Content Marketing: Top 10 Tips & Trends For 2024
Content Marketing In 2024
Part one of our content marketing series expanded on some of the key tactics used in different content strategies. Here are our trend predictions for 2024, which explores the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in content creation, and why content marketing is essential for SEO.
If you wish to discuss your own approach, feel free to contact us.
Find out more about our content marketing services here.
How Much Does Content Marketing Cost?
Content marketing has proven to be a more effective channel due to its ability to generate results long after initial investments are made. Because of this, many businesses across multiple industries are opting to increase their budget toward content strategies this year. Allocation could be anything up to 30% of your total marketing budget dependent on business size, industry, competition, and performance goals, with an emphasis on producing quality content, exploring new content opportunities, and outsourcing to content specialists to optimise spend and enhance your overall Return On Investment (ROI).
What Is Quantity vs Quality Content?
Successful content marketing demands storytelling, quality, and originality, meaning there is increasing difficulty for marketers to keep producing fresh and engaging content. The age-old debate of quantity vs quality continues, with many businesses still struggling to find the right balance between the two.
"For Google, having more high-quality content on your website can improve your chances of ranking higher in search engine results, leading to increased traffic, engagement, and eventually, sales."
With businesses trying to keep quality standards high and not exhaust their in-house resources, it is likely that more content creation will be outsourced to ensure it remains timely, and consistent.
Does Content Marketing Include Social Media?
Social media’s major influence continues this year. Content marketing on social media remains essential for customer interaction, brand building, and revenue generation through the creation and sharing of valuable and engaging content that not only reaches, but resonates with your target audience.
Sites like Facebook, X, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and established platforms such as TikTok, Quora, and Reddit continue to cement their reputation as the most popular channels for content distribution.
These platforms are fantastic for sharing and discussing content, providing direct insights into your audience’s needs and preferences, so always ensure you host the content on your own blog, as well as social media sites to continue building strong relationships with potential and current customers.
How Do You Measure Content Marketing?
Measuring the impact of your content is a key piece of the puzzle when it comes to a strong content marketing strategy. Platforms for tracking content performance and optimising your content strategy include Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Google Search Console, and SEMrush, with most advertising platforms, social media sites, and search engines providing dedicated, built-in analytics tools. Multiple quantitative and qualitative metrics including traffic source, Click-Through-Rate (CTR), bounce rate, engagement rate and social shares all help you to make better, data-informed decisions.
What Is Mobile-Friendly Content?
It is more essential than ever that your content is mobile-friendly to have an edge over old-fashioned competitors. Adopt a mobile-first approach to your content marketing campaigns by creating dynamic layouts for your blogs and websites that have been optimised for smaller screens and touch-based interactions, adding clicks to call, and making them location aware if appropriate.
Consumer behaviour is constantly changing, with mobile users preferring to quickly scan content for relevance before investing their time. Ensure the first paragraphs of your mobile content are concise, have clear headers, are filled with essential information, and presented in an engaging way to effectively hook your audience. Make sure all content is usable on mobile, including e-books, case studies, and videos.
Why Is Content Curation Important?
Set yourself apart from your competitors by making sure you portray yourself as an expert in your industry. In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, content curation has become a popular way of keeping up with the growing demands for instant information. One tactic is to collect and collate valuable content and distribute it through your various social media channels and/or newsletters.
We can see trends in social media algorithms increasingly rewarding those with higher engagement, with content curation providing a consistent and cost-effective way to provide followers with constant value whilst maintaining their interest.
Balancing your own material and curated content from partner and competitors sites is the best strategy.
What Is Engaging Content?
Engage your audience in the initial stages of interaction. Key touch points include a user clicking on your content, commenting, sharing, saving it to read later, or subscribing to receive more. Every action, or inaction, that a user takes can provide valuable insights into the quality and value of the content they’re engaging with to steer your content strategy in the right direction. Carve out the correct messaging to use across channels, and utilise user-generated and interactive content such as short videos, polls, quizzes, webinars, and infographics to draw your audience in and keep them browsing your site. This will generate interest; guiding users to more demanding content that should eventually convert leads into customers.
Do Personas Matter In Content Marketing?
Spend your budget wisely. Take the time to understand the motivation of your potential customers, evaluating different audiences periodically along your content marketing journey. Personas are rich with critical audience insights and can be developed through detailed customer research and the analysis of relevant trends and opportunities. This will help you create stories that connect and engage. Interview your target audiences to find out why they buy, identifying their position in the buyer’s journey and their role in the buying decision. It is equally important to delve into the emotions that influence those decisions, with new capabilities to analyse, understand, and predict how your personas will respond to the content you create. This approach will allow you to tailor your content to meet user’s needs and demands by aligning your messaging across multiple touchpoints.
How Can You Refine Your Content Distribution Strategy?
Your content distribution strategy should be ever-evolving.
As new platforms, features, and tactics continue to come into play, you will be presented with even more opportunities to maximise and extend your content distribution.
Using an airtight content distribution strategy by utilising your owned, earned, and paid media channels not only stretches the lifespan of a piece of content, but can boost brand awareness, and encourage readers to click, act, and convert. Optimising your owned channels, such as your blog, email newsletter, and social media profiles, can be the most cost-effective way to achieve this. Although the content distribution process takes place after content creation, it is important to be mindful of where and how you will publish and promote your content before putting pen to paper. Refreshing older content and keeping tabs on recurring topics will also help lighten your content creation load.
Can AI Be Used For Content Marketing?
The introduction of AI saw marketers lean into automation tools to help boost productivity and streamline the content creation process. The “AI boom” shows no signs of slowing down, with current AI technologies such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini (formerly Bard), and Bing AI being refined, and new technologies expected to emerge that understands things better, writes faster, and is more human-like.
Whilst AI continues to dominate conversation, it is important to use it with care.
For example, Google’s March 2024 algorithm update began penalising websites for publishing AI-generated content created primarily for search engines rather than people. To maintain strong SEO performance, ensure your content retains that personalised ‘human touch’ by carefully reviewing any AI-generated content for accuracy, and protecting your content with thorough plagiarism checks.
Why Is Content Marketing Essential For SEO?
Combining content marketing and SEO can create a powerhouse strategy for your business by integrating keyword research, improving page speed, implementing responsive design, and identifying link building opportunities. User experience continues to be key in 2024 and optimising your website and pages to target relevant and authoritative sites ensures your great content is placed where it will generate and retain sales, increasing visibility and traffic, and creating a wider discussion about your company.
Complementary Relationship
SEO and well-optimised content makes your content both visible and accessible, extending your reach with your audience. It is the value you bring your user when accessing your site, and the value you provide the search engine that makes you rank better. You cannot rank well without useful, helpful content.
Helpful Content (& HCU)
Google defines helpful content as content that is created for a specific audience, showcases expertise, is trustworthy and credible, and meets the needs of the searcher. Helpful Content Updates (HCU) have been rolled out to try and tackle spammy, low-quality content that does not benefit the user, so it is important to keep Google’s Quality Guidelines for people-first content in mind when trying to optimise your content for search. Featured snippets are a great way to gauge if Google thinks your content is helpful.
Value To The User
Quality content is determined by how you engage, inform, support, and delight your audience. The key is to provide value to the user by focusing on their needs and understanding what they aim to achieve when interacting with your business. This approach is critical for increasing visibility in search as the more value you create in your area, the more trustworthy you become, establishing yourself as a go-to authority.
Demonstrating Expertise (E-E-A-T)
Improving your content’s E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) may not be a direct ranking factor, but it serves as a guideline to boost your content performance across organic search. E-E-A-T is an evolution of Google’s E-A-T concept that assesses content’s overall quality and credibility, with value now attributed to first-hand experience, and a renewed emphasis on trust.
Keyword Optimisation Opportunities
Keyword optimisation involves using the right keywords in the right places in the right ways. Due to the rapidly evolving nature of searches, this is an ongoing process that includes updating your content to better target user search queries. This can be achieved by grouping similar keywords into clusters, establishing keyword intent, and migrating keywords over to a keyword map to weave into your content.
Creating Linkable Assets
Another tactic to boost your domain’s authority and relevance signals is to create linkable assets that attract backlinks from other websites as part of an overall link building strategy. These assets can include infographics, written articles, videos, online tools, or downloadable documents. An ideal linkable asset is a comprehensive, long-form resource that also meets Google’s top-ranking content criteria. To conclude, a content strategy backed by detailed and informed research can be an invaluable tool for achieving your long-term business goals by enabling you to build an online portfolio of expertise that establishes trust, attracts new audiences, and retains existing ones. By integrating some or all of the SEO strategies mentioned above into your content creation process, and staying up-to-date with the latest content marketing trends, you can drive traffic and increase user engagement to your site.