
The effectiveness of any SEO strategy largely depends on the website’s content. That’s why a content marketing strategy often needs to be revisited and optimised accordingly. As we head towards spring of 2019, this is as good a time as any to revisit your content marketing strategy, identify top trends that may dominate 2019, and optimise your content plan for maximum success. In this blog post, we list 5 content marketing trends that may play a crucial role in 2019 and beyond.
1. Long-form content
Long-form content has been very successful over the last few years. Search engines like Google prefer sending users to detailed, long-form blog posts that are more likely to have all the answers that the user is searching for. Since competition in the online content marketing world is getting tougher day by day, this trend is only going to get stronger next year. It means that long-form content will become even more important in 2019.
While the exact word-count depends on many factors (such as industry, topic, other related content on the web, etc.) generally your long-form content should have 2,000+ words. Several studies have proven that 2,000+ word content performs better in the SERPs.
Apart from higher search engine rankings, studies also show that long-form content tends to get more social shares than short-form content. This results in additional traffic, brand awareness and better social signals that may help even further in achieving higher SEO rankings in the future.
2. Video content
Video content has been on the rise for the last couple of years. 2019 is not going to be an exception. According to a 2017 report by Animoto, 64% of consumers follow through on a purchase after watching a branded video on Facebook. Since videos are expected to account for approximately 82% of global internet traffic within the next 3 years, it’s high time to start focusing more on videos and webinars.
3. Influencer marketing
Smaller businesses and less-established blogs face a hard time to make a dent in the content marketing universe. Next year, it is expected to get even tougher for newbies to get started in the online marketing world without spending thousands of dollars in advertisement.
Therefore, influencer marketing is going to become even more important than it has been in 2018. Invite guest-blogger that have a lot of credibility and many social media followers. When they publish their content on your platform, you can leverage their popularity to establish your own brand authority. Influencers with a high number of active social media followers can also direct thousands of visitors to your site if they share the content on their social channels. This can be a part of your agreement with them.
4. Voice search
The popularity of smart speakers and mobile voice assistants is on the rise. There is no doubt about that. As smart speakers, such as Google Home, Apple HomePod, and Amazon Alexa continue to become more common, voice search will start playing a massive role in content marketing, search engine optimisation, and how you bring traffic to your website.
Apart from creating audio content and podcasts, content marketers will also have to invest in a different content marketing and SEO strategy that thoroughly accommodates voice search. This may include creating more conversational content, including more question-answer blog posts in your content strategy, and targeting more long-tail keywords.
5. More work and a lot more budget
Many companies already have a decent budget to support their content marketing efforts. However, in 2019, the cost is expected to increase even more — especially for B2B marketers. There are several reasons why the budget may increase next year. For example, it may be because of expanding your content marketing efforts, creating additional informative and persuasive content to increase brand awareness and drive sales, using new content marketing technologies, or trying out new channels.
Whatever the reason may be, the fact that you may require a bit more money to keep your content strategy active remains the same.
Final words
2019 is almost here. Apart from taking into account these important trends, you should also revisit your current content strategy and plug any holes that may negatively affect its performance next year. Analyse your team’s ability to utilise new content technologies, revisit your sales funnel and how your site’s content contributes to it, and refine how you measure ROI to be fully prepared for 2019 and beyond.