Top Content Marketing Trends for 2022

For effective content marketing, you must evolve with the market, adapt to high-impact trends and use techniques that will help you to reach the biggest audience.

In this post, we explore some of the biggest trends for content marketing in 2022. Read on to learn more about the most popular up-and-coming content techniques.

Interactive Content

Interactive content helps to encourage user participation. This can be through the use of polls, questionnaires, quizzes or the option to make choices and explore scenarios. Interactive content helps to optimise audience engagement and experience by making the consumer think and feel things. This leads to a stronger consumer-brand connection.

Here are some useful ways to boost your interactive content in 2022. You could also consider using tools to help you interact with your customers more. Ion Interactive offers customisable templates as well as other useful resources.

Empathetic Content Marketing

Another key technique for 2022 is the need for copy that focuses on user experiences. You can achieve this by putting your customer at the heart of your marketing strategy. Treating your target audience as humans instead of potential buyers is crucial. Start focusing on being authentic in 2022, and reap the benefits of your labour!

Google’s target for searchable content is known as E-A-T, (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness). This concept highlights how the qualities at the centre of empathetic content are embedded into the SEO algorithm. So it’s not surprising that experts believe value-driven content will become the norm in 2022.

How can I achieve this?

Gather feedback from analytics, reviews, social media, and questionnaires. Use your findings to create original, believable and valuable copy for your customers. This will help to prevent pushing prospective users into the arms of your competitors. Good content requires context, as this is what provides value to a reader.

To learn more, check out Joanna Wiebe’s LinkedIn Conversion Copywriting course. This will teach you how to listen to the voice of your customers and write copy that turns prospects into business.

Video Marketing

Videos can convey complicated ideas easily, which makes them a crucial marketing technique. Videos are a solid medium to engage the viewer with the benefits on offer. They also offer a good insight into your company culture.

According to social media marketing statistics, video ads are more engaging than still images. In 2022, the top marketing trend is social media videos, particularly TikTok and Instagram reels. Taking advantage of trends from these platforms will be beneficial to your content marketing strategy.

Marketing trend data on one survey reveals that 76% of marketers consider video to be the most effective format for content. With this in mind, it is clear that video content is a rising star, and that won’t change in 2022. If anything, it will become more pertinent.

Consider using videos, even if it is just in the first step of your content plan. You could combine content marketing techniques, for example interactive videos to engage consumers and encourage them to act (CTA) in a certain way.

Image, or Visual Searches

In the past, SEO has focused solely on keyword search. But images can be a huge and untapped source of power. In 2021, visual search capabilities became available on many applications and platforms. This allowed users to search for specific pictures.

Visual searches are an important technique for your marketing strategy. This is especially true when images can help to increase searches into your product. This is helpful when a consumer doesn’t know the exact name of your product, or when they are looking to purchase the subject of a photo. Start building image search capabilities into your website and product pages now. Research suggests visual searches will become a 40 billion industry by 2025.

Audio Content

Continuing on the theme of engaging the consumer’s senses, audio is set to be a key trend in 2022. This is thanks to the rising popularity of podcasts. In the USA, people spent more than 15 billion hours listening to podcasts in 2021. What’s more, 20% of people bought a product or service because they heard about it in a podcast they listened to. The audio platform continues to offer opportunities for content marketers, and that is expected to increase in 2022.

Usage of branded audio content is also expected to be on the rise this year. The popularity of audio chatroom, Clubhouse, highlights the power that audio content can bring to content marketing.

AI Technology

Around 85 million people used augmented reality in 2021 - that’s more than a 50% increase since 2017. These overwhelming statistics show that the metaverse ought to be part of your content marketing strategy in 2022.

How can I incorporate AI into my content marketing strategy?

You can use AI to create optimised posts, run plagiarism and grammar checks, analyse data - with an emphasis on pattern recognition - and integrate AI-powered chatbots.

Chatbots combine AI technology and interactive content, allowing users to interact with companies. Companies can then collect data, which helps them to better understand users.

Consider ways to start incorporating AI into your content marketing strategy. You might start by introducing chatbots and move outwards from there. The aim is to attract and engage with your target audience.

If you take one thing from this article, it should be that quality and variety are key to your content marketing strategy - not volume.

Start challenging yourself and your team to consider how your content is being presented now and what you might do differently. Consider how many platforms you use and harness the power of new techniques to make your content more compelling and authentic in 2022.