This is a guest post from Anna Konovalova at FlippingBook.
How much has changed in content marketing over the last few years? Well, for one thing, more and more marketers have started to invest in creating and promoting powerful content.
In fact, content marketing is more important than ever: 88% of B2B content marketers believe creating content encourages audiences to view their organization as a credible and trusted resource.
Source: PointVisible
So let’s look at the new trends and tactics you can take with you in 2020 to stand out in today’s online landscape.
Create epic and long-form content.
You’ve probably heard the term “epic content.” It’s so overused that the meaning is almost lost. But what is it exactly?
Epic content refers to something that’s impressive, highly engaging, and that can’t help but get attention.
And it’s the best representation of long-form content. Articles that have long headlines and contain more than 3,000 words perform better in all respects (traffic, backlinks, and social shares). This may be related to the great value they deliver, compared to bite-sized content.
Let’s check out the main types and characteristics of epic content.
- Longreads: not all longreads are epic content, but every piece of epic content is long (minimum, a thousand words and, usually, two to five thousand). Such articles are more likely to become popular among readers and bring you new leads.
- In-depth articles: a long post isn’t necessarily an epic article. But a long post that goes deep into a topic can mean epic content. An epic post doesn’t give you general information; it offers you thorough research on a certain topic. After reading such an article, you should feel like you’ve gained expertise.
- Step-by-step guides and lists: these types of epic content are educational at their core. Their main goal is to teach you how to accomplish a task or to give as many tips as possible. These epic articles thoroughly address every aspect of a certain challenge and everything you’ll likely need. Such an epic content gives you the confidence to overcome your problems and challenges.
- Brand storytelling: This one takes more imagination and creativity than the above. But it’s totally worth it because storytelling will more important than ever this year. Using narrative to connect your brand to customers allows you to tap into the basic human love of stories to build an authentic connection with your audience.
Invest in original research.
Research-backed pieces of content that contain new, interesting data aren’t something you can find everywhere. In an age of interpretations and opinion pieces, the importance of integrating accurate info into your content can’t be overemphasized. And data that you’ve gathered yourself is so much more powerful than someone’s opinion because it’s been tested and proven.
Using proprietary data to create long-form content with graphics has been an effective 2019 strategy for many brands, resulting in backlinks from thousands of high-authority publications. And it’ll become even more popular in 2020, when people will be resorting to trustworthy and expert sources.
See our original research by checking out our resources.
Update and repurpose your content.
When you create great content that evokes emotion and keeps people glued to their PC or mobile device, don’t miss out on a chance to promote it as much as it deserves. It’ll be catching attention, bringing you new leads, and raising your search rankings.
First of all, update your content from time to time, so it’s always relevant and fresh. Making simple updates and tweaks and, most importantly, changing the date of the article to represent the newest revision, will result in your rankings increase. It’s no wonder because Google likes fresh content.
Repurposing content is another amazing opportunity to scale up your content marketing and give it a nice boost. It’s the practice of reusing some elements of existing content to expand its reach. Repurposed content is usually transformed into a new format—for example, turning a blog post into an infographic, a video into a blog post, etc.
You can also create interactive brochures from your popular content. Add images, GIFs, links, and videos to your digital documents to drive engagement and boost SEO. This way, you’ll be able to share your content via all your marketing channels: email, social media, or website. They’ll look nice and neat everywhere.
FlippingBook, software and cloud service for creating professional online documents, can help you with making such digital flipbooks, brochures, catalogs, magazines, and reports in a fast and easy way.
Source: FlippingBook
Thus, you can use a piece of new or ever-green content as the basis for posts, videos, social media posts, and webinars. It’ll allow you to get your content in front of a wide audience and reach as many clients as you can (because some people just read emails, some only watch videos, etc.)
Expand your guest blogging opportunities.
How can you expand your reach even more? Guest blogging. It’s a powerful tactic for raising your brand awareness and developing a link-building strategy.
The best way for a company to start guest blogging is to reach out to other websites in your industry and offer to exchange blog posts. This type of strategy is ideal for both parties, since you get backlinks, wider outreach, a lot of organic traffic, and promising new leads.
And it’s an amazing opportunity to research fresh topics and write about them. When you’re excited about your writing, people feel it and get excited about it too. Plus, you can connect to your fellow marketers and exchange views on your field.
Wrap up
When people feel overwhelmed by the amount of information they receive every day, they start looking for content that can bring value to them, that has unique opinions and findings, and that can be trusted.
And, even when we say that people have a short attention span nowadays, we mean that they overlook all the ads, marketing, and sales paraphernalia and are only ready to dive into deep content. The one that can help them with their challenges.
So 2020 will be a year when you, as a marketer, go for meaningful content and honest interaction with your audience. I’m sure it’ll play out great and will help you create a connection with your audience and grow your business.
Anna Konovalova is a Content Marketer and Translator at FlippingBook, software and cloud provider. When Anna isn’t writing, she enjoys going to the theater, listening to music, and finding inspiration in the world around her. You can find her on LinkedIn.