Content
From 1996 to the present day, content marketing has come a long way. In essence, these stages resemble what happens to any biological system:
- childhood;
- youth;
- growing up;
- old age.
Childhood is characterized by the discovery of the world, youth – by expansion, growing up – by structuring and rationalization, old age – by gradual fading.
What is happening in this area now is most similar to the period of growing up. Rampant expansion with little control over the waste of resources is over. Instead of chaotic mass seeding of content, the trend is now to create material that is “sharpened” for relatively narrow sections of the target audience, but which fully meets the needs of people.
Content of a general nature is not in demand by people and is not valued by search engines. Next, we will analyze this in detail.
Content Marketing Trends
Trends in modern content marketing are characterized by such strategic points:
- Accurate targeting and individualized content by sections of the target audience.
- Analytics at the stages of seeding and promotion of content.
- Analytics of transitions from articles, videos, audio podcasts and publications in social networks.
- Analytics of the growth of the link mass obtained from the seeding of content.
- Analytics against stuffing “guerrilla” content in social networks.
- The expertise of the material is the most important factor in content marketing.
For better understanding, we will divide these points into three subgroups:
- Analytics;
- Individualized adjustment to the target audience;
- Expertise and increased requirements for content.
Please note that we do not use phrases such as “Sowing and promoting content”, or “Using articles and videos …”. There are good reasons for this. An Internet marketer ceases to be someone who independently deals with the technical aspects of creating and distributing information (although this also exists). The trends are such that he is gradually turning into an information strategist-analyst.
Analytics – as a direction for the development of a marketer
Texts are written by copywriters, videos are created by screenwriters, edited by editing operators, and uploaded by content managers. The primary task of a marketer is to analyze the effectiveness and correct the corporate content strategy! This is the key to understanding marketing trends.
Now there are a lot of services for facilitating content creation, calculating effective SEO parameters, analyzing link mass inflow and accounting for transitions through different types of content. A marketer is someone who, based on specialized tools, plans to promote a brand or service.
Why is content marketing separated from online marketing? In many ways, these areas intersect, I propose to consider content marketing as part of Internet marketing. The demand for content direction is due to the fact that this type of promotion in many areas provides better results at lower costs.
For example, content marketing can be compared to PPC advertising in a search engine. Advertising is getting more expensive, in some industries the average check does not justify the cost of attracting one lead. At the same time, a well-thought-out content strategy helps to achieve better results.
Individualization
Content customization is key. Articles and videos “about nothing” do little to promote goods and services. Of course, from time to time a particularly creative “virus” can “shoot”, but a strategy is not built on one-time successes. And no one has yet succeeded in putting stunning, super-popular videos on stream.
Therefore, useful content, individualized to its target audience, is consistently in demand and popular. It is also called “evergreen content” because it becomes obsolete relatively slowly.
What applies to him? Useful articles of the format: “How …”, reviews with specific data, real descriptions with photos and an algorithm.
An example is the top 10 VIP hotels on the south coast. How to get a smartphone with maximum performance for $100. How to relax in Europe and earn …
There are a lot of options, here you can add options: Samsung Season, the best TV for geeks in spring 2021. Nike-Lighting sneakers +3.5 km.h. for sprinters…
Pay attention to personalization, each “article” is tailored to its target audience (VIP, $100, geeks, sprinters). The same principle works with videos and content of any type. It is not necessary to explicitly indicate in the title for whom, it is important that it is clear from the context or the transcription.
This content marketing approach significantly increases sales if you have a well-defined target audience.
Expertise
Content expertise is always noticeable. For example, if the text about the wholesale sales of metal tiles is prepared by someone who does not understand anything about it, the efficiency will be low. Lies will seep through the words, and any specialist will notice this.
Previously, only people understood this, now, thanks to the latest algorithms, and search engines.
Expertise has become one of the important ranking factors for Google and Yandex. Let’s consider them briefly.
“Vega”
“Vega” from Yandex is a new search algorithm that appeared on 12/17/2019. Yandex developers use a neural network to improve the search base and this freed up significant hardware resources, which made it possible to increase search results by about 2 times. Semantic clusters of the search engine are also used, which significantly improved the quality of searching and working with documents.
The most relevant point is the use of expert assessors by the Yandex neural network. These are the people the machine consults with. The system made a selection and found professionals who help it with complex issues. Experts have the right to evaluate the relevance of search engine responses. The system processes their messages in priority compared to others. Thus, search intelligence learns from people and, undoubtedly, will surpass them in terms of expertise, because it has an unlimited memory resource and a huge amount of computing power.
Florida2
Florida2 is the main ranking algorithm from Google, launched in 2019. Its partial implementation was back in 2018, but it was more of a test. One of the important points of the algorithm is the E-A-T (Expertise, Authority and Trust) principle. The content of a good site, according to the search engine, should have exactly these characteristics.
Here is how it is implemented in practice:
- It is necessary to meticulously prescribe technical pages: “About us”, “Contacts”, “Rules for users”, “Legal information”, etc.
- Analyze texts for usefulness. There should not be material for the sake of filling, each text solves specific problems and answers questions that are relevant to the audience.
- Headings H1-H3 should reveal the essence of the text and correspond to the content.
- Store product descriptions should be useful and contain technical data, parameters, composition.
- It is recommended to make links to authoritative sources of information, reference books, encyclopedias.
- It is also important to add the date of publication or update of texts on the blog, to keep product maps up to date.
- Pages with biographies of employees, where their qualifications are confirmed.
- It is important to monitor the reputation of the site on external sources.
- Close from indexing pages with a small amount of content.
- Make sure there are few ad blocks.
Another important point that is related to authority and expertise is to monitor the quality of the link profile. Link building is an effective way to promote, but it can easily wipe out the gains of months of promotion. Google downgrades sites that carry out inaccurate link expansion.
Expert in legal marketing. Head of marketing agency MAVR.
Business degree “Master of Business Administration” (MBA).