Content marketing has grown significantly in the last few years. It was already a strong presence online, but now it’s something every brand needs to pay attention to. You’ll see that your clients will need to get involved as well. It’s set to expand even more.
We’ve put together 10 facts about the phenomenon that we think your clients would be interested in. It’s all compelling stuff, and it shows just how content marketing is going to grow this year.
Buyers like it
There was a time when loud and flashy ads were the best way to attract new clients or contracts. That has shifted. Now, most buyers in companies prefer to see knowledge shared through articles, posts, and more in-depth content. If they notice a brand doing this regularly, they are more inclined to make a purchase.
What this means is that brands (including your clients) need to have a full content strategy that covers all areas of content, and feeds the audience with what they want.
Original written content is still viable
It’s easy to jump on a trend or two, and it’s actually exciting, especially when new content formats arise. Remember when infographics became huge? Everyone started coming out with new infographics, some of which didn’t even make sense.
While trends are fun, what’s interesting to note is that the popular brands out there, and the bigger brands, are busy creating original, high quality written content. And it’s being appreciated by audiences.
That original written content is getting longer
And it’s a good thing. Written content used to be short and sweet, just enough to avoid Google not finding it. Then, people started to realise that having long, involving and intelligent content was the way forward.
Expect longer content to be the norm. Written content is still kicking it, but it has to be long, well-structured, and useful. These aren’t your throwaway blog posts, they’ve got to add real value.
Video will blow the world away
While written content still has a place, and a very solid place at that, video cannot be underestimated. It’s estimated that by 2018, over 70% of Internet traffic by consumers will be based around video. They’re watching a lot of video, and they’re using video to make buying decisions.
Whatever phase you’re working on, whether it’s awareness or conversion, you’re going to have to crank up that video budget.
The biggest stressor is engagement
This kind of makes sense. All your client really wants is engagement. This also happens to be one of the major stressors that content marketers and digital agency employees have. Every time they create content, the biggest issue is whether or not it’s going to create engagement, and therefore justify the work done.
Content (good content) builds confidence
We know, it’s a bit of an obvious point. But it’s amazing how many people still feel this isn’t right. If you concentrate on creating the very best content for your clients, you’ll find a corresponding rise in audience sentiment. Sentiment is literally a measure of what your audience feels about you.
Trust is there for everyone to enjoy, but a brand has to earn it. So the next time a client queries the value in uploading a post every week to their blog, just talk about the confidence it is building.
The more you blog, the more you gain
This is a really important aspect of content marketing, a brand that is doing well generally has a high quality blog that is building influence online.
The really good news is that most internet users read blogs. That is excellent news for any brand that is creating a blog alongside all it’s other marketing efforts.
The history of blogging is full of brands that simply did not create enough posts to make things worthwhile. Research has shown that once you hit the sweet spot in post numbers, you can expect your traffic to grow, and therefore your engagement (because you’re creating incredibly useful content).
That sweet spot? It’s between 50-100 posts. Just crank out that blog goodness and you’ll soon see an accompanying rise in engagement, and leads.
Sometimes a small increase makes for big gains
With blogging this is especially true. If you’re able to produce four great blog posts a week, compared to one a week, you’ll see a huge increase in traffic. It kind of builds up over time, but feeding that growth with a consistent frequency of posts makes for big gains.
It’s proof that if you just switch your game up a little, the end result is fantastic. And your clients will love you for it.
Images in posts and articles are the only game in town
Research has shown that images need to be in every piece of content you create (unless it’s video, where you have plenty of images). Articles, posts and updates that contain images gain massively compared to those without. Silly question, but are you ensuring all content for your client has images, all of it?