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6 Hot Content Marketing Trends To Keep Your Eye On

It’s a massive task to keep up to date with the constantly changing online trends. As the web grows and technology capabilities continue to expand, so much more is possible.

Savvy online businesses are at the leading edge of the movement, using all the options at their disposal to draw traffic to their websites, maximize their search engine ranking and developing their online presence. Stay ahead of the pack by including these 6 hot trends in your clients' content marketing strategies:

Virtual e-Events

Events such as B2B conferences and webinars are increasingly being held online. Two recent examples of this are:

  • An online conference that took place in a virtual venue with
  • an auditorium
  • a resource center
  • a marketing salon, and
  • a networking lounge
  • New logins arrived in the lobby, from where they could choose which “venue” to enter.
  • Webinars in the auditorium were accompanied by slides and a chat window for questions and comments.
  • In the networking lounge, participants could view who was in the room and network with them in a chat window.
  • Twitter guru Dan Zarella was guest speaker at a recent webinar, which strove to set a record with over 11,000 participants and prizes for the most tweets.

These events are becoming popular and effective ways to educate company decision-makers about your industry and products and generate sales leads. In a report by the Content Marketing Institute, stats show webinar hosting has grown by 25 % since 2011.

Video Ventures

The use of video content has grown exponentially. Cisco Systems predicted recently that by 2013, 90 % of web traffic will be video-oriented. Reasons for this shift include the huge number of people accessing the web using their smart phones, which lend themselves better to video than to reading text.

As this trend continues, video is becoming the preferred way of accessing content. Many small business owners find the idea of producing a film daunting to say the least, but the growth of YouTube’s easy-to-use tools is gradually helping people overcome this. Many people have made successful business videos just using a webcam.

Infographics

We’ve always loved charts, maps, tables and lists, haven’t we? Now there’s a new kid on the block – the infographic. A combination of graphic and text elements, infographics offer a visual method of communicating complex information quickly and easily. They present the material in an abstract way, using visual language that is universally understood. For example, the color red is used to depict danger, risk and financial issues, while green is generally accepted to mean environmentally-friendly technology. Infographics are also useful for highlighting statistics in a way that’s easy for non-statistical readers to understand.

Making it Mobile

We live for our smart phones. With Microsoft predicting that mobile internet usage will overtake desktop access by 2014, any businesses without mobile sites are running last in the race. And while it’s possible to access a regular website using a smart phone, the user’s experience is so much better if the site is optimized for mobile viewing. That means:

  • fewer web pages
  • less click-throughs
  • smaller files
  • faster downloads

Whether your content consists of articles, blog posts, podcasts or video, make sure it’s accessible by phone and that the mobile site offers a good user experience.

Clever Curation

Once frowned upon as inappropriate, the curation of content gleaned from other websites and blogs is now recognized by 85% of marketers as a way to provide information to your users without having to redo the work. It solves the content marketer’s daily challenge of trying to find quality content. It’s free. It’s also a way to build links and goodwill with the sites you reference, and to recognize industry experts directly. Whether you share relevant content via your website or blog, or use social media platforms such as Twitter or Storify, it can be hugely beneficial for your content marketing strategy and help to establish your company as a thought leader in your field.

Presenting White Papers

Originally used to describe political and research documents, the term “white paper” has come to mean a document that is mainly educational in nature. White papers have become very popular as a way to get users to enter their email addresses, which usually subscribes them to the mailing database. In return, the user gets a white paper that gives detailed, credible information on the product or service, with value-added “key takeaways” to help him make a decision.

However you look at it, content marketing is here to stay, and businesses that understand this.

Topics: content marketing - content strategy - content marketing tips - content marketing strategy

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