We’ve all experienced firsthand how the pandemic has pushed the digital transformation of marketing into hyperdrive. All of the effort spent on pivoting how you communicate with customers, accelerating your existing digital initiatives, and moving your B2B strategy into uncharted territory will continue to be relevant in 2022.
According to McKinsey, “more than three quarters of buyers and sellers say they now prefer digital self-serve and remote human engagement over face-to-face interactions. This seismic shift in B2B decision makers’ preferences will extend into the future, and B2B marketers must continue to align with our customers’ increasing expectations for speed, convenience, transparency, and expertise.
As we move into 2022, we expect to see these trends that set the bar in 2021 endure with a greater focus on sincerity and relevancy. As customers continue to advance their level of sophistication, they can quickly determine which companies understand and offer what they need. They expect you to be on target when you communicate with them and deliver timely, personalized content.
Video will consistently dominate marketing channels
Eighty-four percent of people say they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video. Consumers demand educational and informative product videos in their decision-making process now more than ever before. With the massive increase in video consumption in every aspect of their lives due to lockdowns and remote work, they are also looking for greater authenticity and higher quality from the companies that produce them.
Genuinely showcase your company’s differentiators – are you passionate, brilliant, reliable, empathetic? Convey how that relates to the product or service you are offering in the video and how it benefits your customers through sincere storytelling aligned with your mission. This is how you will stand out as customers continue to massively consume video, even after pandemic restrictions ease.
While there will always be demand for longer videos, such as case studies, product demos, and expert interviews, more consumers are watching mobile video, which will encompass 76% of mobile bandwidth by 2025.
For mobile video, think about factors like length and captions. Shorter videos are more digestible and shareable on mobile devices. In fact, 69% of people prefer to watch a short video to learn about a service or product. Also, consider that 92% of U.S. consumers view videos with the sound off on mobile devices. Providing captions for accessibility and mobile viewing is no longer an option – it’s a must.
Consumers seek out immersive, interactive, personalized content journeys
Due to the massive amount of virtual and on-demand content created during the past couple of years, many organizations have a trove of videos, virtual trade show booths, webinars, and other elements. There’s an opportunity to incorporate all this collateral into a personalized content journey.
Whether you’re allowing prospects the opportunity to self-identify their needs and blaze their own trails – or helping to guide their buyer journeys – create meaningful interactions. Craft the experience to allow prospects to focus on the benefits from their point of view, which creates value. Interactive websites, shoppable videos, and extended reality deployments should showcase the benefits of products and services customized to the buyer’s level of knowledge, the detail required, the solutions needed, the industry, and the decision-making authority.
Don’t forget that in designing personalized, interactive engagements, you need to focus on the UX basics for the immersive experience. And be sure that you are creating the appropriate content and experience for the channel and device.
Topical authority evolves SEO strategy, driving traffic to companies with true expertise
Refined AI and machine learning in search algorithms have evolved the search engine’s ability to discern context. This means that content marketers must ensure topical authority — providing the best information from reliable sources that solve the user’s problem.
Marketers can’t rely solely on technical SEO practices like keyword optimization, content tagging, and site optimization. Although these are foundational to SEO, search engine algorithms demand quality, thoughtful content aligned with the customer’s needs.
Google ranks search results based on a site’s or page’s ability to most effectively answer the user’s question or provide the right information related to a topic, industry, or need. High-quality, authoritative content that ranks well isn’t developed overnight. Your content strategy can help focus your content around the most relevant topics to your users.
That’s where topic clusters and content hubs come into play as tools to optimize your authoritative, well-rounded content portfolio. Topic clusters consist of pillar content, the broader primary subject content, and cluster content, which can contain subtopics or specialized, supportive content. A content hub is a centralized, organized online destination for content around a central topic. The hub comprises various content types that correlate with the different stages of the customer’s journey.
These approaches allow for consistent updates to your content as well as a foundation for future content expansion. The organization is key to helping users access the information they need more quickly. So take a look at your content, and find the approach that’s best for you!
Repurposing gives new life to high-performing content across channels
Developing high-quality, authoritative content plays a more strategic role than ever before. Incorporating a genuine voice, providing expertise, and creating true personalization have been important content marketing trends in 2021.
While developing comprehensive copy can seem arduous with all the other hats content marketers wear, you can maximize your efforts by repurposing content into multiple formats for different channels and throughout the marketing funnel.
A great place to start is to identify your top-performing content. Perhaps this is something that needs a quick update, but revamping it into something new could be more effective than creating new content from scratch. You can make your job more manageable if you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
Content repurposing ideas include:
- Building an e-book from several white papers or case studies
- Repurposing a blog post as an infographic
- Turning webinars into product training
- Developing a new video from a presentation
- Incorporating statistics into social posts
- Deconstructing long-form content into snippets to use in personalized messaging
When your content strategy emphasizes evolving many pieces of new content for different uses over time, you maximize ROI from the initial investment. As a well-rounded content portfolio develops, you can periodically optimize your web content for the best SEO results, offer more thorough and targeted content throughout the buyer journey, and accelerate purchase decisions.
Strengthen Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy with PMG
PMG partners with tech and SaaS marketing organizations to drive business value through high-impact content, demand generation, and digital marketing programs — helping companies define their strategies, deliver on their objectives, and smash their KPIs. Contact us today for a free 20-minute consultation.
