Categories: Business

Content Marketing Forecast – 4 Trends To Watch For In 2021

Content marketing in 2020 witnessed swift changes to become relevant and engaging for the evolving target audiences. COVID-19 pandemic is one of the major forces shifting the tides in the content marketing game.

As an industry, the global content marketing market is likely to grow by more than USD 269 billion during 2020-2024, progressing at a CAGR of 13% during the forecast period. Around 46% of the budget is spent on content marketing.

Content marketing drives brand awareness, demand, and revenue. Therefore, it is important to evolve your content marketing strategy continuously.

Here are the top four trends you need to know for your 2021 content strategy.

IMAGE: UNSPLASH

1. There Will Be An Increase In The Adoption Of AI

As per the global survey on AI by McKinsey, participants from a variety of industries attribute 20% or more of their businesses’ earnings before interest and taxes to AI. It indicates the impact and growth of AI in 2021 and beyond.

A PwC report says that AI could contribute up to USD 15.7 trillion to the global economy in 2030. The implementation of AI in content marketing is predicted to become increasingly important. It will help improve the user experience or personalize content for the target audience.

Businesses are already using AI and ML in content marketing for the below tasks.

Content optimization: Optimization tools leverage AI to help you create, edit, and optimize content to perform better across all channels. Machine learning algorithms analyze your text in real-time to determine its performance with your intended target audience. It also offers suggestions to improve future performance.
A/B testing: AI-enabled tools provide a platform to discover the content that closes deals. Over time, these tools learn which content performs best to help move prospects down the funnel. They also give insights into which content needs improvement so you can prioritize what needs to be updated. Omniconvert is a website conversion and AB testing optimization platform that runs fully automated experiments on autopilot.
Content analysis: AI helps you analyze your own as well as the competitor’s content to understand what performs well and why. It then offers topics, keywords, and other suggestions to optimize your content for search engines and to satisfy your visitors. MarketMuse is one of the tools that help you ensure your content is optimized to cover the topic more comprehensively than your competitors.

2. The User Experience And Personalized Content Will Be The Differentiator

Customer experience encompasses the behaviors, emotions, and attitudes of the people using a product, system, or service. It helps you ensure the association between your business objectives and customers’ needs.

You should use different customer service management software to optimize the customer communication channels. Customers should be nurtured at every stage of the buyer journey to pull them towards conversion.

Focus on creating high-quality content. But, also consider how fast your page loads, the positioning of images, and the mobile responsiveness of your pages. You should also focus on making your content more personalized to have a positive impact on UX.

Interactive content such as surveys, polls, and quizzes continues to drive results. Its success is independent of consumer participation. Rather than just passively reading, your potential customer has the chance to interact with your content, further deepening the relationship.

Content personalization involves using consumer behavior and preferences. Considering these two aspects helps to show each person that relevant content is tailored to their needs. Incorporating consumer behavior and preferences elements into your content marketing strategy builds powerful insights and directly impacts purchase behavior.

3. Google’s Core Web Vitals Will Go Live In 2021

In 2020, Google announced a new ranking signal that will go live in 2021 after a 6-month notice. This new ranking signal combines Core Web Vitals with their existing page experience signals.

Google provides the page experience outline that focuses on measuring key web usability factors, including:

Load time
Interactivity
Content loading stability

There are three metrics to measure the above factors:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): It measures the loading performance. Sites should strive to have LCP less than 2.5 seconds.
First Input Delay (FID): It measures the time taken by the browser to respond to the interaction triggered by the user. Sites should have an FID of less than 100 ms to provide a good user experience.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): It measures visual stability during interactivity on the website. Sites should strive to have a CLS score of less than 0.1 to provide a good user experience.

Take appropriate steps to prepare for the new user experience ranking factors before this algorithm update goes live.

Optimize your speed and reduce errors: One of the reasons people bounce is slow loading speed. Go to PageSpeed Insights and enter your URL. It offers a detailed analysis of the content of a web page and provides actionable suggestions on both mobile and desktop devices.
Optimize your site for security issues: Check whether your website has issues that could put your users at risk. The best way is to use the security issues report in Google Search Console. It also provides insights into how to fix the problem.
Optimize for mobile: Check your site for mobile-friendliness. Use mobile usability reports to check the pages that have usability problems. It flags issues, such as content not fitting the screen and text is too small. It also shows you a list of affected URLs for each issue.

4. There Will Be An Increase In Video Content Consumption

Consumers prefer getting information quickly. Thus, video is a quick and effective way to communicate your message and educate your audience. As per a forecast by Zenith, the average person will watch 100 minutes per day in 2021.

A report by Cisco says that video content will form 82% of internet traffic by the year 2022. To truly pull your audience, create videos that display your content to the right audience. There are various types of video content marketing:

Webinars
Video interviews
Videos of presentations
Tutorial videos
Product demos and reviews
Video testimonials
Recordings of live streams
Video ads

According to Wyzowl’s 2020 report, including video in content marketing is worth it. Here are some observations of the report.

As per 96% of people, they have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service.
84% of people admit that a brand’s video has convinced them to buy a product or service.
Around 86% of people like to see more videos from brands.

Videos play a significant role in improving the quality of your organic traffic. Here are a few places where you can incorporate video.

Embed a video on your website landing page to close sales on leads.
Use video ads to get attention.
embed a personalized video in your email marketing to help serve customers and resolve problems.
Enhance your product or service description with a video spiel if you have segmented pages for virtual commerce.

Final Thoughts

Today, the Covid-19 pandemic and fast-evolving technology are changing the ways content is delivered. While the effectiveness of content marketing is indisputable, the channels, tools, and techniques marketers use to create and distribute content will continue to advance in 2021.

Therefore, if you want to grow your brand through content marketing in 2021, be sure to follow the trends above to improve your content marketing strategy. Above all, great user experience and credible user-generated content would separate average businesses from thriving brands.

If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.