Content marketing is an ever-evolving field that changes with consumers, technology and culture. Businesses have connected to their audiences through email marketing, influencer marketing, social media marketing and a variety of other methods, and the list continues to grow. It can be overwhelming to try to keep up with every content marketing trend and pick the winners, so we did it for you.

Here are five content marketing trends that you should incorporate into your strategy this year.

1. Stories—in every sense of the word

Stories are short videos or images that will last for 24 hours before disappearing and being saved in a set of archives. The story feature is currently available on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. Stories are very popular among social media users. Benchmarking from Rival IQ suggests the average brands are posting about 10 Instagram stories per month.

Stories also appear on Google Images, which increases your chances of discoverability. These posts do not have to be high-quality productions and you can use them to inform your audience about announcements, events, Q&A sessions, behind-the-scenes sneak peeks and so much more.

Google is continuously evolving its SERP (search engine results page), and Web Stories are the flashy result of the latest iteration. Web Stories are being framed as a boundless version of the short, ephemeral format familiar to social media. Google says the content creator gets to determine how long the story stays online, and “every pixel” is customizable.

Stories are just one aspect of search you can optimize. Check out our post on boosting your search rankings for on-page best practices that will drive traffic to your site.

2. Livestreaming

Live streaming has shifted the way in which brands are able to interact with their audience. According to research by Conviva, viewers watch live content about 27% longer than on-demand content. And according to Wyzowl, 85% of consumers say they want to see more video content from brands. You can capitalize on these consumer preferences today with your own livestream. There are lots of topics you can use for livestream fodder, such as:

• Ask-me-anything sessions and live Q&As
• Product or feature announcements
• Product demos
• Conference and/or event coverage

Find even more cost-effective and compelling video content ideas here.

3. Community-building

Now more than ever, brands should be aiming to build communities around the content they create and share. A 2020 survey by Content Marketing Institute found that 32% of B2B marketers had online communities and of those who did not, 27% of them planned to create one in the next year.

To build a strong online community, put your audience first. Find ways to keep them interested and allow community members to interact with one another. You must meet your audience on the platforms and public squares they’re already congregating in, so whether this community is fostered via a Facebook page or user group depends on what works best for your consumers.

Some quick and easy ways to begin engaging your audience and building community are:

• Incorporate polls into your social media strategy and crowdsource everything from consumer preferences to product feedback.
• Foster user-generated content by allowing your audience to submit their own testimonials, soundbites and video snippets that you can use as fodder for podcast discussions, Q&A-style blog posts and more.

4. Content Teams with Diverse Skill Sets

Having a team of folks with a mixed skill set will make the content you create more dynamic and compelling. IMPACT, a digital sales and marketing company, suggests that a sturdy content marketing team includes the following roles:

• Content Manager
• Writer
• Videographer
• Designer/Developer
• Social Media Expert
• Ad Specialist

This list is not exhaustive. Increasingly, it will be crucial for content marketers to have teams that can work across a variety of media, including print, video, podcast, email, website, social media and in-person events.

5. Smarter, Not Harder, Distribution

No matter how strong the content your produce is, it will always fall flat without proper promotion and distribution. Too often when marketers talk about repurposing content, they simply try to use the same message to share the same content on an ever-growing list of platforms. But what your social media audience responds to may be different from what your podcast audience prefers, and not every piece of content will be suited for every platform.

Rather than taking a spray-and-pray approach, engage with your community to understand how they want to receive the content you disseminate and what they want to read, watch and listen to. Craft content that maximizes the benefits of the specific channels you plan to distribute it on, make tweaks where you can to get more mileage out of each piece, but also know where to draw the line to keep your audience interested and coming back for more.