“Tools are great, but content marketing success is about the wizard, not the wand.” – Jay Baer

Do you consider yourself the Dumbledore of content marketing or a muggle applying to Hogwarts? Whatever the decree, the right wizard will find their way because content marketing speaks with customers and not at them. And that’s just what we want, don’t we?

With the next decade on the horizon, underestimating the power of content would be a rookie mistake. And we’ve come way too far ahead for that. So, here’s our quick take on the top 5 trends that we think would rule the content marketing realm in 2020. Read on!

1. Video Content: From being the ‘next big thing’ in content marketing, video is a norm now. The Social Media trinity (Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn) is constantly emphasizing and investing in improving its video capabilities, primarily, because it’s directly proportional to higher engagement and customer retention. It leaves little to the imagination and diminishes the grey areas that prospects/customers despise. 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. Video is, now, a viral marketing method. Marketing videos can be in several forms, like:

• Product Demos
• Video Blogs (vlogs)
• Interviews
• Webinars
• Tutorials
• Live Event Videos
• Ads
• Presentations

A video marketing strategy is a sure-fire way of maximizing your content outreach, not just in 2020 but beyond.

2. Interactive Content: People love to interact. If you give them the opportunity to connect with your brand via 360-degree videos, AR/VR, shoppable posts, quizzes, and polls; there’s nothing like it. This kind of content breaks monotony, it’s new, fresh, and original. 93% of marketers agree that interactive content is effective in educating its buyers versus just 70% for static content. Every piece of interactive content is a form of a call-to-action (CTA) with or without another CTA. It gives your site visitor a reason to stay on the page other than just being informative or sales-y. Interactive content is shareable and shareability increases brand awareness. Therefore, interactive content is going to be big all through 2020.

3. Hyper-dynamic Content: Personalization isn’t special anymore. Everyone’s done it and is done with it. What customers expect and deserve now is insanely personalized information. This personalized content cannot happen in a day, it’s a pattern that you’d need to observe. The customer information that you need for this is:

• Name
• Title
• Organization
• Specific Interest
• Demographics
• Location
• Weather Triggers

Utilize this information to create an insanely dynamic marketing message, send it at the right time, and you’d surely notice the difference in the impact of these campaigns and your regular ones. Hyper-dynamic content is here to stay for good and we might as well induce it with our marketing steroids.

4. SEO-centric Content: Google search algorithms constantly change. Keeping them in mind while creating content is the smartest thing for you to do if you want traction on your content. What’s the point of creating and publishing content if your audience can’t find it? SEO-centric writing does not mean just placing keywords on a page. If you’re creating content only to satisfy specific keyword queries, it would not add any value to the people searching for relevant information. The best way to approach SEO-centric writing is in steps:

• Find your keywords, qualify them
• Determine your search intent
• Build your content around it, optimize it
• Publish

Focus on what your readers would want to read and you’ll know that SEO-centric content is no rocket science.

5. Voice Search Tailored Content: According to Google, 20% of all searches are voice. Creating content tailored to voice search is tricky because how we speak is not always the same as we write. Take your time with it because voice search is going nowhere and will only continue to rise. Try using longtail keywords in headers and titles and create content with natural language search in mind. For your meta descriptions, incorporate full questions with a conversational tone. Furnish your content with traditional SEO value by structuring and writing it in a way that a search engine would understand its meaning and context. It’s imperative for content marketers to start figuring out the semantics of content tailored to voice search as we would see better voice technology unravel in 2020 and it only makes sense to get used to it.

2020 is going to be an exciting time for content marketers with endless possibilities. So, pick up that wand and cast these top 5 spells to become the next Dumbledore of the content marketing realm!

Want to ace content marketing like the pros? Talk to us, won’t you?!