Content Marketing trends to look out for in 2022

“There is no perfect content strategy…a content strategy is only as strong as it has the ability to evolve and change” – Jamie Gassmann, Director of Marketing at R3 Continuum.

Content Marketing is an important channel for growing your brand organically, but also for targeting the right audience. A good content strategy makes sure that the rankings you are building translate into traffic that has real benefit to the site and therefore conversions and revenue.

As a channel, content is constantly evolving, and 2021 has been no exception with several new tactics and features to get to grips with.

So, what can we see happening in 2022, and how can you get on the front foot to deliver the best content strategies for your clients and brands?

Voice search

“Alexa, are you just a novelty?”

Not anymore! At the beginning of 2021, it was estimated that 7 in 10 people across the UK had used a voice-assistant at least once in 30 days, and that figure is only expected to rise further in 2022. Voice search has been bouncing around the marketing trends world for a good couple of years now, but it feels like 2022 could finally be its year as home devices creep into more and more households across the country.

Data produced by Voxly Digital showed that in 2021, 71% of UK voice-users had used their assistants to search for general questions either daily or weekly – and as content marketers, we can jump on this trend.

As more people use voice search in 2022, it makes sense that we incorporate it into our strategies. As a big fan of FAQ content, it’s exciting to think of how the continuing ascension of voice search can benefit this tactic. Users will always have queries and FAQs can be extremely useful if the right search terms are used.

Growing budgets and interest

The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted priorities, and brands are realising that SEO and content marketing can deliver fantastic results for them after years of seeing the channel as “discretionary spending”.

Research from LinkedIn in July 2021 showed that Content Marketing budgets are expected to rise in 2022 as organisations put a greater emphasis on customer retention (more on that below), rather than fixating on attracting new customers that may not already be affiliated with the brand.

Time is precious

If you are passionate about a topic, it’s easy to create reams and reams of what you think is amazing a and useful content for a reader. But the truth is, your user’s time is precious and it’s important to really get to the point as quickly as possible.

Long-form blog content is valued by both readers and search engines and should have a place in your content strategy when creating style guides for instance, but for someone to commit to your piece, grabbing them within your introduction is paramount. There is a misconception that readers have short attention spans, which is contradictory to Google’s rankings and the introduction of passage indexing which encourages longer content pieces.

Instead of attention span, think of it as a reader consideration span – and you need to grab that as quickly as possible!

What is Google passage indexing?

Rolled out in February 2021, passage indexing has been developed by the search giant to rank individual passages within a page based on the search term from a specific user. This means that certain sections of longer pieces of content can be ranked independently from the rest of the page. What this means is that if you have long-form content written about a specific topic and you have individual passages about a sub-topic, Google will now rank those sections on their own.

A switch in tactics

Prior to the pandemic, the primary role of content marketing was to attract as many new customers as possible, but things have changed, and keeping hold of users that have already purchased is expected to be a major factor in many content strategies as we move into 2022. Acquisition will remain important but expect to see a greater focus on retention.

How do we do this? Well, creating blog content that speaks to the user and provides them with tangible value will be paramount, but it’s also important to focus on video and audio content as these become more popular with consumers year after year. Video in particular is predicted to account for 82% of all internet traffic in 2022.

One thing the pandemic has shown us is that the habits of consumers are unpredictable, and this is likely to continue well into 2022, so don’t be surprised if we see marketing turned on its head once again.

If you want help developing your content strategy in a post-COVID world, don’t forget to get in touch with the herd today – we’re happy to help. hello@meta.co.uk.