The future of content marketing: trends, tactics and tools

Over the past decade, content marketing has grown rapidly.

Each major brand is trying to attract more and more customers to the network, and there is a good reason for this. Content marketing has long been known for its (relatively) low initial costs and long-term benefits.
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As a result, content marketing has become the main tactic of digital marketing: more than 90% of B2B and almost 90% of B2C marketers admit that they include content in every marketing campaign.

This rise in popularity has several important implications.

• Content creation exceeds its demand. You may have noticed that for any possible request you already have a substantial amount of content.
• Consumers are spoiled: they have access to more content than they may need. It is becoming increasingly difficult to surprise or involve them;
• It is becoming increasingly difficult to compete with larger budget content. The more major brands begin to create content in your niche, the higher the content standards and the more your target audience expects from any content they encounter.

So what is the future of content marketing? He is dying?

Of course not. The great thing about digital marketing is that ingenuity and creativity can always beat big marketing budgets.

Here are three trends in content marketing and examples of their use.

1. Content Collaboration

Collaboration on content is one of the most popular marketing trends. In 2019, content links and bridges the gap. This is a beautiful concept.

Content collaboration means working with other people (inside or outside your company) to create and promote content.

Collaboration is the possible answer to most of your problems in content marketing:

• Saves money on content creation and marketing (you can compete with larger budgets). If you focus on the aspect of building relationships, you can find content contributors who will be happy to help you for free.
• Collaboration allows you to find more unique angles and formats that you could not have imagined if you worked on it alone.

Here are some examples of collaborating on content:

• Involvement of your employees from different departments that are not involved in brainstorming and content marketing (for example, customer support ). One of the best-known examples of how this tactic works in practice is the " Made in Johnsonville " video campaign, 100% created by company employees.

• Get influencers in your content
One of the best examples of influencers involvement is the Moz Ranking Factors , which includes many influential industry leaders who were not only represented as participants, but were also able to provide unique comments on each search engine ranking factor. Remember that this is your very trusted content, as it came from well-known industry experts:


Many platforms and tools are being launched to meet this need for advanced marketing collaboration.

ContentCal is a good example of how to integrate the entire team into the content planning and marketing process using two main functions:

• Campaigns: allow you to create informational materials that your team can access (and contribute)
• “Pinboard”: allows your entire team to participate in the social networks of your brand (with an additional level of quality that ensures a constant voice of the brand)

2. Search engine optimization

Previously, there was a huge gap between creating and optimizing content: writers were forced to build content around “keywords” by defining phrases that we needed to include in a copy a certain number of times.

Besides some killing of creativity, this approach had another big problem: keywords de-humanized writing. It's too easy to forget that there are real people who enter these keywords in the search field.

The evolution of the Google algorithm quickly put an end to this outdated optimization tactic. Google no longer focuses on keywords. Now he can evaluate the context and intent of each request.

To adapt to the new algorithm, we finally move away from the content that matches the keywords and learn to create more detailed content that really adds value.

This forms another big marketing trend: optimization for requests.
There are many important reasons for creating content that meets niche needs:

• Requests are closer to natural language than keywords, so they make your content more optimized for voice search .
• Google understands and displays requests . Pay attention to the People also ask search elements and the Featured Snippets answer boxes , where Google displays pages that best meet search queries.
• Content solves the problem: in search queries, you can clearly see the problem that the potential client is facing and offer solutions in your content.

Create content that responds to requests and provides solutions

There are many tools that allow you to research popular queries, but I recommend using Text Optimizer , which is a semantic analysis tool.

This tool:

• Uses Google search snippets to extract related terms and concepts
• Detects popular queries on any topic and helps optimize content for the query.

Other sources of niche research include:

• Your support and sales team (again, collaborate with them in creating content)
• Social networks (especially Twitter comments )
• Quora, Reddit, and Amazon Q & A Sections
• Online reviews and discussion boards, etc.

Another reliable tool is the Serpstat clustering function , which allows you to find related queries and group large lists of keywords / queries by meaning.

If you use multiple sources to research your queries, Serpstat will offer content ideas that span multiple searches, and thus help you rank better.


You can read more about how to use clustering here .

3. Personalization of content

Dynamic personalization is another trend that is breaking into the marketing industry, despite growing privacy concerns.

Marketing personalization means setting up a web interface for each specific user.

Personalization is not segmentation (which means providing personalized experience to a specific group of users).

Through personalized product and content offerings, Amazon and Netflix have been providing personalized experiences for users over the years.
BigCommerce found that when deciding to make purchases on the Internet, the younger generation of US consumers rely heavily on personalized recommendations for products based on artificial intelligence and personalized advertising on social networks.

Personalization is awaiting your brand these days. She will help brands to attract customers in an era of information overload.

When it comes to content, dynamic personalization is easier than you think.

Here are two ways you can easily personalize your content now:

1. Personalize your calls-to-action

Personalized CTAs increase interaction by 202%. Hubspot's Smart CTA is a great tool to help with this.

Of all the personalization settings, these are the most useful:

• Personalize your CTA using your username
• Show your visitors an individual CTA based on how they found your content

2. Personalization of content for product recommendations with Alter

Alter is a personalization marketing platform that uses anonymized data.



Alter is very easy to configure: you do not need any technical knowledge, and it also provides some basic reports so that you know how your users see the content. You can use it to customize your CTA, banners or product recommendations.

3. Closely monitor user interaction on the page

Finally, if you want your personalization tactics to be successful, you need to carefully monitor how your audience responds to personalized experiences.

Finteza is a freeware analytic software focused on monitoring and reporting on specific events on the page


Set up conversion tracking for each personalized CTA to better control engagement.

Moving forward: how to prepare?

This is by no means all of the content marketing trends that are already taking place. Similarly, these are not all the tools you can play with. The purpose of this article was not to create the ultimate resource - which is hardly possible in any case, because content marketing continues to evolve.

In this article, I wanted to show that evolution is good, and there is no need to be afraid of change. Technology is evolving, our audience is changing, and our competitors are moving forward.
These are the problems we face, but these problems open up new possibilities.

To adapt to any changes and get ahead of your competitors, always be ready to explore new tools and experiment with new things (including content formats and tactics).

More such articles can be read on my telegram channel (proroas). I write about marketing and web analytics.

Good luck