Content Marketing Trends and Strategies For 2022

Content Marketing is one of the most valuable strategies in the digital landscape. From attracting traffic to lead generation, creative content marketing plays a vital role in brand recognition and conversions. The following statistics offer us insights into the importance of content: 

• 82% of marketers reported using content marketing in 2021 
• Blogs have a 13x positive ROI for marketers
• 77% of Internet users read blogs
• Blogging can increase traffic to websites by 300%

If you wish to leverage online content marketing, you must be ahead of your competitors and embrace the emerging trends. There are more than 600 million blogs, and yours would have to stand out to be counted. What would be blog post content marketing trends to focus on in 2022?

Content Marketing Trends For 2022

Write Content for Dream Customers

Online content marketing is a game of the maximum – maximum visibility, maximum traffic, and maximum interactions. Take a back step and ask yourself the question – is an increase in traffic leading to higher conversions? Keeping aside the traffic and visibility, what matters most to your business is conversions. If you aren’t converting, your content strategy isn’t yielding results. 

Your content must reach out to the audience who are looking for your products and services. The best content marketing strategies are those that target the ‘dream customers’, highlight their problems and solve their pain points. Complementing your content with a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign might offer you the dividends you are looking for. 

Bad SEO Can Kill Good Content

More than 92% of the users never go beyond the first page of search results on Google! Almost one in four users click the first link on the search results. The verdict is clear – your need to focus on Search Engine Optimization to get the best out of your content marketing plan. Bad SEO can kill good content and cannot make compromises with SEO. 

Irrespective of how unique, informative, or beneficial your content won’t be visible to the target audience without a good and sustained SEO campaign. Work on the Title, Keywords, and Meta Data to improve the relevancy and ranking of the content. 

Try Innovative Content Formats

In 2022, you must focus on innovative content formats. They would complement the regular content marketing formats and create the occasional X-factor that puts your brand ahead of the competition. Gated Content is likely to be a big trend in 2022. Among the types of content marketing strategies that are trending this is the most talked about. In this strategy, content is displayed to users once they have submitted basic information such as their names, email ids, etc. which helps you generate leads. 

Along with Gated Content, you must also explore other innovative content formats, such as infographics, illustrations, image sliders, calculators, etc. which have been around for a while. Such content attracts user attention immediately and tends to be shared on social media. 2022 might just be the year where innovative content formats take precedence over the traditional text-and-image blog posts. 

Create ‘Voice Search’ Friendly Blogs

Did you know that there are more than a billion voice searches taking place every month? With 55% of homes in the developed parts of the world expected to own a smart speaker in 2022, we might see the volume of voice searches grow exponentially next year. Are you writing blogs optimized for voice searches? If not, you have no time to waste: get going immediately. 

Most voice searches are in the form of interrogative sentences. For example, a user looking for the best pizzeria in Honolulu is likely to ask the smart speaker “Which is the best pizzeria in Honolulu?” Your blogs need to be answer questions directly and briefly. This would also increase your blog post’s chances of appearing as a featured snippet on the search engines. 

Use Live Updating Content

Blog post content has a certain shelf life. Depending on the type of content you are creating, they can become obsolete in a day, a month, or a few months. As marketers explore content marketing formats that allow old blog posts to stay relevant, live-updating content is gaining popularity. This strategy should be explored when you want users to visit the same page regularly. 

If you are using stats and data on your content where the variables change regularly, this approach would serve you well. For example, if you have a blog on the Covid-19 vaccinations by country, updating this data daily would generate repeat traffic to your blog. This also helps in repurposing content and making them stay relevant for a longer duration. 

Turn Content into Podcasts

According to the latest studies, more than 55% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Reading long blog posts on small-sized screens isn’t the easiest of tasks. Mobile users are switching to podcasts instead of reading long paragraphs of text as listening is easier than reading on small-sized screens. Integrating podcasts on your blog is a great idea as it allows users to plug in their headphones and enjoy the information blog posts you have written. Given that shrinking attention spans are making people lose their ability to read long-form content, and long-form content is the best for SEO, podcasts are not a replacement for blogs but an additional tool with them.

This is one of the fastest-growing trends in online content marketing and 2022 is going to be the year this strategy gets adopted by most blogs. Dozens of Text-to-Speech tools let you convert your blogs into podcasts and you can turn your entire blog into a podcast within minutes. This helps cater to two sets of audiences with the same content. 

Integrate Video into Blogs

We know it's 2021 and this has been one of the trending ideas for several years now. Yet, the majority of the blogs are to embrace this idea. Active Internet users spend 16 hours every week watching online videos. Videos are 12x likely to be shared than text and image-based blogs. Here, we aren’t arguing for Vlogs or switching over to a YouTube channel altogether. But adding short videos to the blogs or embedding your YouTube videos into the blog post makes it more relatable and entertaining for the users. 

In 2022, this would be one of the biggest trends in the blogosphere. Videos tend to add the time spent on a page and result in more page engagement. Thanks to the overwhelming popularity of Instagram and TikTok short videos have become very popular and by integrating them on your blog posts you would make deeper inroads. 

Final Words

As more businesses get serious about creative content marketing in 2022, we expect the competition to skyrocket. To stay ahead in the game, you will need a well-planned content marketing strategy that is in sync with the upcoming trends. By embracing the trends and strategies we have mentioned, you’ll reap maximum benefits from your blog. 

Creating conversion-oriented content is time-consuming. If you are looking to explore creative content marketing strategies for your blog and increase user interactions and conversions, the content marketing team at Growth Natives can help. We have been at the forefront of online content marketing and create captivating blogs for your readers. 

We have experience in different types of content marketing techniques and employ the best strategies to keep your brand ahead in the game. Write to us at info@growthnatives.com or visit our website to know more about the innovative content marketing strategies.