Originally published on bestnewsfit.com.

There are recent trends in content marketing that businesses can implement to improve audience engagement and campaign effectiveness. Effective engagement means more sales. In this article, Christopher Lee, Marketing Manager at WNY Holdings, provides some insight into these new strategies and techniques.

In the world of marketing, not all content is created equal. In bygone eras, marketing content was too often pointless material used as a thinly veiled attempt to mask keyword stuffing. Today's consumer is far too sophisticated to be fooled by that strategy.

Provide high-value content for your audience. There will be place-enough for keywords, and high-value content will help improve your creds as an authority.

Marketing content should educate, entertain, and inspire your audience — preferably all at the same time. Before they become your customers, consumers want to feel they are in some way better off having visited your site, watched your video, or downloaded your app.

Now more than ever, consumers are drowning in a tsunami of marketing content. One way to help your audience engage with your content is to make it interactive.

Some great ways to interact with your audience include, of course, surveys — they are a tried-and-true mechanism that still works quite well. Fun quizzes create interest and allow people to test their knowledge.

Contests, interactive maps, and interactive visuals all provide an opportunity for your audience to spend just a bit more time thinking about your business.

Think about any marketing-related task you regularly perform — let's look at: analyze campaigns, choose visual content, and try to anticipate consumer behavior, as three examples.

Artificial intelligence (AI), or more specifically, machine learning (ML), is especially good at making comparisons and drawing conclusions. AI-based campaign analytics tools can examine past campaign results and make suggestions about how future campaigns can be tweaked to be more effective.

Every marketer has spent time agonizing over finding the right visual to appeal to their audience and help deliver their message. AI can predict what visual will catch your customer's eye.

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics related to website speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. Their purpose is to create a measurement that can incentivize website developers to improve their overall user experience.

Planned to roll out in just a couple of months, Google will combine Core Web Vitals with existing indicators to create a holistic picture of a user's experience on a web page.

To be recognized as an authority on a topic requires a sustained effort to cover all aspects of the topic in short, digestible content pieces. Deployment of content should be designed to incrementally build on previous content to illustrate a deep understanding of the topic.

For complex solutions, a series of explainer videos could be part of the content authority strategy, as an example. Short form blog posts orchestrated to expand upon the topic with each new post will help your plan succeed too.

Christopher Lee is the Marketing Manager at WNY Holdings LLC, a customer-focused digital marketing company that was started in 2018 to provide tailored marketing strategies for small businesses. Christopher Lee assists clients with all their digital marketing needs, from content marketing, web, and graphic design, media creation, SEO, all the way to Facebook advertising.