Based on interviews with industry experts, internal data, thousands of data points, and emerging trends. Online visibility management and content marketing SaaS platform, SEM Rush recently published the State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report. The report provides a bird’s eye view of top content marketing trends and an indepth manual on how to build your content strategy and workflow in 2022.
200K tweets analyzed, 500K blog posts inspected, 1.5K marketers surveyed, 500K content topics examined.
Favourite Takeaways from SEMRush State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report:
Content Marketing in Numbers: Key Trends from 2021
- Average monthly searches for “content marketing agency” fell from 5,400 to 1,900
- Average monthly searches for “content marketing strategy” fell by 33%
- B2B and niche industries appear in content-marketing-related trending topics, global
- 22% more people asked the question: “What is content marketing?”
- “How to create content for affiliate marketing” saw a 366% increase on the previous year
Popular topics globally
• “Content marketing tools” once again features in the most popular topics globally. Clearly, there is a need for more automation as marketing managers deal with labor intensive processes.
• “Corporate content marketing” and “B2B content marketing strategy 2020” together indicate that content marketing is a strong tactic when selling to other businesses
2022 Content Marketing Trends: Ask the Experts
SEM Rush spoke to a number of marketing experts to find out what they believe will be the eight top trends in content marketing in 2022. Here is what they thought:
01 Trend One: Content Will Become More Human
Henneke Duistermaat, Founder at Enchanting Marketing.
The internet is already awash with average and below-average content. With artificial intelligence (AI), this tsunami of low-quality content will only accelerate. The content marketers who will continue to stand out are those with the most intimate knowledge of their (niche) audience. They are the original thinkers, the creative writers, the experimenters, the people with the skills to captivate, educate, entertain, and inspire their audience.
02. Trend Two: Your Audience Needs Will Continue To Shift
Heidi Cohen, Chief Marketing Officer at Actionable Marketing
Your audience and their needs have changed over the past two years. The key differences across businesses are how employees work, their lifestyles, and their use of devices and media consumption. This includes the use of voice first devices like smartphones and voice assistants.
To ensure your content marketing continues to meet your audience’s needs, take the time to talk to them to determine what their hot button issues include.
Recommendations:
- Remove any excessive references to COVID since your audience likely has pandemic fatigue. Any reference to the pandemic may seem off-putting.
- Add voice to text content: This allows you to reach your on-the-go audience who prefers listening to content on voice first devices.
- Transform voice and audio content into text and visual content. Extend the range of existing content to reach more of your audience.
03. Trend Three: Content Marketers Will Focus on Customer Empathy and Customer Research
Kathryn Strachan, Managing Director & Owner of Copy House
In the B2B industry, we can often lose sight of the person behind the screen and market towards the business itself. But if the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that it’s vital to understand your customer avatar. There are tons of ways to do this, such as digging into their pain points and what’s keeping them up at night, then learning how to cater to their needs.
Integrating empathy into your content strategy and researching your customer’s needs will help your brand connect with your audience by producing personalized content for them.
Recommendations:
- By picking apart your ideal customer, you can then learn how to best cater to them while ensuring your content answers the questions of the final decision-makers too.
- By truly understanding what their pain points are and what’s keeping them up at night.
4. Trend Four: Storytelling in content marketing will be key
Casie Gillette, Senior Director, Digital Marketing at KoMarketing
For content marketers, being able to create something that is interesting to your customers means being creative. It means being able to tell a story. If you are promoting a product, what is it about that product that is interesting? If you are writing ad copy, why should someone click on your ad above the others? So much of what we do is about he customer, but it’s also about the story we are telling.
Recommendations
- Break down the silos in your organization. Talk to your sales team, talk to your customer support, check out social media to find out who is talking about you and what else they are interested in.
- By talking to the people who talk to your customers, you can better understand what they want and the story you need to tell them.
5. Trend Five: Content will be seen as a revenue generator
Liraz Postan, International SEO and Speaker, Founder of Liraz Postan LTD
Since COVID, small businesses have been investing efforts in digital marketing strategy—and competition for ranking is as tough as ever. Nevertheless, content resources are expensive—and that’s a challenge for small business owners. Since every piece of content requires resources and budget, it’s important to measure our content and create an effective content funnel to ensure we make the most of it.
Recommendations:
- Always set KPIs and hold yourself accountable for every piece of content. It doesn’t mean that every content piece will always perform perfectly and add to the bottom line, but every piece of analysis will at least help you understand what works and what doesn’t.
- Use tools to analyze content performance. Some potential performance metrics include traffic, engagement, trackable events on your website, conversion rates, leads—even return on investment.
- Optimize your content plans and your content accordingly. Completing the previous steps will help you make more decisions based on the real user data. Try to remove yourself from the equation, because, at the end of the day, it’s your customers who will be interacting with this content, not you.
6.Trend Six: Click-Through Rates in Search will be a top KPI
Andy Crestodina, Chief Marketing Officer and Co-founder, Orbit Media Studios, Inc.
The biggest trend in search isn’t the most talked-about trend. It isn’t Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (E-A-T) or Core Web Vitals (CWV). It’s much bigger and more fundamental. It’s a change that affects virtually all key phrases. This trend doesn’t affect rankings. It affects click-through rates.
Recommendations
- Create content that is actually memorable. The traffic we do squeeze out of search is typically very short-lived. Your visitors may not be on your site for long (5-7 minutes on average at most) and click-through rates from the landing page to subsequent pages are usually low (10-15% on average at most).
7. Trend 7: Short-form Video will increase in importance
Adam Connell, Founder of Blogging Wizard and Startup Bonsai
If TikTok and Instagram have taught us anything recently, it’s that short-form videos didn’t die with Vine. They are here to stay and they’re only getting more popular. This is because they allow us to reach busy consumers who wouldn’t ordinarily have the time to watch longer-form content. It’s the quick and entertaining nature of these videos that is generally responsible for their ability to spread like wildfire across the internet. So note that as video length increases, you run the risk of decreasing the shareable nature of videos.
Recommendations:
- FAQs: Do you or your brand get a lot of frequent questions? Answer them directly in an FAQ video.
- Educational videos: Educating your customer base is important. And it can be an effective growth tool. Try distilling specific concepts down into short and entertaining videos.
- Company announcements: Do you have news to share? Share it in a short-form video.
- Challenges: User-generated content (UGC) can be extremely powerful. Challenges are one of the most effective ways to encourage your community to create content for you.
- Testimonials: Shine the spotlight on positive customer feedback. This is especially important for small businesses. Instagram stories are especially good for this.
8. Trend Eight: Content Audits will take center stage in 2022
Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group
In 2022, content marketing leaders are mainly focusing on how to get the best results from existing content marketing efforts. Sure, some will say that video, AR, VR, voice, and probably even AI are the biggest trends in content marketing. The trick is to find content that performed well in the past. Maybe it had page-one rankings or high traffic, great conversions, or high page authority. But if a page has lost those results, it is ripe for pruning or updating.
Updating this content will become less of a side project and more of the main project for many content marketers.
Content Marketing Industry Survey 2021
To truly understand the state of content marketing in 2021, SEM Rush surveyed 1,500 marketers in companies ranging from one to 1,000 employees or more, across more than 20 industries and over 40 countries. Their answers paint a picture of a marketing industry that truly favors content as a tactic, with 97% of respondents saying it formed part of their strategy.
Key Findings
Having a documented content strategy
- 78% of companies that believe their content marketing was very successful in 2021 have a documented content marketing strategy.
- 81% of companies with unsuccessful content marketing efforts didn’t have a documented content strategy
Content marketing spend
- 53% of companies that didn’t have much success with content marketing in 2021 spent less than 5% of their marketing budget on content
- 73% of companies that believe to have had a very successful content marketing strategy in 2021 spend from 10% to 70% of their total marketing budget on content marketing
Promoting your content on paid channels
- 46% of companies that had highly successful content marketing this year increased their paid content promo budget in 2021
- 31% of companies that had unsuccessful content marketing in 2021 had no paid promo for their content at all
Size of the content marketing team
- 59% of companies whose content marketing was unsuccessful in 2021 had no dedicated content marketing team or specialist
- 36% of companies whose content marketing was unsuccessful in 2021 had 1-3 specialists in their content team
Running content audits and updating content
- 46% of companies whose content marketing was unsuccessful in 2021 never run content audits
- 65% of companies whose content marketing was very successful in 2021 run content audits more than twice a year
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