Six small business content trends to focus on in 2021

By Alexandra Gavril - January 5, 2021

High-quality content is and will remain essential for the growth of small businesses in 2021 and beyond. And the great thing about is that creativity and flexibility can win over big budgets. So, if you’re on a low budget this year, read on as we share the six content trends to focus on in 2021 to boost your efforts, stay relevant, and get your small business noticed.

1. Featured snippet

Featured snippets aren’t new but they’re getting lots of attention in 2021. Why? Because they’re a fantastic opportunity to get more eyes on your business.

If you’re not familiar with featured snippets, they’re a highly visible block of information that shows up at the very top of the first page of results. That’s a prominent spot and one of the best ways to get people’s attention to your brand.

Here’s how a featured snippet looks:

Featured snippets can contain anything from numbered lists and bullet points to videos.

While appearing in the featured snippet won’t necessarily get you more clicks and visitors (since people get most or all of the information directly from the result), there are other benefits. People will learn about your business (if they haven’t already), and they’ll regard you as an expert that they can trust to buy from.

Want to get your small business content to show up as a featured snippet? The idea is to create useful, relevant, and properly optimised content that answers your customers’ questions. So, whether it’s a product or service description, a video or a how-to guide, here are some tips to help you get that top result spot:

Answer your customers’ most frequently asked questions.
Create step-by-step articles and videos that explain how to perform a specific task.
Structure your content to make it easy to read. Write in short paragraphs and use bullet points or numbered lists. Also use headings and subheadings to summarise each section of content.
Optimise your content using relevant keywords and keywords phrases that your customers would use to find your content. Read our posts to learn how to use keywords to optimise your content and how to optimise a YouTube video for visibility in the search engines.

2. Videos, webinars, and podcasts

We’re now accustomed to video content. So accustomed that we expect most businesses to create it for us to consume.

Videos (live or pre-recorded) and webinars can give you the opportunity to tell an engaging story about your business, products and services, and connect with your target audience in a more visual way. It also humanizes your brand, which can help you build stronger and more authentic relationships with your prospects and customers.

But what kind of video content should you create in 2021? You can find lots of video ideas and inspiration in this post, from FAQ, product, and how-to videos to customer interviews, and more. If you need more, just look at how your competitors or businesses in other industries are doing it. Watch their videos. Join their webinars. Notice the topics they choose, how they tell a story, how they connect with their audience, the feedback they receive, and more. Write down what might work for your business and then create your own videos or host your own webinars.

What if you’re not comfortable being in front of a camera? That’s ok, many people aren’t. In this case, you can choose to create content in audio format. Audio content or podcasts are great alternatives to get your content noticed beyond the screen.

3. One-to-one customer interviews

Now, more than ever, people crave connection. As a small business, this is a good opportunity for you to schedule one-to-one calls with customers and connect with them. It’s the year to reach out, find out how they feel, what they need now, and what they’ll need next.

You can then use that information to improve your offering, provide a better customer experience, or create better content for everyone (considering) doing business with you. The more in tune your content, the better people will feel about your business and offering.

This article provides some good tips and advice on how to conduct customer interviews.

4. Interactive content

Interactive content refers to any piece of content where people can engage with your business. This can be anything from surveys and quizzes to polls, contests, assessments, and calculator widgets.

Here’s a simple example of a calculator where the customer needs to fill out some information to get a cost estimate.

Source

Why should you focus your efforts on this content trend this year? Because it’s not only a great way to provide value to your visitors but it also get them to engage with your brand. At the same time, you get to learn bits of valuable information about your potential customers that you can then use to provide a better product, service, or experience.

5. Repurposed content

As a small business owner, it’s a challenge to find time to write helpful content for your site, blog, and other platforms and channels you’re using to engage with your audience.

Writing content is time-consuming. So, this year, try repurposing it as much as you can. For example, if you’re a plumber and decide to create content that explains “how to unclog a sink”, you can start with a how-to video. Then, you can turn that video into a blog post and next, into an infographic. You can even turn it into a checklist and make it available to download on your site as a PDF.

6. Measuring the results

Writing useful content is important. But what’s even more important is to measure its impact on your audience. So, this year, make it a habit to look at your analytics data to ensure you’re creating the right kind of content and serving it to the right customers at the right time.

If you’re not yet using Google Analytics on your site to analyse its performance, now’s the time to start. So, sign up for a free analytics account and check out these two articles to learn more about the reports and metrics you can find in your Google Analytics account (and how to use them to make your small business better).

Wrapping up

There you have it – the six content trends that you should focus on this year. Be sure to leverage these trends to create better content and grow your small business in 2021.