Creating high quality content plays a critical role in attracting customers, boosting search engine rankings, and increasing conversion rates. Yet with the growth of technology and voice-enabled smart devices, along with shorter attention spans from your customers, it’s now more important than ever to ramp up your content marketing to bring more traffic to your website and customers to your business.
Here is the type of content that you should be creating in 2022 …
Give customers a self-service solution
Customers want to a self-service solution online. When they want to make a restaurant booking, they want to do online. We want things we can do quickly via an app, we don’t like waiting and we HATE being ‘on hold’ waiting for a customer service rep to talk to you whilst we listen to repetitive music.
We are a “now or never” generation. When we order on Amazon, we expect it the next day. When our washing machine breaks, we don’t save up for a new one, we buy on credit if we don’t have the immediate funds.
NOW, NOW, NOW….
So as business owners, it shouldn’t be any different for OUR customers.
In a B2B world, you are still dealing with PEOPLE. Give them answers to their questions online, make it super easy for people to do business with you, generate content that helps solves their problems – because these are things that turn prospects into customers.
Create content that works with voice search
Voice search is getting smarter. By the end of 2022 over half of the US population are expected to have a voice-enabled smart device in their home.
Focus on conversational keywords like questions and statistics in your industry that your customers might be curious about. Create content with punchy titles that match the persona of your customer, with the questions they might want to ask.
Voice Search isn’t going away. It’s only going to get bigger, and by creating content now that matches the behaviour of your customers when they search using Voice, you will get ahead of the game and attract more customers.
1000 words did you say?
Content is king, but longer content (1000 words+) is the KINGdom. Most savvy businesses have woken up to the fact that creating consistent content will help you attract more customers from Google and social media – so we’re all doing it. The thing that will help you stand out more is longer form content where you’re providing really useful nuggets, rather than just a bog-standard 400 word blog. A thousand words means you’re going into much more detail, making it more relevant and engaging for those who read it.
Double up on content
Repurpose some of your existing blogs that are performing well into 1-minute short videos. This will give you really engaging content to share on social media without you having to think of yet another topic to write about.
Jump on the podcast bandwagon
In 2021, there were 14.6 million podcast listeners in the UK. There’s over 2million active podcasts with more 48 million podcast episodes.
Podcasts are easy to listen to, they can be accessed from a smart device, and they can be listened to whilst doing something else (for those who can multi-task!). The ones I’ve listened to this year have given me great insight into some of the topics that I’m really passionate about. My favourite one is The Liz Earle podcast about the menopause.
Visual storytelling
When content is conveyed through visuals, the human brain is able to retain that information far more readily that it would be if it was just reading words off a page.
Find ways that your visual content can engage with your audience in a personal way. How can you or your brand relate to them more?
Instant and real video content gets far more engagement on social media and I’ve noticed the social media platforms leveraging live video and favouring it with their algorithm.
Watch out for this more in 2022.
So are you ready to get really creative and engaging with your content in 2022? If so, you may need a helping hand with planning a great content calendar to ensure it cuts through all the noise.