The digital space is hyper-saturated with content. There are over 1.6 billion websites in the world and more than 500 million are blogs. Over two million blog posts get published every single day. That’s 60+ million a month and over 700 million per year.
The Rising Content Tsunami
Now think about this. The greater the content volume, the less effective it is. And it might be independent of overall interest in a topic. Take a look at this chart showing the rising content tsunami volume versus total engagement for the topic “keto diet”:
*Source BuzzSumo
As the volume of content increased, the total engagement dropped. You might not be surprised at this, but look again. See how the TOTAL engagement dropped, not engagement per article. Was the topic just a fad that faded away? We can look at the Google Trends data to find out.
Even though there were ups and downs, the overall interest in this topic is higher than it was in 2017 (unlike the total engagement):
*Google Trends for “keto diet”
Could a similar trend be occurring for content marketing overall? If so, how can you prevent your content marketing efforts from getting buried?
Feature Customer Generated Content
In whatever way you can, leverage and highlight what customers say about you. Feature your reviews, conduct interviews, and curate customer opinion. People trust word of mouth more than boilerplate marketing, no matter how creative. Think about it. When you go to buy something, do you check the user reviews? Your audience does too.
Give Them Instant Gratification
For better or worse, brands like Amazon have elevated our expectations enormously. When we have a question or problem, we expect a near-immediate answer. However you do it, with live chat or chatbots, give your customers the fastest response possible.
Make It Memorable
Even though content saturation makes it harder than ever to get noticed, the best content will still get rewarded. Content marketers have to continuously up their game. Put on a new twist like we did on this article, i.e. building on BuzzSumo’s insight and piling on our own. Video continues to gain traction, but live video puts you ahead of the curve. And remember, smart POSITIONING will always get you noticed, no matter how crowded the field. It might even make sense to generate less content but with higher value and creativity.
Gear Up For Visual Search
The way we search for things online continues to evolve. Voice search is not the same as text, and neither is visual. For example, what if your search query was an image rather than a word or phrase?
Gartner predicts that “by 2021, early adopter brands that redesign their websites to support visual and voice search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%.” Now while you might not have the tech to redesign your website just yet, you could at least open up a Pinterest account which is one of the leading visual search platforms.
Meanwhile, until pure image-based search takes off, make sure you optimize your images. To do this you can:
- Compress your images to minimize load time.
- Use relevant keywords and phrases for alt tags and image descriptions.
- Add captions. This may help with search, and people actually read them.
- Write descriptive alternate text (also called the image alt tag)
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