Digital marketing in 2021 is shaping up to be more critical than ever with social media.
With the turmoil of the global pandemic now behind us, it’s time to look ahead and set the stage for marketing strategies for the upcoming months.
As nearly 400 million eyes are glued to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms, there isn’t any reason for brands to overlook social media platforms.
Eventually, social media space has captured greater significance for consumers and businesses, it’s not just regular pushing your content on social media platforms in the hope of growing your website traffic and ultimately generating leads in an already crowded marketplace.
To succeed on social media, you must keep your team up to date with the ongoing content marketing and social media trends to make sure they can exploit every opportunity available. Over the years, the tactics that generated results have changed.
With a heavy sigh, even the large brands and agencies revamped their social media strategies for their content marketing strategy to stick out.
How do you keep your social media followers engaged? What strategy is appropriate for today’s context? You’re not alone in probing these puzzles, and it’s more important than ever to get strategic!
In this post, I’m sharing the top six content and social media trends to better align social media marketing to seize more engagement this year.
The trend is shifting towards video
In the last few years, short videos delivered so much buzz and social engagement, and at the same time, they built brand loyalty.
As SproutSocial explained it, the global pandemic of 2020 marked so many small businesses going digital and live streaming is the only possible way to convey their message yet maintaining social distancing.
Reportedly, 40% of consumers want to consume more live video from brands, live streaming is another way for brands, marketers, influencers, and consumers to connect.
Brands like Taobao, China’s largest eCommerce platform, which have figured out how to provide online social experiences, have sustained high engagement no other types of social posts can even.
According to HootSuite, Taobao features short videos on more than 40% of product pages.
Source – luxurysociety.com
Since our attention spans are shrinking, marketers are sure video and live streams are the way to capture even the most passive users.
Moment to consider personalized marketing
Everybody in the marketing industry is articulating hyper-personalization. Indeed, this is why brands and business executives are pouring money into leveraging data, data analysis and digital tools. In fact, large organizations have a massive amount of data and information at their disposal, and based on that, they can remit personalized content and marketing experiences to your target audience.
Today’s consumers covet custom-tailored solutions, persuading businesses to segment their audience and alter marketing efforts that are more relevant to their buyer persona. We’ve seen abandoned cart emails to retargeting ads that speak to individual customers.
Personalization is becoming increasingly significant as people have content arising at them from every direction. If you want any opportunity to stand out, you’ll need to build multiple audience personas for a diversified array of people you want to target.
The best example out there in the eCommerce realm is Amazon. Someone who is an enthusiastic ailurophile will heed plenty of personalized cat food products. On the other hand, millennial cinephile gets pleased to see Prime streaming titles go on and on.
With the ongoing trend of AI-based marketing and ease of availability of data than ever, you can expect personalized social media marketing to get traction among B2B and B2C marketers.
Perfect your content strategy
For a successful content strategy, find your value proposition first.
What is your subject expertise, and how can you aid value to the global conversation with your unique voice? What can you offer that no one can? Why should people follow you?
Once you answered these questions, the next step is obviously to identify what your target audience wants. You need to analyze the data you have gathered in different social media and SEO campaigns to understand user intent and persona.
In 2021 and beyond, only brands with intent-driven and data-driven strategies will stand out.
Instead of simply following the try, test, and learn approach, great brands roll out the content strategy based on an incredible body of data that will give them precision in designing a content marketing funnel, budget allocation, and format types.
Remember, the better your content strategy, the better your brand will perform on social media.
A Versatile Marketing Tool – Quizzes
A solid content marketing strategy requires a strong hook. Without the right kind of content, you’re shooting arrows at a non-existent bullseye.
While ebooks, whitepapers, Instagram stories, and podcasts are flowing within a marketing strategy, diversity and engagement is the real key to retaining the followers that might get bored with the same sort of messaging.What do people adore to share on Facebook?
How BuzzFeed grew so successful?
Quizzes.
As Guardian puts it, though BuzzFeed didn’t invent the listicles and quizzes, it has transformed the digital landscape considerably.
A whopping 54% of BuzzFeed’s social traffic comes from Facebook, as per SimilarWeb.
Besides BuzzFeed, other companies like The Elephant Pants and Cloud Sherpas gained enormous money for their launch and qualifying leads, respectively.
Acknowledge the marketing charm of social media polls
Social media polls are evergreen scoop in social media marketing.
As brands attempt new ways to drive engagement and generate leads, the allure of social media polls makes sense.
Today, audience polls are integrated features on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Introducing social media polls into your marketing strategy will help draw in users and spark engagement. After all, they are a proven and easy way to boost engagement as they require little time for users to join in and participate.
What’s exciting about polls on social media is how they let you capture insights into your fan base and allow people to express their views and be part of the conversation.
Look at it this way: Social media bridges the gap between your brand’s message and audience, and without engagement, social media marketing misfires.
There’s great value in repurposing the best content for social media
Last and perhaps the simplest way to get your brand’s message to rise above the noise is to repurpose your top-performing content assets.
Besides the obvious fascination of content recycling (just reformatting, and you’re about to reach a completely new audience), there are other strategic benefits to reform your content for social media, including:
- Strengthening your brand’s messaging
- Giving a new life to old content
- Creating an opportunity for SEO inbound links
For instance, if you’ve previously produced a data-driven blog post, you can turn it into an infographic or small visuals to capture your social media users’ interest right from the get-go. On the flip side, you can break your detail-oriented content into bite-sized pieces and share it on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
As Iconsquare puts it, one story can show dozens more, and therefore repurposing content brings you enormous benefit with minimal effort.
In Closing
There are by no means the only ways to follow the social media trends that promise to captivate your audience. From valuable content that your users seek out to how-to video guides to even riding the wave of an evergreen infographic – there’s no limit to the creativity you can bring to the table. In turn, you’ll get social likes, shares, and of course, new followers that can be converted into paying customers.
Shyam is the founder of a search consulting business and has over 7 years of industry experience in branding and search engine marketing. With background experience in IT engineering, he also customizes eCommerce stores and optimizes sales funnel for better ROI generation.
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