Every business needs good content.
From emails to newsletters to blogs to case studies to product announcements, there will always be a need to communicate with customers and clients. The most important need for content though is your online rankings.
That’s right! Content also has a significant impact on the visibility of your business on search engines and social media.
However, content trends so quickly that it takes a concerted effort to keep up with them. Optimizing your content for best practices is essential to growing your business and ensuring you create assets your audience wants to engage with and consume.
Whether your company has B2B aspects or not, content is still essential to your brand awareness and company growth. However, content marketing is especially valuable with the increased importance of research, commitment, and reliability in the B2B field.
The Importance of Content Marketing
Content marketing is essential because it answers your audience's questions and helps you build trust, develop relationships, improve sales, and generate leads. Clients and customers expect high-quality, consistent content from their favorite brands in today's age.
That’s why it pays to personalize your relationship with your audience and entice them with personalized and dynamic content. While there are many content marketing options, email campaigns and educational content are the top content marketing methods B2B marketers use to nurture their audience (at 87% and 77% usage, respectively.) This isn’t surprising as these two methods can be directly controlled and respond quickly to audience needs and requests.
These are great places to start using the following B2B content marketing trends. But however you implement them, you’ll surely benefit from keeping their principles in mind!
Trend One: Funnel-Specific Content
If you’ve never heard of a sales funnel, take a minute to learn about them from our blog here. Basically, though, a sales funnel represents how close lead customers are to making a purchase. At the top of the funnel are “cold leads” with some passing interest, and at the bottom, they are “hot leads” actively considering buying.
It’s beneficial to consider what portion of the funnel is being targeted by your content. You need to build awareness at the top of the funnel and not necessarily try to make a sale, using content like blogs, social media updates, review videos, and infographics. At the bottom, you should be more direct, offering free trials, discounts, social proof, and case studies to give them a taste of what they’ll get from a purchase and push them to buy.
Personalizing your content to specific points on the funnel will meet a lead customer where they’re at and gently lead them to greater interest in your business.
Trend Two: Interactive Content
Passive content, like this blog, is something you consume without any input from your end. This passive content is useful, generating conversions moderately or very well in 36% of cases. However, the power of interactive content directly involving its consumers cannot be denied- it almost doubles those conversions to 70%.
While interactive content is more challenging to produce, even minor uses in key areas of your online presence can be very effective.
When your content changes in a live and responsive manner to buyers and prospects, it actively engages them and gives them a stronger reason to keep reading, watching, or listening. Most of all, it makes them feel more in control of what information they want to view and when.
Examples of good interactive content include apps, quizzes, price calculators, webinars, games, or dynamic navigation. Even smaller interactive touches on websites and email messaging can take advantage of these 2022 content marketing trends.
Trend Three: Collaborative Content
Great things can happen when two businesses or brands team up for collaborative marketing, and over 70% of consumers pay more attention.
Also known as co-branding, this strategy is a strategic marketing and advertising partnership between two brands where the success of one brand brings success to its partner. This combines the strength of two brands to increase the consumers' willingness to pay for their product or service. It also connects two different (but similar) audiences, and increases its reach across a broader and more diverse range of people.
It’s essential to vet your partnership brand carefully, but if the two of you can reach a mutual agreement, the possibilities are limitless. You can pool your resources for a coordinated advertising campaign, develop strategies for long-term brand awareness and growth, and even break records.
Trend Four: Long-Form Content
While there’s a bit of a myth that modern audiences won’t read, we believe our audience to be smarter than that! In fact, blogs were the second most popular form of content that businesses used to generate leads in 2021, according to The State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report.
These, and other forms of long-form content, are helpful for people seeking in-depth information or wanting to get a new perspective on a topic. Long-form content is actually shared more often than short-form content. It can also serve a valuable role in boosting the search engine results of your website. Creating this longer content on a regular basis can be tricky, but is easier to accomplish with the right help.
Trend Five: Audio and Video Content
While there is no shortage of people ready to read content, quality audio and video content can definitely attract a larger audience. These media types are easier to jump into, and many people enjoy listening to content while multitasking.
Audio content continues to grow in popularity, and it is the place to be at the moment. It’s become a powerful way for marketers to build connections online and serve their communities through valuable content and conversations.
You don’t need anything to get started except for your phone, and you don’t have to worry about being camera-ready either. One interesting up-and-coming platform we’ve spotted is Twitter Spaces. This service allows you to have up to 11 speakers, one host, and two co-hosts host a live audio conversation that anyone can listen into with a single click.
While video demands a bit more focus from your audience, it has unique and powerful features of its own. Video has a significantly higher chance of going viral than other media, earning 1200% more shares than text and image content combined. Furthermore, 97% of consumers and online marketers report that video helps customers understand their product.
Your video platform of choice will vary depending on your business, but we can recommend one thing: don’t use YouTube Shorts. At this point, that platform is not very optimized, especially for B2B brands.
Trend Six: Storytelling Content
Storytelling has the power to humanize a brand, making it easier for a business to foster a relationship with its consumers. And when you connect with your audience on a personal level, it can help scale business growth and increase your profits as a result.
Using emotional cues in your marketing content hooks the attention of your audience and builds an emotional, personal connection with your brand.
In today’s fast-paced world, visual storytelling has become a vital element of every marketing thrust. With 91% of consumers preferring interactive and visual content over its long-form, text-centric counterpart, people are looking to consume content quickly and more efficiently.
Better yet, video media has an unparalleled potential to create genuine emotion in an audience- just think how involved people are in their favorite TV shows or movie franchises.
What This Means for the Future of Marketing
There is a commonality between these B2B content marketing trends: content marketing is becoming more personalized and focuses more on cultivating natural engagement and shares. Rather than purely worrying about being informational or making the hard sell, consider developing content to expand your audience over time and keep them interested in following you.
Whatever strategy you take, make sure that all your content has a reason and purpose. Know who you’re targeting, especially demographics, and where they fall in the sales funnel. Understand what you’re hoping to get out of the content and how to ensure it serves a useful purpose for as long as possible.
Invest additional time and budget where possible to develop that all-important audio and video content. Thanks to their broad reach and highly digestible formats, platforms like Twitter Spaces, Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube can be incredibly impactful to work with.
Key Takeaways
You may have noticed that many of these 2022 content marketing trends ask you to produce content that involves the work of more specialized skills and is more complex. It’s certainly possible for you or other team members to learn these skills and find the time needed to put them into practice. For a more streamlined solution, however, you should consider seeking the help of content professionals.
That’s where Zoek can help. Our content writers, designers, and web developers are ready to help you create content that meets the challenges of tomorrow. Just click here to get started with a free consultation and find out how we can help with your Wix project.
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