My Prediction for Content Marketing 2022

Each year, Semruush publishes their state of content market report. After downloading the copy, I was happy to report that content marketing is strong.

A proof point is that 47% of companies intend to increase their content team by 2022. The main point is that it serves as the foundation of our firm's existence.

According to the report, the key to a successful content marketing program is “avoiding ad-hoc content creation and case by case analysis and instead building strategies and mapping clear processes.”

This report gives a snapshot of top content marketing trends as well as tips for how to create a content strategy that is successful in 2022. It was an honor to be included in one of the top trends in content marketing. I look forward to sharing it with you.

First, some highlights

• 78% of content marketing companies succeed document their content marketing strategies
• Content audits are a common practice in content marketing. 65% of those companies who succeeded conduct them.
• 22% more people were interested in the question “What is Content Marketing?”
• The most talked about topic in content marketing is content marketing tools
• The most searched term related to content marketing is “Content marketing plan”.

My Content Marketing Trend

Marketing should produce tangible results. This is what I believe since childhood. We use the Semrush Viability Tracker to show results to all of our clients.

Here are some examples:

Healthcare Technology Company

Marketing Technology Company

Through a weekly blog article and an annual content plan, we help clients achieve these results.

But updating old content is one of our most important trends. Here is an example of one our oldest clients, and the results they get from a combination new and updated weekly content.

We look for pages with declining search traffic or that have been ranked previously. We give them a content refresh, an updated publish date, as well as a social boost.

This is how we have grown from zero to nearly 1,000,000 page views per month and ranking for almost 100,000 keywords.

Our weekly content publication schedule includes both new and updated content. Each week we publish two original articles that are keyword-focused. Then, we publish 2 fresh articles from our over 1,500 articles library.

Prediction for 2022: Content Marketing

Here is my 2022 content marketing trend prediction with Semrush's permission.

Content marketing leaders will be focusing their efforts on getting the most out of existing content marketing efforts in 2022. Some will argue that Voice, AR, VR and Voice are the most important trends in content marketing.

Real content marketers are searching for the 20% that will bring a 80% return on their investment. We are doing more content updates, pruning, and reuse.

It is important to look for content that has been successful in the past. It might have had high page-one rankings, high traffic, high conversions or high page authority. If a page loses those rankings, it's time to prune or update.

This will make updating content less of a side-project and more of a main project for content marketers. Update quality pages and re-directing non-performing content has proven to be a great way to increase traffic and improve rankings.

This and other information can be found in the Semrush State of Content Marketing Report. Click here.

Content Marketing Trends for 2022

Last year, I wrote 12 content marketing trends that every business should follow. These are the three main ones that I covered:

1. Content Marketing is Back in Style

In the past, business-to-business SaaS marketers and founders of new companies would first think about buying social media ads to help grow their businesses. They would say, “We must be on Tiktok.” Or “we need to employ a social media intern.”

After realizing that social media is not a good platform for selling anything, we're seeing them return to content marketing. Google even stated that content is the best way for buyers to search for. Industry research shows that content marketing spending is expected to increase by twice as much in 2022.

2. AI-Generated Content

Although we believe there are many efficient ways to automate content promotion, AI-generated content is still far away. For clients, we do have access to some AI-driven content marketing strategies as well as AI-driven content promotion. We believe that AI will force us to rethink what we create in the future.

We tested several AI-generated content services, and were disappointed in their ability create quality blog content and long-form articles.

We will now have to confront what I call “The Paradox of AI”: The more robots tell us what we should do, the more we need people (employees or customers) to create that content and share it. This brings me to my last big prediction for content marketing in 2022.

3. Employee activation. Brands will continue to turn to employees, customers, experts and executives to produce more content that aids buyers.

My friends help me get by. You can check out my top post from a few decades back about content marketing predictions by 20 industry experts.

• Scaling content marketing technology
• Trends in video marketing
• Podcasting is the next big thing
• Backlash and resistance to content marketing
• Acceptance of content marketing
• How content marketing scales
• Moving from content to experiences
• Content marketing that aligns better with sales
• cross-enterprise content marketing coordination
• Brand storytelling
• Content distribution and amplification
• personalization
• Buyer alignment and customer journeys
• Content merging with data and media
• Content is more effective than ads

Although these predictions for content marketing are only a few years old, it is still very interesting to see how they have performed over the years.

Do you want to convert new customers and engage them using the most important trend in digital marketing: consistent, quality content? Get our weekly blog content service. Get started now to generate more leads and traffic for your business.