If you’re a B2B business owner who isn’t investing in content marketing, you’re in the minority according to smallbiztrends.com. Investing in a good content marketing strategy is essential for B2B businesses if they want to attract, educate, and keep clients through something known as the buyer’s journey. And blogs are among the primary three forms of marketing used in content strategies today.
Content marketing trends to watch
1. Long-form blog posts
2. Repurposing content to support multiple channels
3. An increased willingness to outsource
4. Content marketing is flourishing
5. Prioritising original content over keywords
6. An increase in marketing budgets and efforts
1. Long-form blog posts
The B2B sales funnel is complex. Clients often have to invest a large amount of money and time when purchasing services from a B2B business. This is why they require in-depth information to assist with purchasing decisions before they talk to the business directly. Long-form content, in the form of blogs, works to provide value to prospective clients while at the same time, builds authority with search engines.
Blog posts that explain all the in and outs of what your services provide are extremely helpful for addressing potential client’s possible concerns, demonstrating credibility and building authority. For blog posts that are more than 2,000 words, content should be easily digestible with clear headers, bulleted lists, and graphics so that your audience doesn’t lose interest.
2. Repurposing content to support multiple channels
While it’s not a brand-new content marketing trend, repurposing content continues to hold value for businesses who want to improve their sales. Repurposing content is important not only for blog posts but across various channels as well. Creating valuable, high-quality content for your audience is the best way to ensure that it serves its purpose. It’s an organic way to build your brand, grow your audience and achieve your marketing goals.
3. An increased willingness to outsource
Due to the uncertainty of 2020, businesses had to decrease their marketing budgets and took the decision to outsource content marketing activities, with small businesses outsourcing the most. According to Clutch, 8 out of 10 small businesses outsourced business functions in 2021 in an effort to save time, grow their business, and work with experts across a range of business functions.
4. Content marketing is flourishing
Content marketing is flourishing in 2021 for one simple reason, it’s what people want! They don’t want intrusive banners, ads, and popups along with irrelevant messages and products that have nothing to do with them. They want high quality, useful, relevant and engaging content about things that matter to them.
In 2020, the average length of a top-ranking blog post was 1447 words, which might sound counterintuitive due to the fact that our attention spans are getting shorter, but believe it or not, people are still willing to invest the time required to read a comprehensive and well-written post.
5. Prioritising original content over keywords
Original content over keywords is what makes digital marketing campaigns effective. This realisation became quite obvious back in 2013 when audiences started demanding more authenticity from content produced by brands.
Google also took note and began focusing on finding ways to give credit to sources that demonstrated legit expertise and had a genuine interest in helping audiences through the Hummingbird update. The update favours semantically sensible content over websites that have tried to “rig” the system with keyword stuffing and duplicate content.
The takeaway? Content needs to be focused more on originality and less on keywords, less on semantically-linked words and less on making sure that headings are in the right place in order to do well in the search results.
6. An increase in marketing budgets and efforts
In 2021 businesses are focused on including more experts when it comes to creating content and improving their websites according to the Content Marketing Institute. They also want to increase their number of employees to keep up with the demands of the content marketing world. One respondent stated that they plan to “increase staff and ramp up their inbound strategy through content marketing.” And another saying that their business will “track results and continue to expand their content marketing efforts as their company continues to grow.”
In addition, marketing spend for 2021 is expected to grow by 5.8% according to award-winning agency network, Dentsu.
Need help with content marketing? We at The Mustard Flower pride ourselves on being ethical, affordable and providing expert content marketing services to all our clients. Talk to us today!
