As the digital world keeps changing over the years, trends come and go, with businesses constantly trying to keep up. That’s why understanding content marketing at its core is crucial for your overall digital marketing strategy. Hence, here are the five key insights to improve your content marketing in 2022.
#1 What Your Competitors Are Up To
First and foremost, it is crucial to know what the current market situation is like and what your competitors are planning for the coming year. You can analyze their past activities to learn from their successes and failures, but to truly know what they are planning for the nearest future, it is essential to do more research and try to get insider information.
A good idea is to look at the recent surveys conducted among companies similar to yours or those operating in your niche. For example, HubSpot’s Not Another State of Marketing Report from 2021 can be a great starting point for many businesses that want to reinvent their digital marketing strategy. The report has many interesting statistics and findings that will help you get a better idea of not only the content marketing but also the general digital marketing plans of many companies, big and small.
By looking at reports like these, you can see how their approaches to content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) have changed over the past few years, which will help you understand why they are either sticking to what they have done before or trying to adopt new techniques. Anything from budgeting to social media marketing to interactive content can be discussed in such surveys and reports, so you will definitely enrich your knowledge of a variety of topics.
For instance, one of the most important insights from the abovementioned report is the extent of market research done by the surveyed companies. Eighty-three percent of marketers said they conduct market research, with 88 percent of those marketers also saying they use the said research to inform business decisions. Moreover, 67 percent of marketers claimed they plan to increase their budgets for market research in 2022. Considering how many businesses prioritize market research nowadays, it is crucial to do the same to improve your business strategy.
#2 What Your Audience Is Searching For
While you need to have an idea of what your competitors are doing, you should also understand what your target audience is like, how your potential and current customers think and what they are searching for. The last point is particularly important as it will help you enhance your SEO strategy to get the best results possible.
When you understand what your audience is searching for, you can give them exactly what they want. For instance, let’s say that you provide writing services. In this case, one of the queries that your potential customers will be searching for is “write my research paper for me.” However, it is not the only keyword you will need to target, and you need to find out which variations of this particular phrase your audience uses the most to look for services similar to yours.
Try to work closely with searcher intent. Develop the structure of your customers’ journey to have a complete picture of what your customers do at any specific stage of getting to know your brand and eventually engaging and interacting with it. Keep in mind that different segments of your target audience will have different journeys. This is why creating personalized content or at least customizing content for different segments is necessary to achieve better results with your digital marketing campaigns.
Carefully consider which methods are used by your audience to discover your business. For instance, you might discover that the majority of your clients use a mobile device to do their search and then get to your website. If this is the case, you might want to target mobile searches more than desktop ones. Similarly, consider looking more into voice search optimization as it could also be useful for improving your SEO metrics.
#3 Which Content Performs the Best
Considering the type of marketing you are working with, it is definitely crucial to look at its key component – content. The quality of your content, its types and formats, the topics you cover, the frequency at which you publish it and where you publish it – all of these factors will greatly influence the success of your content marketing strategy. Without planning all of these things, you can’t achieve truly impactful results with your marketing.
Here’s how to approach each of these factors:
- Quality: Create a set of standards for all the content you create. For instance, you might want to use a minimum number of sources for any article you publish. To ensure that this standard is maintained, you need to have a set of guidelines for your marketers and content creators to always follow.
- Type/Format: Another thing to consider is the type or format of content you want to create. Obviously, you will be working with a variety of formats, but it’s still worth having a specific one to focus on if you know that you get the best results from it. Many brands are prioritizing video marketing nowadays, so that might be the right direction for you to go in as well.
- Topic: The topics you cover in your content are also important. If you create content about things your audience doesn’t care about, your content will underperform. Consequently, if you want to see the best results in terms of SEO, engagement and so on, you need to identify what your audience is most interested in.
- Posting Schedule: Lastly, consider the frequency at which you publish your content and the platforms where you publish it. If you publish content at the right time and frequency (and even align your publishing across multiple platforms), you can get the most out of your content marketing activities.
#4 How SERP Actually Works
The search engine result page (SERP) is something you are probably fairly acquainted with. However, there is not enough stressing just how important it is to understand how SERP actually works. Your SERP positioning could make a huge difference in the success of your digital marketing strategy.
There are many factors that will influence your SERP positioning. From your backlink profile and internal linking to average session type and conversion rate, there are numerous details that will ultimately lead to your website ranking higher or lower in search results. Obviously, you can’t keep in mind all of them at once, but you can still aim to rank for specific keywords, gradually build your link profile and employ other techniques to maintain consistently good SERP metrics.
One of the most important things you should do when it comes to SERP is keep up with the latest updates related to Google and other search engines. For instance, Google’s Knowledge Panels have become more critical for SERP recently. If you keep up with all the latest updates, you can make the necessary changes to your digital strategy when you notice that a search engine is about to change its algorithm in some way.
#5 How Users Interact With Your Brand
Last but not least, consider how users interact with your brand online. Engagement and conversion rates play a huge role in determining how your brand will be seen by your audience and potential audience. Moreover, both of these metrics also influence your SEO, SERP and many other aspects of your digital strategy.
Look at your customer journey to see which points get the most engagement and how you can maximize engagement there even more. Likewise, some techniques that you use in one way can be applied to a completely different aspect of your marketing to see similar results. For instance, your short TikTok videos can be used for Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. Another example would be using Instagram Stories-type polls in interactive ads that will lead your audience to a landing page on your website.
It’s a good idea to look at real-time user behavior and utilize automation to work with it. It is particularly difficult to optimize content in real-time, but it is possible with the help of different AI solutions that track a user’s actions on your website and make relevant suggestions or show customized content. Remember that personalization is crucial for modern digital marketing, which is exactly why you need to think about this aspect of your content marketing strategy.