3 Current Content Marketing Trends to Make Your Business Boom This Year

In this article, the Adsy team is looking into the tendencies in content marketing for 2021. We’ve analyzed several B2B and B2C marketing surveys to determine three main trends to watch and employ.

These are the emerging trends in marketing that have the power to drive loyal customers to your business. Implement them to ensure the prosperity of your brand this year.

1. Be more transparent

Transparency is the pillar of healthy and trusting relations between your business and its customers. According to Sprout Social, a social media analysis tool, 86% of respondents more than ever before expect brands to be open and transparent. This is exactly the reason why it opens our top three marketing trends for 2022.

What is transparency?

But before we move any further with the ways transparency affects your buyers, let’s identify it to avoid any ambiguity and to be on the same page with the users. In the research by Sprout Social, customers themselves define transparency in the following terms:

This removes all the questions about how you should communicate with your readers, what experiences to suggest to them, and it also resolves many issues on brand voice choice. It’s clear that to win your users and increase sales you no longer need to seek some generic solutions. Work on opening up, and you’re on the way to success.

With this seemingly easy key to fruitful relations between brands and customers, few brands are following the path at the moment. Only 15% of Americans believe that brands do open up to the public, and 30% don’t see any signs of transparency for the brands’ part. “Customers want more transparency, so what?” you may say. "It doesn’t mean that it will make them buy more.” It does, actually.

• 85% of people are ready to try your product once again even after a bad first impression
• 85% are also ready to support your brand during a crisis
• 89% will forgive if your brand makes a mistake

Another study we’ve looked into, by Label Insight, revealed that 73% of consumers are even ready to pay more for your product if it offers frankness and clarity.

These results can ONLY be achieved if you are open and transparent, admit your faults, and work on eliminating them.

How do you reach transparency?

Consumers don’t hide the fact that they want to gain access to almost all the information the brand has to offer. Your company values and business practices, changes to the product or pricing, even financial performance make a difference and shift the audience’s perception of your brand.

To help you get closer to your customers we’ve devised a few communication and content marketing techniques.

Make your choice.

First and foremost, choose the most effective medium to reach your audience with the best possible results. Customers themselves want the brand’s website to provide all the information on product attributes, as 50% of respondents confirm.

At the same time, Sprout Social insists that transparency across social media is getting more weight with customers, especially, the most active age group -- millennials. 81% of young people consider social media the most accountable source of information.

Listen, talk...

So after you've chosen the most important channel your next step would be to develop a reaction strategy -- forget about ignoring your customers’ opinions, questions, and worries. The majority of people lose faith in a brand when it leaves unanswered questions either from employees or from customers.

So go get your SMM manager to review all the messages on your brand’s page on social media. Silence is not golden in this case, and by letting comments and reviews go unnoticed you build a wall between your business and customers.

... and anticipate

Later you’ll be able to notice any tendencies in the questions your team gets. This is the perfect time to go further and try another content marketing format. Meet the queries upfront by creating content that will take the questions off before they are even asked. Tell more about your company values in social media posts, add the lacking information to your product descriptions on the site, show the backstage of your product creation, the people behind the services you provide.

If you have some available resources it’s worth giving a shot at creating video content. Videos are rated the most trusted and transparent source of information (according to 67% of Americans), so leverage them if you can among other content marketing techniques you’re employing. You can read more about the positive impact of videos on your business in the blog post we published earlier.

2. Personalize your business for the users

Personalization comes along with other current marketing trends, with 45% of users refusing to waste their time on content irrelevant to their needs. It becomes crucial for you to make sure you provide a unique experience for your potential customers to make them listen and, eventually, buy from you.

As Michael Brenner, CEO and Founder of Marketing Insider Group says, “Attention has become the currency of the digital, social and mobile web.”

And if we fail to deliver content that corresponds to our readers’ expectations, we may as well forget about getting likes, shares, and comments. And by expectations, we not only mean the content itself, but posting time, targeting, and channels which altogether ensure a truly personalized experience for your customers.

Impact of personalization

The first thing to remember when creating content and personalizing it is the fact that three-quarters of your potential buyers will perceive your brand as relevant as long as your content is relevant. Even more, for 84% of people relevant content boosts their purchase intent bringing you closer to a successful sale.

How users discover your content and brand

Once again we come to the understanding that channels we use for talking to our customers play a significant role and may even determine the results we achieve.

The research made by Marketing Insider Group revealed that Facebook is by far the most effective channel because 50% of users find branded content there. The top 5 looks like this:

Interestingly enough, when asked where they discover content, millennials (aged 18-34) more frequently select Youtube (42% of respondents). Keep this in mind if your business mainly targets the young generation.

Conclusions

At Adsy we’ve also felt this increase with marketers and buyers coming to promote their businesses through content marketing. When it comes to guest posts, the majority admits that the soсial media influencers don't work that well, as business owners also expect to get Google approved backlinks to their sites among other benefits. With the help of guest posts they are able not only to increase brand awareness, but to improve rankings as well.

Whichever influencer type you think is appropriate for you, make sure to leverage it. Be it a series of posts on Instagram or a dozen of guest posts from publishers in your niche, influencer marketing has a potential to help you reach your business goals.

These were the three emerging trends in content marketing Adsy team looks forward to seeing brands use and develop. Are you working on any of them? Which other new marketing trends are you going to include in your strategy this year? Let's discuss them in the comments!