Content marketing has become a cut throat industry, where more and more businesses and marketers are using it for promotional purposes. What this means, unfortunately, is that it can be a lot of hard work to make your content stand out from the crowd and reach your target audiences and in 2017, it’s going to be more difficult than ever. In this blog post, I’m going to share my best predictions for what kind of content is going to rule in 2017 and how you should promote it.

Reach more people with your content with influencer marketing

Social media has allowed more people than ever to reach a certain influence online. We no longer need big stars to help us promote our businesses or blogs, as we can use the reach and weight of social media influencers.

Because so many people are using content marketing as a means of promotion, it can be very difficult to not only reach your audiences, but also to make your content stand out and get them to engage and click on your links. Influencers can be of huge help with that – having a few influencers sharing your content and essentially vouching for it to their loyal audiences.

This year, marketers will need to connect with more influencers in order to get the best possible results. Come up with a plan in due time, identify the best influencers in your niche, create awesome content and start engaging with social influencers and you’ll have an advantage over the competition this year. If you want more help on how to identify and connect with social media influencers, you can check out my guide here.

More personalized, targeted content and email marketing automation

Email marketing and email in general has been named as ‘dead’ by marketers for years now. In fact, email marketing seems to be working better than ever and remains to this day one of the best means of reaching your customers and driving more conversions and sales.

That said, most of your audiences’ inboxes are likely filled with newsletters from various types of businesses, so even here, you need to be able to stand out somehow.

The best way to do that is to make sure you only send content that is relevant to each user, at the right times and marketing automation can really help you with that.

With marketing automation, you can track your website and blog visitors and find out more about their likes and dislikes. For example, are they only interested in a certain subject, reading only particular articles from your blog? If so, you can then use this information to only send them newsletters regarding similar articles, so that they’ll be more tempted to open that email and click on your link.

The more you know about your readers and website visitors, such as browsing patterns and interests, the better emails you can send them, and thus increase your chances of getting more traffic and engagement for your content.

Video and other types of visual content

Video is an extremely effective form of content, and yet it’s not nearly as used as one would expect. For example, just including a video in your email can increase your click-through rate by 200 to 300% and 64% of those who view a video are more likely to buy a product online.

Live streamed video has been extremely popular last year and all signs point towards a similar success in 2017. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and now Twitter (among others), all offer live streaming options, which presents businesses and marketers with a big opportunity this year.

There are lots of ways that you can use live streaming, such as by offering a behind the scenes look into your business, interviews and Q&A’s, and much more.

Video creation is easier than ever for users of all levels and all experiences. There are plenty of tools that you can use, even as a beginner, to create beautiful videos, including animations, whiteboard videos, video slideshows and much more.

Online courses

Another way of diversifying your content offering is to create an online course. The online course industry is hugely successful and growing at a very rapid rate. In fact, it’s become an $107 billion industry, almost doubling from $56.2 billion back in 2014.

Just like with video creation, online courses are now very easy to produce, even if you’re a complete beginner. All you need to do is create all of the content you want included in your course and then use a tool to put it all together.

It’s definitely a lot of work, but it can yield great results and help you stand out, as it’s definitely one of the more complex forms of content, so it’s less likely your competitors will also create an online course.

Get more engagement with interactive content

Interactive content offers a great way for businesses to drive more engagement on their blog, website and social media. Although it’s not a form of content that you can create all the time, using it every once in a while, can help you improve the engagement you get.

Try to think of a subject that would either be of real interest to your audience, such as controversial discussions in your niche, or alternatively, a fun, engaging quiz.

You can create this type of content both on your website or blog, as well as on social media. Many of the major social networks let you create quizzes and polls easily, and there are a lot of great tools that you can use to create interactive content directly on your website, in just minutes.

Conclusion

Although 2017 is going to be a tough year for content marketers, with a strong plan in place and great, engaging content ready to be shares, you can still get great results this year. What forms of content do you think will be most successful in 2017? What will be the best and most effective ways to promote your content this year? Let me know in your comments, and please share:)