By Neil Patel

Let’s talk about content marketing.

How’s it doing in 2021? Where might it be headed this year and next? Is it still the king?

Content marketing continues to flourish for one very simple reason: it’s what the people want. They don’t want intrusive banners, ads, and popups.

They don’t want irrelevant messages and products that have nothing to do with them shoved in their face. They don’t want spam clogging their inbox.

People want high quality, useful, relevant, and engaging content about things that matter to them.

Craig Davis, the former Chief Creative Officer at marketing communications firm J. Walter Thompson, said it best:

We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.

That’s content marketing in a nutshell. And yes, it’s still king, but it is evolving. Consider:

• Compared to outbound tactics, content marketing costs 62% less but generates 3x as many leads.
• Video and voice search are leading the charge in 2021.

• Over 41 percent of Americans use an ad blocker of some sort. Content is not an “ad”, and so is an effective method to get around blockers.
• Businesses that use content marketing have conversion rates 6x higher on average than those who do not.
• 70% of consumers prefer to learn about a product from an article rather than an ad, and 4x more would rather a video than an article.
• Roughly 24% of marketers plan to increase their spending on content marketing in both B2B and B2C.
• SMBs that blog generate 126% more lead growth than their non-blogging counterparts.
• 38% of marketers publish new content at least weekly, while 91% of the most successful business bloggers publish at least once per week.
• 60% of marketers say content marketing is very important or extremely important to their overall strategy.

If you’re not convinced yet, any blog post on content marketing statistics will quickly change your mind.

It works. Exceedingly well.

But the thing about content marketing is – as with virtually everything digital – it’s constantly evolving and changing. Tactics and channels that worked last year, or even last month, might not deliver the same robust results today.

Digital marketers have to stay on top of the industry, paying attention not only to what the competition is doing, but where the people are spending their time online, and what they’re consuming while there.

So, what’s happening in content marketing, version 2021? Let’s find out.

Content Marketing: 2021 Current Trends

To operate on the assumption that what content marketing was it will always be is to fail at it. Horribly. In the early days, you could post a 500 word, keyword-stuffed blog post and generate plenty of traffic.

Not anymore. Content marketing is as much about watching the trends as it is about creating and sharing …read more

Source:: Kiss Metrics Blog