As they all say, content is king! But how do you continue to provide the best content when the demands for content marketing continually change over time? How do you make sure that your content marketing efforts don’t go to waste? One good thing to remember is to pay close attention to your audience. Do you still know who your audience is? Are you giving them content that’s useful to them?

HubSpot Research recently made a remark on how 2016 initiated a new phase of technology, one wherein consumer preferences and new innovations are important factors to consider for every marketer. If you are trying to improve your content marketing practices, the key to doing so is to identify if you are providing your readers the right content. So how do you determine this?

Here are some of the latest trends as told by industry experts:

 Videos

Video has largely become a vital part of content marketing. As projected by experts, 80% of web traffic will come from video by the year 2019. This will represent an impressive increase in video content and especially the amount of time people spend watching YouTube and Facebook videos.

How to make use of video content for your advantage?

• Keep videos within two minutes in length to ensure viewers watch the entire clip.
• Add captions and animations to your video so it’s easy for viewers to understand the message, even without listening to anything.
• Cover breaking news, since this is something more users are interested in seeing.

 Social Media

Social media is never going to die, at least anytime soon. As a matter of fact, its audience is only growing bigger every day. To date, there are 1.7 billion daily active users on Facebook, 500 million on Instagram, 313 million on Twitter, and 150 million on Snapchat. These individuals are consuming more content compared in the past. Because of this, content creators have started to make use of these channels to connect with their target audience.

How do you maximize social media for your brand?

• Use relevant hashtags sparingly. It’s not good to use multiple hashtags that aim to increase Twitter engagement. You can use a branded campaign hashtag for your audience to easily find content.
• Use social media for your videos to gain more engagement through likes, shares, retweets or replies.

 News Articles

Nowadays, more and more people are using the internet to stay updated with the latest news. Based on the findings of experts, readers want to keep up with news articles; however, they don’t really read these articles thoroughly. Many readers tend to skim-read the articles or even get the gist of the content through the headline of the article.

How to boost engagement through news articles?

• Provide an accompanying video to a long article so that those who don’t have time to thoroughly read the text can use the video.
• Maintain your reader’s attention by using bullets, images, and by breaking up larger text paragraphs. 

Research Content

Readers are also looking for original research they can easily consume and understand. An evidence of this is proven by how successful infographics have become over the years. Your readers no longer want to spend long periods of time trying to decipher the information you provide them. Instead, they are more likely to appreciate it if you spent some of your resources providing a visual element that could prove to be useful for the content they are searching.

How does one make the most out of research data?

• Make sure to provide effective data visualization through an infographic.
• Remember to use color in providing the information you have collected as this improves your content’s readership and the attention span of your audience.
• Break up text in easily digestible images. Remember, people tend to skim-read now instead of reading the entire text.
• Provide actionable content so your readers know how they can apply what they just learned.

Information provided through an infographic can be more easily remembered by an individual compared to their reading text.

Knowing these things can help you with your content marketing strategy. You no longer have to second guess your tactics since you already know what it is your readers are searching for. In this way, you know that your efforts won’t go to waste.