Top 10 Content Marketing Trends In 2022 To Stay On The Top

Every year, trends in content marketing change to suit the time. Some of these changes are minor, while others may come with an entirely new set of rules. In 2022, marketing strategies will continue to expand and evolve with the ever-changing world of content. Depending on your business goals, emerging trends in content marketing can be leveraged to help shape your approach. 

• Rise of user-generated content (UGC). UGC is any content created by the people (individuals) rather than brands, and influencer marketing is becoming the flag bearer of UGC. Influencer marketing is all the rage, and it’s estimated that it’ll bring in $15 billion by 2022 [1]. 90% of consumers prefer user-generated content to ads and promotional emails. According to Marketing In Asia (M.I.A.), research 65% of respondents believe that marketing spend on UGC has increased in recent years. While being highly cost-effective, UGC is helping companies build trust in their customers (72%) and enhance customer engagement (63%). 

• Say hello to interactive marketing. With the rise of digital marketing, traditional advertising strategies have lost their effectiveness. This is because consumers now want and expect hyper-personalized messaging that is tailored to each individual and acts as a personalised link between brands and individuals. Further, as customers become more independent, companies need to find new ways to keep prospects interested. Therefore, interactive content is gaining massive traction. The recent M.I.A. research revealed that the reusability of interactive content was the biggest perk it had to offer (65%), followed by the increase in the number of visitors (55%). 83% also said that content marketing and interactive content made a good recipe for enhancing message retention in the customers. 

Also read: The Complete Guide To Interactive Marketing 

• Podcasting. Podcasts is one of the finest content format used for marketing and promoting brands. Their more personalised and intimate approach to communicating with the audience is getting more attention than ever. Branding via podcasts can be much easier than other channels because of the lack of competition and large audience. The research shows that there are only 700,000 podcasts airing at a time, which is drastically less than 80 million business pages on Facebook [2]. In addition, branded audio content like Clubhouse audio chatroom app is rapidly capturing the market [3]. According to HubSpot’s most recent survey, the budget allocated for podcasts is not going anywhere in the near future, with 80% of the marketers planning to invest the same or more of their budget in podcasts and audio content [4]. Since the ROI of this content format is still a question, a relatively small percentage (18%) of successful startups are experimenting with it [5]. 

• Marketing in the metaverse: Metaverse is synonymous with immersive engagement. If you are looking at keeping your customers hooked, it’s time to move to the metaverse because approximately 85 million people had experienced AR – VR in 2021 [6]. Research by Citi has found that in 2030 the metaverse could amount to an $8-13 trillion revenue opportunity [7]. 

Also read: Marketing In The Metaverse: A Digital Odyssey For Brands 

• Video content marketing. Videos are a great way to spread the word about your company culture and the benefits of your products. They make people really enthusiastic about getting involved with what you do. Studies have shown that video content on social media elicits a much higher rate of leads. As there’s a shift to video-based content, companies should start producing and incorporating videos into their content marketing strategy as a majority of consumers (54%) desire the inclusion of promotional videos from the brands they support [8]. Building an engagement strategy via videos could be expensive, time-consuming & difficult, resulting in a small percentage (30%) of the participants experimenting with video marketing [5]. 

• Building an emotional connect. Content marketing is all about the experience your business provides to its leads in order to create a series of follow-up campaign touches that lead to re-engagement, retention and referrals. The connection between you and the person on the other end is important for creating engaging content. In 2022, the true human connection will be key. 
• Building content with AI. Marketing automation and AI-ML are hugely shaping marketing today. While automation has penetrated every department, marketing teams continue to push their boundaries by using it more frequently for tasks like email marketing, lead generation and content writing. AI content tools, such as Rytr, enable average content marketers to put out larger quantities of content with less effort. 
   

Also read: Smart Marketing: The Impact Of Artificial Intelligence & Automation On Marketing 

• Increased focus on the hybrid agency model. According to Forbes, 2022 will see an increased focus on the hybrid agency model. The idea behind this is that agencies can delegate some of their fulfilment work to a partner who understands it better and provide much better service as a result. Not only is it effective, but it frees up agency reps to focus on the strategic stuff that brings in the big bucks [9]. 
• Rise of the cloud. Cloud analytics is a rapidly evolving field that utilises the advent of big data and cloud computing to help organisations optimise their marketing efforts. The potential growth rate for this market is huge, and marketing professionals are actively changing the way they think in order to work in cloud analytics. According to a recent survey, 91% of the respondents agreed to use cloud analytics to gather insights on customer data and build an intelligent system. 64% of these people said they used this aspect of technology to create data-backed strategies and 58% to offer hyper-personalised content that aids in marketing [10]. 

Also read: 7 Reasons To Switch To Cloud Analytics For Better Marketing 

• A/B Testing your Website Content. A/B testing gets a lot of buzz but is often only done at the paid stage of marketing instead of being carried out on organic search traffic. Rather, it should be conducted on SEO pages with high value. Such as popular blogs and posts, to see a spike in the conversion rate. 

Content is not the only space with new trends. Digital marketing, on the whole, is witnessing some massive shifts. Download the report to know what they are. 

Endnotes: 

1. https://www.marketinginasia.com/ugc-user-generated-content-is-the-new-black/ 
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1291360/podcast-listeners-worldwide/ 
3. https://rockcontent.com/blog/clubhouse-social-app/ 
4. https://rockcontent.com/blog/content-marketing-trends/ 
5. https://www.marketinginasia.com/mia-research-report-best-brand-building-practices-what-experience-teach-businesses/ 
6. https://influencermarketinghub.com/metaverse-marketing/ 
7. https://fortune.com/2022/04/01/citi-metaverse-economy-13-trillion-2030/  
8. https://www.oberlo.in/blog/video-marketing-statistics#:~:text=in the US.-,54% of consumers want to see more video content from,a brand on social media. 
9. https://www.marketinginasia.com/smart-marketing-the-impact-of-artificial-intelligence-automation-on-marketing/ 
10. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2022/01/24/16-top-content-marketing-trends-to-stay-on-top-of-in-2022/?sh=422321475c84 
11. https://www.marketinginasia.com/7-reasons-to-switch-to-cloud-analytics-for-better-marketing%ef%bf%bc/