The top content strategy trends and content marketing trends in 2022 and beyond will be dominated by green and social causes as the world moves together to tackle these issues.
Before you read the trends for 2022, read also the trends for 2021 which still persist in 2022. These trends include broadcasting live videos, data visualization, user-generated content, accessible content and voice search.
Top Content Strategy Trends 2022
1. Content purging and digital clutter minimization
Human activity has massive impact on the environment, leading to rising world temperatures and climate change. As a result, climate change will now threaten and change every aspects of human activity, including content strategy and content marketing.
Many people think that digital content publishing and content marketing are carbon zero activities since they are mostly online and no paper is involved.
Wrong! The data centers are the infrastructure hosting your online and digital content while the processing, transmitting, and storing of the data at data centers consume enormous resources and energy.
Many data center operators have also joined the effort to go green. IBM has built energy-efficient servers that are able to consolidate the work of 126 competitive servers down to just two servers. On the other hand, Amazon is aiming to power its operations with renewable energy by 2025.
In 2022, you should play your part to save the earth and remove the unnecessary content on the servers.
Start by purging the duplicated content, cached content, and under-performing content. Then slowly go through your media files, and delete the unwanted digital clutter, such as old documents, files and images on the servers.
This content strategy trend will likely continue beyond 2022 as green gains dominance.
2. The Clubhouse experience
This content strategy trend is also included as one of the top 12 UI UX trends of 2022.
Marketers and content strategists used to capture users’ attention by producing high-quality content in the form of short videos or GIFs. This content effectively provides both valuable information and entertainment to the users.
However, with Clubhouse suddenly gaining popularity in 2021, marketers ponder whether they have missed out on audio content as one of the effective content marketing strategies to communicate with users.
With audio content, marketers will be able to target the market of audio content, especially users who prefer listening to podcasts while multitasking.
3. Localized content with micro-influencers
From 2022 onwards, you will see more localized content for individual markets with the emergence of more micro-influencers.
The use of micro-influencers is not exactly a new trend anymore. Micro-influencers are social media accounts with only tens of thousands of followers, usually from the same country. They have a close relationship with their followers, thus generating a higher engagement rate and conversion rate.
For brands, micro-influencers are more affordable with the benefits greatly outweighing the costs. They are abundant in volume and are able to cover a wide range of niches in local markets previously not possible with macro-influencers.
Why will the use of micro-influencers increase in 2022? The ongoing trade wars and travel restrictions have led brands to invest more in marketing localization. This converts to more budget for more localized content.
4. Social causes
Shoppers are spoilt for choice. They are now considering beyond price and quality when shopping for goods and services. According to an article by Nielsen Norman Group, online shoppers do take note of socially conscious retailers when making purchases.
Therefore, if your brands have made effort in common social causes such as social diversity, social equity, sustainability, green and environmental consciousness, or philanthropic efforts, do not shy away from telling the consumers.
In 2022, subtlety structure your content strategy to let consumers know what you have done and what you have in plan for social causes.
5. Data driven and verified content
One of the key take-aways from content strategy trends 2021 is that the COVID-19 pandemic has trained the mass public to be savvy e-commerce users and critical with data.
Consumers are always seeking more information and data from verified sources. As active players in their respective industries, brands are effectively the subject matter experts in the products or services they offer.
Brands can make use of their knowledge to publish educational content on the industry trends and standards, safety precautions, best practices, statistics, case studies, etc. This will not only increase your brand awareness but also increase your conversion rate.
In 2022, both B2C and B2B should leverage their resources to create more data-driven content to engage the audience. One of the best examples to learn from is Think with Google. Think with Google converts Google’s data and experience working with marketers into case studies for insights, ideas, and inspiration benefiting other marketers.
