As the saying goes, content is king. Not many forms of modern marketing have had the same impact on customer engagement and conversion that content marketing has. Building informative digital material is crucial for effective brand positioning, and quality content is easier to create than ever before.
This concept has really taken shape in the last few years, though content was relevant before that. As you will see, advancements in technology have significantly changed how products and services are marketed to customers. Here are a few trends in technology and content marketing that marketers need to be aware of.
Optimizing for Voice Search
Due to the popularity of intelligent personal assistants like Alexa and Siri, voice search technology has grown in its ability to understand user intent. Predictive AI is commonly used in conjunction with this to improve results to queries. And the more people that use this technology, the better these search results will get.
Gaining traffic through voice search results will call for new practices in SEO in your content development. That makes sense because people do not speak the same way that they write and type. You might search for “auto shops Chicago” on Google, but you’d ask, “Siri, what are the best auto shops in Chicago?”
In other words, if you want to optimize voice search results, you have to anticipate longtail keyphrase searches. Text searches are generally a few words, conversational searches are longer. Additionally, a large portion of voice searches are locality-based, so your content could need to include geographical keywords as well.
Analytics and Data with Content Marketing
Proper market research has always required asking the right questions and identifying competitors. Today, data is the most effective way to pinpoint keywords, search terms, and target audience information. These insights can be obtained through a number of sources and will help you gain a better look at your target customer base.
With Google Analytics, you can determine who is finding your content, how they are finding it, and the different ways in which they engage with it. This includes if users are viewing, sharing, and navigating to other parts of your website through it.
Another important aspect of measuring content success is conversion rates. Rather than focusing on on-site activity, you could use sales data and click through rates to determine which pieces of content are generating the most leads and conversions. It can be easy to get bogged down in data collection, but thankfully, it can be easily automated.
There are many content analytics tools that can help in your ongoing quest for traffic and sales optimization. Many content management platforms like WordPress include analytic insights, for instance. There are also programs like Flurry and Heap that will inform you about mobile engagement, which is vial in the digital age. And there’s always trusty Google Analytics that can offer you tons of insight on your content.
Mediocre Content Is No Longer Acceptable
It was surprisingly easy in the past to get away with mediocre material. And it’s why content marketing garnered such a bad reputation—the quality of output has been low, but the amount of it large. But this approach will not help a business anymore; in fact, it’s likely to lead to lost traffic, engagement, and sales.
For one, Google is cracking down on low-quality output and penalizing efforts that are purely self-promotional. On the other hand, web users are fed up with seeing content that doesn’t serve any purpose. They won’t engage with it because it offers nothing to them. Many lists of 2019 content marketing trends are including “quality” for this very reason!
Thus, it’s important to ensure that every piece of content you create is top notch and useful to your audience. This means that sources are cited, information is detailed, and the material is easy to understand. While creating your content, ask yourself if everything you need to present has been conveyed accurately. Content marketing is a lot of work, but can pay off in the long run.
At the end of the day, there’s too much content on the internet for you to skimp on this. The entire nature of digital marketing is very competitive, and failing to comply with your target audience’s wishes will take traffic and sales away from you. Ensure that you change with increasing technology, better insight, and content trends. This will help you cater to more people, which will hopefully increase site traffic and sales.
The original version of this article was first published on V3Broadsuite.
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