Content Marketing Trends for 2022

Digital marketers know there’s no surefire way to succeed and generate conversions from content marketing. Sharing valuable content that captures customers into your sales funnel is a challenging endeavor, with unspoken rules and algorithms that shift yearly. Content marketing has evolved over the last few years like other digital marketing efforts.

Traditionally, digital marketers only had to create a standard website and pay for Google ads to drive clients their way. Current content marketing has evolved and expanded alongside marketing strategies. Content marketing tips for 2022 require maximum relevance and precision. Below are content marketing trends to watch out for in 2022.

Increasing Focus on Better Content Experience

Customer experience is currently paramount to success in all digital marketing strategies. Unfortunately, customer preferences change over time, necessitating a change in content type and presenting format. Keeping tabs on these changes and your target audience preference is the best way to create a better customer experience.

As for 2022, content marketing strategies shift towards a cohesive structure, tying various parts into a whole. To achieve this, marketing departments should join hands and focus on researching, strategizing, and implementing this new holistic content experience that suits their audience.

Ideally, this trend requires content marketers to be part of their customers’ world. This means consistently providing engaging content and interactions across various platforms to improve customer loyalty and boost brand image. Brands should focus on improving their audience’s content experience by planning and hiring steadfast content creators and editors.

Shift Towards Empathic Content Marketing

Content marketers have been forced to find a different approach to content marketing, thanks to recent events that made customers the central point of their marketing strategies. The general name for this approach is empathic marketing, and brands should adopt it to survive in 2022.

Empathy means putting yourself in another person’s shoes to feel their experiences and perspective. However, empathic marketing first conceptualizes the world and marketing situations from your customer’s eyes. You should then develop a marketing strategy using your findings to meet their specific needs and demands.

Empathic content marketing allows brands to speak to their targeted customers, not potential buyers. Brands should begin by evaluating their audience by answering the following:

• Who are your customers?
• What are their challenges and pain points?
• What spikes or motivates them to take specific actions?

By answering these questions, content marketers can create beneficial content that relates to and evokes their customer’s emotions. This goes a long way in building trust, improving customer experiences, and building authentic relationships.

Hybrid of Virtual and Live Events

The last two years have relied on online interactions, especially after living in a virtual world during the pandemic. As the pandemic clears, consumers are finding ways of balancing online and in-person interactions. Brands should understand this and find ways of creating a hybrid of live and virtual events to satisfy their customers’ expectations.

Even though brands impressively adapted to the virtual world during distress, 2022 will witness a return of various live events, like conferences and workshops. Similarly, there will be continued evolution in how online events, such as webinars and live sessions are hosted. Each brand should evaluate the usage of virtual and live events to create a hybrid marketing strategy that meets customers’ expectations.

Increasing Use of Interactive Content

Engaging content is key to improved customer content experience. There’s no better way to create engaging content than using interactive content. Various polls have shown that digital marketers agree that interactive content is superior to static content in capturing customer attention and keeping them longer.

This proven effectiveness is the reason why the use of interactive content will increase in 2022. Brands should focus on creating interactive content that suits different phases of the buyer’s journey. Content managers should take advantage of the already popular interactive questions and polls. They are engaging, and brands gather quick information about their customers.

Besides polls and interactive questions, content marketers should expect more ways of integrating engaging content into their marketing strategy. For instance, brands can create polls on landing pages to make them engaging. They can also be used in reports, guides, and interactive eBooks.

Increased Adoption of Voice Search Will Evolve Content Marketing

Since its inception, millions of users have performed screenless searches every day. They simply give instructions to their digital assistants without touching their smartphones or laptops. Currently, voice-activated search accounts account for 20% of all online searches and continue to grow.

Voice search will cause a shift in content marketing, as customers speak and write differently. Brands should find ways of adapting their content to align with natural language search algorithms, which requires the inclusion of questions and answers. To adopt this style, content marketers should use complete questions, long-tail keywords in the titles and headers, and optimize their pages to natural language.

User-generated Content Is Still Effective

User-generated content (UGC) had and continues to have major effects on eCommerce content marketing. Recent figures show that more than 85% of online shoppers trust content, feedback, and reviews from previous users. This is a significant population to channel into your sales funnel.

Unfortunately, most brands don’t know how to leverage the potential for customers to create content that can be shared on their platforms. User-generated content has tremendous benefits, including:

• Positive reviews impress new customers
• Users feel they are being heard or listened to
• It creates a loyal community
• It is a free content

User-generated content is an excellent way of attracting customers to your platforms by giving them access to the content they trust and are interested in.

Personalization and Hyper-personalization

Customizing your content, especially email marketing campaigns dramatically increases user engagement. Customers who have experienced standard personalization often prefer businesses that personalize their buyer’s journey. As such, more brands will likely add personalization into their marketing strategies in 2022.

While personalization has been used for a while, a trend taking shape in 2022 is hyper-personalization. Hyper-personalization goes beyond referring to customers by their names. It taps into the customer’s preferences, desires, and needs. Hyper-personalization is a largely data-driven approach that uses data, artificial intelligence, automation, and analytics to identify unique points of interaction.

With this, brands will tap into their specific buyer persona and create content that suits specific products, languages, and preferred marketing channels for every customer. Some brands that have excelled using hyper-personalization include Amazon, WED, Stitch Fix, and Netflix.

Image or Visual Search

Visual searching capabilities, which allowed customers to search using images only, were introduced in several apps and platforms in 2021. Google, Amazon, and Pinterest capitalized on this technology, offering customers visual recognition. While millennials and Gen X have largely embraced this technology, brands should integrate it into their content marketing strategy to widen their brand reach.

Visual search is useful for consumers who don’t know the product’s name or brand and would like to learn more or purchase. Most companies experimenting with visual search have gained an immense competitive advantage over others.

Incorporating visual search into your brand’s SEO and content marketing strategy by using Pinterest ads or integrating image search abilities into your product pages and web content is rewarding.

Content Marketing Trends in 2022 – Endnote

New and exciting content marketing strategies will gain momentum in 2022. Brands should stay updated to take advantage of these changes, as they will make a difference in how businesses communicate with their current and future customers. Content marketing increases brand awareness, customer reach, and revenue if done right.