The 8 Practical Blogging Trends You Really Need to Follow in 2020
Blogs can be extremely powerful lead generators. So powerful that B2B companies that have a blog report 67% more leads that those who do not. That’s because of the social media and Google phenomenon as people might not be talking about brands daily but they do at least a dozen searches per day, share viable articles with their friends, and discuss the trending topics.
Many brands have become market leaders because they’ve managed to establish their blogs as industry-leading knowledge sources. HubSpot and Moz are great examples of this, as the companies’ blogs have become a place where marketers go to check on the latest trends or research a particular topic.
Blogging has become such an essential part of every marketing strategy. Did you know that websites with a blog tend to have 434% more indexed pages? Another helpful data is that blogs have been rated as the 5th most trustworthy source for gathering online information.
A survey by OrbitMedia researched the biggest challenges bloggers face. The results showed that finding time for creating and promoting content plus attracting visitors to the website are the main problems.
Blogs can be extremely powerful lead generators. So powerful that B2B companies that have a blog report 67% more leads that those who do not. That’s because of the social media and Google phenomenon as people might not be talking about brands daily but they do at least a dozen searches per day, share viable articles with their friends, and discuss the trending topics.
Many brands have become market leaders because they’ve managed to establish their blogs as industry-leading knowledge sources. HubSpot and Moz are great examples of this, as the companies’ blogs have become a place where marketers go to check on the latest trends or research a particular topic.
Blogging has become such an essential part of every marketing strategy. Did you know that websites with a blog tend to have 434% more indexed pages? Another helpful data is that blogs have been rated as the 5th most trustworthy source for gathering online information.
A survey by OrbitMedia researched the biggest challenges bloggers face. The results showed that finding time for creating and promoting content plus attracting visitors to the website are the main problems.
It results that not all of us manage to reach large audiences and engage with them. The goal of this article is to research exactly what trends make blogs go from empty no-reader spaces to highly engaged communities.
Trend 1: Good Performing Articles Are Growing in Length
Image via OrbitMedia
It’s true that a significantly small percentage of marketers write articles larger than 2000 words, but these bloggers are reporting that their content is performing around 3 times better than the average article that has a length of 1150 words. This is why, we can actually conclude that the longer the publication – the better it performs.
Now, with word-stuffing long dead, to rank higher one of the essential things you must know is that Google is constantly optimizing its search engine to provide users with more relevant and intent-based content.
To answer the needs of customers, the company has developed LSI (latent semantic indexing) – an algorithm that uses mathematical techniques to understands the relationship patterns between different words in your text. LSI helps Google understand the topic of your article.
To rank higher, you have to use a precise subset of keywords rather than a singular one because this helps LSI understand your article more in-depth and rank you higher for a particular search.
Trend 2: Bloggers Invest More Time per Post
Overall, the time bloggers invest in producing content has risen. What’s apparent is that effort pays off as copywriters who spend 6+ hours on an article report two times better results than those who don’t.
Both search engines and users demanding content personalization. Respectively to make an article attract a particular kind of people you need to do more thorough research, work with buyer personas, and psychographic targeting in order to personalize it.
Your overall content strategy should be optimized and coherent, meaning different activities should be aligned with one another and support the final goals.
Writing two thousand words is not enough anymore. You have to provide supplementary content that keeps the audience engaged and helps them better understand the topic. Adding video, infographics, or audio in an article helps engage more people, yet it also means you may need to put even more effort and time into publishing a lead-generating article nowadays.
Related article: How to Turn Your Blog Posts into Social Media Content
Trend 3: Frequency Is King
A research by Social Media Examiner shows that blogs that post daily get 5 times more traffic compared to those that don’t. Regular engagement is one of the surest ways to establish consistently high-volume traffic.
Also, take into consideration that marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI.
How to start blogging consistently? Create an editorial calendar and elaborate your workflow. Think about the topics you are going to write depending on your business and your customer’s pain points.
Many companies have blogs but what’s curious is that just 2% of businesses use them to their maximum efficiency, publishing a post at least once per day. However, 60-68% of those that publish daily or more regularly, report high results driven by their publications.
That’s easily explainable. To run a blog effectively, you have to invest a significant amount of resources and have people contributing to the daily publishing process. However, once you manage to post at least once per day – you slowly become a recognizable source increasing consumer dependency on your brand. Becoming a source of daily information makes you rise above competitors, especially locally, presenting bigger market opportunities.
Another reason why blogging daily is important is that most users online are interested in time-relevant topics and demand everyday access to new content to be active readers of a blog. If users know there’s always something new to find once they visit your blog, they will dive into your content each time they require info in your company’s field.
Related article: 19 Expert Tips on How to Build a Successful Business Blog
Trend 4: An Editor Is a Blogger’s Bestie
Almost half of the users report that they skim through articles. This means that making your writing as up-to-the-point as possible and polishing content in order to be easily comprehensive is essential to engage the viewer skimming your text. Working with editors helps copywriters engage more leads and personalize their content to fit users’ needs even more precisely.
Here are some free editor tools you can try in order to improve your content’s readability:
- Grammarly – checks your grammar and spelling. It’s free and you can add the Grammarly extension to your browser.
- Hemingway – helps you to write clearly, it highlights the places in your text where you can improve your wording or points whenever your sentences are too long.
Do not forget to update your already published articles: older content that gets updated scores much stronger results than old-content that is not up-to-date or accurate. Furthermore, the relevancy an experienced editor could tailor in your article makes you sound much more trustworthy.
Trend 5: The Hunt for Original Content
Users are not looking for something reposted that they’ve read at least 20 times with different wording. Especially active readers, consuming content daily and being highly engaged, are looking for articles that provide them with unique knowledge and relevant perspective.
Nowadays people are busy and overwhelmed with information. They don’t have time for irrelevant content where they can’t find anything valuable. That’s why you should think of their needs and provide the right solution.
Whatever your business is your goal should be educating and helping your customers. This is the essence of inbound marketing. There are different formats you can experiment and see if they work for your audience or not. For instance, listicles are the most popular blog post format among business blogs.
Trend 6: Analyze Every Step of the Way
Image via OrbitMedia
More and more bloggers are using data to drive their creative processes and 40% of those who always use analytics report strong results. This once again proves the fact, that researching your target market is an essential part of marketing nowadays.
Knowing users’ intent and psychographics is important if you want to answer the constantly evolving expectations of customers. Not only demographic data is important nowadays, but understanding what your target market is interested in, what are their pain points and goals, who are they following and how are they consuming content. All of this data helps you to properly reach out and use content that appeals to users’ intent, engages and converts leads.
Marketing is an iterative process; adjusting your strategy to the market requirements, rather than not making mistakes is the difference between good and bad marketers.
Trend 7: Attention Bloggers, Guest Posting Is NOT Your Enemy
Even though most bloggers guest-post, the stigma among some in the copywriting community is that guest-blogging is bad for your personal brand. Well, finally there’s a statistic that proves these people couldn’t be more wrong.
Brand blogs implementing guest blogging not only score better in search engines due to content quantity but they usually have larger audiences than personal blogs. Guest posting doesn’t only serve the brand you’re writing for but also lets you reach new audiences, get powerful insights into their consumer behavior, and even become a known name in the blogging industry.
Trend 8: Promoting Your Content
In the sea of information, one of our main job as marketers is to divide the subjective data from the facts. Promoting your content is a broad topic and usually based on the industry you’re in and your business model, there’re different ways to approach it – each of which could be equally beneficial depending on the case. Yet, we’ve tried to find commonly occurring patterns to see the overall trends.
Even though social media is quite popular and almost every marketer we know is excited by its potential, it’s also a place where visual content is the king. Promoting your blog through social media could easily turn into an ineffective, highly-spending activity. Due to this, we suggest that you carefully monitor how your articles are performing in social media to know whether the investment is worth it.
Paid-advertising, of course, is the most effective activity for marketers, though it’s always good to keep in mind your content strategy and where the blog fits in it to not overspend. SEO-optimization requires much smaller investment but is a must for every blog that wants to rank higher in SERPs and get the immense non-paid, organic search traffic from users whose intent is known and easily leverageable.
Among the most effective promoting activities the one that got our interest was the influencer outreach. Influencers are continuing to be a 21st-century phenomenon with incredibly engaged personal audiences and are always a good choice to collaborate with for a marketing campaign. Especially if their own image resonates well with your brand’s one.
The GDPR-targeted survivor, email marketing, is still amongst the least effective practices for promoting your blog. It’s extremely hard to time the emails of all your subscribers as people are rarely active at the same time and usually get irritated if you start mailing them too often. What email campaigns are very useful for though is to re-engage subscribers or send your value proposition to users that have previously engaged with your emails.
Related article: How to Find and Fill the Holes in Your Content
Bonus Trend 9: Try Interactive Content
Interactive content is definitely a trend you should follow. People like visuals and pages where they can interact and play with. This is a great way you can keep them more time on your site.
What do the numbers say about interactive content?
- 70% of marketers say interactive content is effective at engaging their website visitors or buyers.
- 93% marketers rate interactive content as effective at educating the buyer.
Depending on your field there are different types of interactive content you can try on your blog: quizzes, interactive infographics, guides or e-books, calculators, surveys or polls, timelines or sliders, games and video.
It will be an inspiring new direction for blog content production and an easy transition from your regular posts to interactive content to follow this sample table:
Summary
Blogging can be extremely powerful lead-generating and converting marketing practice. It’s also quite useful for getting external links leading to your website and thus indexing the page and the site higher in SERP results. Setting and running a blog requires careful analysis, a very structured process, a good understanding of your marketing strategy and target market, and real empirical knowledge that can be converted to unique content.
What’s important though is to understand that marketing is an iterative process, where we need to constantly educate ourselves on the latest trends, share trendy content, and do time-relevant data analysis. Be consistent and give it time. The effort you need to invest in blogging is rising, but so are the results, so roll up your sleeves and start organizing your blog today, especially if you’re a B2B company!
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