Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Content Marketing Institute – CMI

Content marketing is fundamental to digital branding and brand engagement. Brands need to create great quality content with a value for the customers to be able to compete for customer engagement. Keeping up with the content marketing trends, creating a content marketing strategy and branded content distribution strategy will help to achieve that.

Content marketing and brand engagement

The popularity of content marketing is growing. According to CMI in 2019 B2B marketers spend 40% of their marketing budget on content marketing. Content marketing plays an evenly important role in B2C marketing.

Learn more about  B2C Content Marketing or B2B Content Marketing.

Good content is a fundament of brand communication with the audience.

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As the recent marketing model has shifted from sales to engagement the role of communication increased. Building a stronger and long-lasting relationship with customers is replacing one-way marketing messages. Brands are now focusing on engaging the audience with interesting for them content to create engagement opportunities. This approach is called Content Marketing. 

Four stages of Content Marketing

1. Create outstanding content

• Create value and emotional connection to engage. Content based on customer insides focused on the needs of your audience.
• Original and authentic content. Share your story and what your brand stand for. Be creative, don’t copy others.
• Most popular B2B and B2C content recently: social media content (eg. tweets, stories), blogs/short articles and e-newsletters (CMI, 2019). Read how to create Social Media Marketing Strategy to expand your online reach.
• Use content themes to develop a plan.

Social Media	Purpose	Content Types
Facebook	Connects people	Often emotionally driven eg; videos, curated content
Instagram	Allows observation	Often around trends, lifestyle, photos, quotes, stories
TikTok	Entertain and influence	Often funny content, mostly viral puts video first
LinkedIn	Inform and network	Professional content, jobs, company news, career updates
Snapchat	1-1 connect	Images, videos, animations, stories, snaps
Twitter	Follow/Monitor	News, blogs, GIFs
Pinterest	Aspire	Infographics, photo guides, designs
Weibo	Connect and follow(The Chinese Twitter)	Videos, images, music, 140 characters

2. Content marketing strategy

• Research your customer. Good customer insights are essential in developing the connection.
• Rich and competing content. Focused on creating true value and connection with the audience. Aspiring, motivational, educational content with breathtaking images, entertaining videos. Follow the content marketing trends and keep up. Forget the hard-sell, put the customer first and brand in the background.
• Unique selling point. Instead of copying a competition create personal content that reflects the unique values of your brand. High-quality content as such builds trust and strengthens the connection to your audience.
• Be consistent. Create Content calendar and post regularly, relevant content via relevant channel.

An example of a superior content marketing creating a brand is Redbull. Red Bull’s content marketing superiority is driven by; content diversity, global presence, an audience focus, content consistency, and the integral role of content across all facets of the business.

Robert

Visit Red Bull Media House – Red Bull’s multi-platform media company “on a mission to inspire with ‘beyond the ordinary’ stories – both direct-to-consumer and through partnerships.”

3. Branded content distribution strategy 

There are many ways to distribute your content, successful content marketing requires a distribution strategy. Without planning and the right investment, the connection to the customer may be lost.

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According to CMI research 69% of organisations classified as ‘most successful’, have a documented content strategy, compared to 16% of ‘least successful’ companies.

Great content shared via relevant channels, distributed and amplified organically (using SEO) or boosted through paid distribution (SEM, PPC, SMM, influencers)

Organic content distribution is essential in forming customer relationships and sustaining brand engagement.

edX

In USA 85% of all businesses (B2C and B2B) use paid distribution channels for content marketing, with social media advertising/promoted posts being the most common activity. For B2C businesses, Facebook was overwhelmingly the most common social media platform used for paid (95%); and for B2B businesses it was LinkedIn (76%) followed closely by Facebook at 66% CMI

Read more on SEO Plan and Successful SEM campaign.

4. Measuring your content marketing success 

• Conversions. Successful content marketing will bring the company target results. Whether it is audience engagement, website traffic, subscriptions or sales. All of those are measurable conversions.
• Indicators. Indicators may include increased page views, longer visit duration, lower bounce rate, and social metrics such as video views, content shares, positive comments and/or interactions.
• Indicators relating to conversion (leads and acquisitions) include conversion rate measured by sales or leads, how content sources contribute to the conversion funnel, referrals from social networks, and subscriber versus non-subscriber behaviour. (edX.org)
• Use available tools, like Google Analytics or social media analytics to measure content performance. Reassess every 4-6 weeks.

Content marketing trends for 2020

by B2C

1: User Generated Content (UGC)

Good UGC can contribute to improved SEO rankings, increase social media reach and engagement; and help you develop a deeper insight into your customers’ needs and their relationship with your brand.

Bullock, 2019

According to Convince and Convert, 85 % of consumers find UGC more influential than brand content.

UGC is any type of content, created and published by unpaid contributors, who promote the brand via their private channels.

Read more about brand advocacy and participation branding.

2. Video Content Creation

An emerging trend within video content is a vertical video. Whilst short-form video has been popular for some time, the growth of social media as content consumption platforms is leading to a growing importance in vertical video. Within this category, live video streaming continues to gain traction.

Evans 2019; Carter, 2020; Hillier 2019

Search Engine Journal reports that in 2018, 85 % of internet users in the U.S. watched video content monthly on any of their devices. There are trend estimates that live streaming could represent 17% of all Internet traffic by 2022 (Cisco, 2019).

Video content includes all types of videos, which encourage the viewer to spend more time with the brand.

Read more about using the video content for your advantage .

3. Quality Over Quantity

When it comes to digital marketing, quality trumps quantity and makes your brand more personable in the long run. We live in the age of transparency, and consumers crave authenticity.

Forbes

Good quality, original content published regularly will always be an important part of brand promotion. Whether its blog or social media post or a video, the standard needs to be high.

4. Visuals

Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat are the most popular platforms where teens hang out. For adults, YouTube is the most-used platform, topping even Facebook. To this end, visuals in the content are going to get more interesting in 2020.

Pew Research

According to Search Engine Journal, from entertainment to communication, people are going all-in on the power of dynamic or interactive imagery. Among the next generation of soon-to-be-adults, visual social media reigns supreme.

Social media platforms are overflowed with content. Engaging and entertaining visuals can make help brands to out in the crowd.

5. Podcasting

Podcasts have exploded in recent years. Statista reports, that the number of podcast listeners has tripled within the last decade and this number is projected to continue growing as time goes on. 

It is best if brands to focus the podcast on one topic and become an expert in that niche.

6. Data-Driven Content

‘Data + technology + great storytelling’ has come to form a powerful engine that are taking brands into new territory with both relevance, personalization, and creativity.

MarTechAdvisor

Determine what content is most appealing to your audience. Find out what keywords they are looking for, what time of the day your website gets mosts visits, from what geological location your visitors come from, what type of devices your audience is using, etc. Create content based on your findings. Measure the success. Reassess regularly.

7. Voice Device Content

NPR and Edison Research estimates that there are now nearly 120 million smart speakers in U.S. homes, representing 78 % year-over-year growth.

To utilize this trend, think about how your audience would search for your content using voice search. Create relaxant content based on the questions they could be asking.

8. Search engine optimized content

Search Engine Optimisation helps businesses to rank in search engines. This can be achieved with a good quality, relevant and original content.

For the content to be relevant right keyword must be used. Find the keyword relevant to your goal and your audience. Think of what your audience may be asking for and give them the answer.

The keyword should appear in the title-tag, meta-description, page link and page copy. Page copy should include the keyword 3-8 times, the way it makes sense for the reader.

Read more about Search Engine Optimization.

9. Personalised content

Highly relevant and valuable content that the customer is searching for when interacting with the brand.

Find out what the customer is looking for and create based on their interest.

10. Artificial Intelligence in content marketing

When you have a bunch of data but you’re not sure what matters to the outcome you want, driver analysis, using a deep understanding of mathematics, data science, and machine learning, is an effective tool.

Chris Pen, 2018

By understanding better what drives leads and gives the best conversion rate, businesses will be able to plan their resources and priorities.

AI in content marketing you can be applied by business three ways

• Do it yourself. This approach fits for the small percentage of marketers who have a genuine interest in data science and machine learning. You should be interested in going deep with math, statistics, and probability – and comfortable writing code. (CMI) Recommended course for newbies: Google’s Machine Learning Crash Course
• Delegate to data scientist staff. The second option applies to larger organizations that employ data scientists (e.g., Google, Facebook, and Uber) (CMI)
• Outsource to AI specialising agencies.

Summarising. Successful content marketing is a smooth collaboration of journalism, communications and marketing. To engage and connect with the customer brands need to deliver customer focus, high value, personalised content, while keeping up with the latest content marketing trends. Distribute and promote with a plan and investment. Finally, measure the success using conversions and indicators and reassess regularly.

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To learn more about engaging and connecting with the customer read Digital Branding and Brand Engagement – Customer Behaviour.

To learn more about the digital brand expansion make sure to read: Social Media Marketing Strategy For Businesses. Expand Your Online Reach and How the Search Engines can help your business? SEO Plan and successful SEM campaigns.

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Thank you for Reading! 

Ola van Zyl

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