Personalizing the reader’s experience is one of the top trends in content marketing for 2022, according to a new report.

Semrush’s State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report is based on surveys from more than 1,500 marketers, 500,000 blog posts and topics, and thousands of tweets and niche articles.

According to the report, researching the target audience helps businesses to optimize content for both search engines and readers.

By discovering the wants and needs of the audience, including their search intent and content consumption, content marketers can make better decisions about the types of content to create.

Experts say taking an empathetic approach to marketing can take a strategy to the next level. 

Looking at the world through the customer’s eyes and speaking to them as humans — and not simply buyers — will make content more relatable and build trust and real relationships, experts say.

According to the report, the top tactics that lead to content marketing success include improving content quality, search engine optimization (SEO), and creating more visual content and video.

Improving content quality means creating useful content with original research, experts say.

It also means developing a consistent and relevant tone, creating clear titles, and adding relevant links and external resources.

Staying up-to-date with customer needs and performing the necessary research to create the right content can take a lot of time, experts say, and requires more customer interaction.

Some companies have the ability to shift their marketing team’s priorities more easily than others, and have more resources to perform the necessary work, experts say. 

Others might consider hiring a professional content marketing agency, which has the capability to build the right strategy for a company based on data analysis and research.

According to the report, the top three content marketing goals measured by marketers are increasing brand awareness, attracting more web traffic, and generating leads.

Increasing brand awareness through top-notch content includes diversifying across a wide range of content, including blog posts, videos, webinars, podcasts, case studies, and more, according to the report.

This content should be non-branded, so it can capture the attention of people who aren’t searching for a specific brand, but instead are searching for information about a specific topic.

Experts say regardless of where a company is in their content marketing journey, digging into the needs, wants, challenges, motivations, and questions of their audience can help them begin to tailor content to the right people.

According to the report, building a community on social media is the top way businesses are planning to use their budgets in 2022.

Social media offers a great opportunity to learn more about an audience through experimenting with content types and directly interacting with the audience, experts say.