Content marketing is an important aspect for businesses if they want to reach out to prospective customers and improve conversions. 95 percent of users only look at the first page of search results and half of the clicks on SERPs go to the top three results. So, if your content appears on the second page, most people won’t even see it and even if you secure a first-page position, it won’t directly guarantee conversions. This is exactly why content is worth optimizing.
For 2020, you need to determine what inspires your target audience to create content that can engage users and convince them to interact with your brand. In this article, we’ll discuss the top content marketing trends for 2020 that you should integrate into your marketing strategy to get the best results possible.
Voice search optimized content
By the end of 2020, over 50 percent of the searches will be voice searches. Moreover, 30 percent of all the searches will be done without a screen. In 2018, it was reported that nearly 20 percent of US adults own a smart speaker now, but this number is expected to double by 2022.
Voice search optimized content will dominate the content marketing trends in 2020. As a result, optimizing content for voice search is no longer an option for brands, it has now become a necessity if they want to stay ahead of their competitors. Not to mention, providing compelling and engaging voice-activated content to users opens up new avenues of engagement for your business.
The continued popularity of videos
Video has now become a critical part of the customer journey. Over 80 percent of customers switch between online search and videos while researching products they want to buy.
As a result, 81 percent of businesses are already using videos as their main marketing tool (this number is up from 63 percent last year). Mobile video consumption is already rising by 100 percent every year and by 2022 it is expected that online videos will drive more than 82 percent of the total customer internet traffic.
For the year 2020, marketers should focus on how they can make video a major component of their content marketing strategy. The easiest way to get started is by creating video versions of your existing blog posts and uploading them to both your website and YouTube.
Content creation driven by user and search intent
Recent updates to Google’s algorithm have made it clear that preference will be given to content which focuses on the user and search intent.
Search intent can be described as the main reason behind a search engine query. Why did the user make this search? Do they want to learn something? Do they want to buy something?
In other words, it means that Google’s algorithm is advanced enough to understand what the users are looking for. So, when you search for the ‘best running shoes,’ Google isn’t going to show you a landing page for different shoe brands no matter how much they optimize their page.
Why? Because Google knows the users are looking for comparison articles and listicles that can help them decide which running shoes to buy.
Personalized user content
Today’s customers are used to sponsored content on social media and the promotional newsletters that land in their inbox every day. Creating the same content for all of your customers, regardless of their interests, may not give you the results that you want.
Modern customers now expect brands to provide highly-personalized experience and the best way to go about it is through dynamic content delivery. You can automate the curation as well as delivery of content to customers, both for the website and emails, based on the customer’s previous behavior. The main aim of dynamic and personalized content is to deliver content to customers that can move them further in the buyer’s journey.
Increased focus on organic content
Over 76 percent of marketers believe that organic traffic is a direct measure of content success.
While paid content can get you in front of new customers, it is your organic content that will help you build a connection with your audience. It allows you to build a community and convert qualified leads into paying customers.
Moreover, you need organic content to back up your paid campaigns to boast validity and improve credibility. After all, while paid content might be able to give you short-term traffic spikes, it is your organic content strategy that will contribute to long-term SEO traffic.
Strategic content curation
With the high volume of content available to users, their attention span has reduced drastically. By effectively curating your content, you can share valuable and engaging content with your target audience which will in turn help establish your brand as an authority in the industry.
Instead of shooting in the dark, it’s best to use a data-driven content curation tool to help you identify the kind of topics and blogs your customers might be interested in.
You should also analyze important keywords, average word count for blogs, and the type of content that performs the best for a particular topic.
Featured snippets – The fight for position zero
Featured snippets are the small boxes of text that appear on the top of Google’s search results and they are mainly designed to answer the searcher’s query. The content in featured snippets is pulled from web pages and it can be in the form of text definitions, steps, lists, and tables.
Why should content marketers care about featured snippets? Because achieving position zero with featured snippets gives your content more space and more chance to impress users. Not only do links that land on featured snippets get a serious CTR boost, but they also help improve conversions.
Let’s assume you currently rank at position 6 for an important keyword. Slowly making your way to position #1 can be incredibly challenging, time-consuming, and borderline impossible in some cases.
But if there is a featured snippet opportunity, then you can instantly jump to the top of the search results by making a few small changes to your page. If the featured snippets for the search query have bullet lists, you can add a table of content to your page to improve your chances to get to the position zero
Final words
Instead of implementing all the content marketing trends at once, pick, and choose the ones that work the best for your brand and your target customers. Experiment with them, one at a time, and refine your content marketing campaigns to get the best results.
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Great article full of good hints. I can notice the editor expertise. I’m an Italian SEO and I agree that the future of Google search is aiming to the featured snippets, the small boxes of text that appear on the top of Google’s search results. I’m working to trigger those small boxes and it would be useful to read a guide about it. Let me know if you are going to write an article about it. I’d be curious to know your techniques.