious tasks to manage your business.
The more energy you dedicate to dull administrative tasks, like watching trends, scheduling posts, and analyzing activity, the less energy you have to give to more creative (and ultimately more rewarding) activities, like content and campaign brainstorming.
Fortunately, a number of digital tools are available to cut the time and effort you put into the clerical duties.
At the bare minimum, you should have a content calendar, a social media dashboard, and an analytics program to help your team stay organized, but you might also invest in content curation software, like ContentDJ and Feedly, or even free websites like Reddit.
Obtain More Data
"Big data" has definitely been a buzz word in the industry for the past year, but the importance of aggregating and analyzing information has not dissipated in the New Year. To create the content your audience wants, you must understand what type of content goes viral and which gets barely a bounce back.
To continuously gain insight on your market and users, it is important to incorporate more tools that will generate in-depth information for your business. The more data you can obtain about your target market, the better you can craft your marketing strategies. This way, your content will be more catered and focused.
Complex tools and services like Mixpanel (which tracks user behavior on websites) and Content Scoring (which calculates the real value of various posts) will provide more information and thus more improvement in all your content.
Content continues to be a crucial part of a business' marketing strategy. Share with me in the comments below other ways to make your content more fun and engaging.
on
Hi.
I am a big fan of your blog. I had read many of your great articles and learn great techniques and methods to do proper research. This information again is very interesting and all case studies are very inspiring.
on
Really nice article Tiffany. The way I see it, most bloggers make a mistake by allowing almost everyone to write on their blog. This can deter you from achieving your goals. I have worked with numerous websites that have meaningless content just because they lack knowledge or were not interested in performing addition research.