Our Top 3 Tech Trends for Content Marketing – Part 1

When it comes to content marketing, it’s vital to stay up to date with the tech if you’re going to make a real impact with your content and get results.

Luckily we’ve provided you with the right equipment to navigate these rocky roads!

Here are our top 3 tech trends for content marketing

1.    Voice Search

While voice search is nothing new, the need for business owners to get on this trend is crucial. Why?

Because voice search is becoming more widely used, with voice services such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Home continuing to rise in popularity.

So how do content marketers prepare for this?

• Optimise your articles for voiceover in the same way you would for featured snippets; create clear, concise answers that could be read in response to a query.
• Provide answers to FAQs that users seeking your products or services would ask. It’s a good idea to have a FAQ page on your website.
• Use query clustering tools to understand how to better explain your topic, as well as optimise your content for an array of related searches.

Google’s Speakable (currently in beta) is a project with the goal of empowering content marketers with the ability to deliver their content to users through voice.

Speakable identifies sections of content that are suitable for audio using text-to-speech (TTS). So, when you ask your Google Assistant a question, it will respond with an excerpt from the top article and tell you the publisher’s name. Then the device sends a source link to your connected device.

Webpages with speakable structured data can use the Google Assistant to distribute content through new channels and reach a wider base of users – and get double the exposure for their business.

2. AI

Artificial intelligence is predicted to play a much bigger role in marketing. While the concept of AI has been tossed around like a Caesar salad for years, we’re reaching a point where small businesses can benefit from its use.

Let’s back up a bit and start with the basics. What is AI?

AI describes intelligent software which enables a computer to “think” through programming specifications. Although the term is popularly relatable to sci-fi movies, this tech allows content marketers to:

• search for relevant content
• collect consumer data
• explore predictive analytics
• save time, as AI can interpret enormous amounts of data within seconds
• create better content marketing strategies
• build powerful, highly targeted, personalised audience segments

A great example of accessible AI is Fizziology. They’re a social media research company that combines AI and human intelligence to help their clients better understand consumer trends and insights.

Fizziology performed a study on the reaction to Colin Kaepernick as the face of Nike. While mentions of burning merchandise and boycotting the brand were all over headlines, those conversations actually only made up 3% of mentions on the first day of the campaign, and less than 1% of mentions over that week. With all of social media reacting to shredded Nikes, it would have been easy for a marketer to misinterpret the branding impact. Instead, the data was collected by AI and interpreted by a human to reveal the true impact.

3. Chatbots

According to a survey from Capterra, 65% of U.S. millennials prefer to use chatbots when engaging with brands. However, most small businesses surveyed weren’t using the technology.

As a brand, creating an amazing online customer experience should be high on your priority list, and implementing chatbots can help you do this. Having an AI-powered chatbot on your website means that:

• customers have their basic questions answered at any given time, day or night
• users receive customer support
• You receive customer data gathered by your chatbot

A crucial part of the customer experience is content. Proper scripting of your bot is vital to the seamless customer experience. Conversational and informative content is a must if you want to minimise the number of chats transferred to a human. The more advanced the AI running your chatbot is, the more varied and personalised the responses can be.

Chatbots are also the perfect addition to your sales funnel. For users who are unsure about converting to customers, your chatbot can direct them to informative content such as buying guides or comparative studies, and push them closer towards a purchase.

You can even place chatbots specifically to lead users to content applicable to their pain points. Why make users wade through webpages of material in trying to locate what they need? Instead, your chatbots can “talk” to the visitor, determine their needs, and then direct them to their solution.

With the ever-changing preferences of audiences, marketers need to adapt to and adopt the new technology that will help make their marketing efforts all the more successful. Read up on more tech trends in part 2 of this blog here.