3 New Content Distribution Tech Trends to Embrace Now [Tools]

Content marketing heavily relies on technology, which means it evolves quickly. Mobile search, video marketing, SEO – all of that has been changing and advancing content marketing for the past few years.

You are either keeping up or falling behind.

Today’s content distribution tactics call for experimenting with many emerging channels, so let’s look at the latest technology trends that you should embrace to diversify and empower your content marketing.

1. Progressive web apps (PWAs)

Put simply, a progressive web app is your website engaging like a natural app on a mobile device. As Google says, progressive web apps are “a new way to deliver amazing user experiences on the web.”

Let’s compare how each operates on a mobile device:

There are a few powerful benefits of serving your content to mobile users through a progressive web app, including:

• Ability to re-engage your customers through push notifications
• Ability to serve your content faster, providing a reliable mobile experience
• Access to your content in an offline mode
• Opportunity for your users to reaccess your site by seeing it on the home screen

It accomplishes all of that without the need to invest money into developing a standalone app. That’s what makes progressive web apps such a hot content distribution channel these days.

How to embrace the trend?

Use web design platforms that support PWAs. For example, Duda, an innovative website builder, allows publishers to easily enable PWAs on their sites. You won’t need any development budget: It’s as simple as one click inside the settings dashboard. Once you activate the setting, define the site’s PWA name, short name, icon, and splash screen color.

2. Google Speakable

It’s not all about links or clicks any more. In the era of Instagram and Snapchat, which don’t allow clickable links, that shouldn’t come as a surprise, yet a lot of businesses are still falling behind.

There are more ways to search and discover your content these days than by merely typing words into the search box.

With the growing popularity of voice search and intelligent speaker devices, more of your content is discovered through voice and audio devices. Whether your content is there to be heard is a matter of how quickly you evolve.

Google’s Speakable is one of the first (still experimental) projects enabling content marketers to deliver their content to their potential customers through voice without them ever touching a keyboard.

The project was announced this summer and it aims to have Google Assistant and Google Home devices speak the news when users ask for it. Give it a try. Ask your Google Assistant, “Hey Google, what’s the latest news on NASA?”

The device responds with an excerpt from the top news article and the publisher’s name. Then Google Assistant sends the source link to the connected mobile device.

With this new feature, the publishing site gets double exposure. First, the device speaks the source site. Second, the users receive the URL on their mobile device.

To qualify as a source, content publishers should:

• Make sure their sites are valid news sites (This includes both optimizing for Google News and requesting inclusion from Google itself.)
• Publish news in English (Support for more languages is announced to be coming soon.)
• Use Schema.org/speakable code to mark up your audio. (There’s a WordPress plug-in that can help.)
• Follow Google’s guidelines

When it comes to the latter point, Google basically asks your audio to be quick and user-friendly, which means:

• Don’t have it read anything extra (e.g., image alternative tags).
• Don’t read the whole article. Offer takeaways. Focus on providing immediate value – about two to three sentences.

How to embrace the trend?

Optimizing your voiceover for your articles is similar to optimizing for featured snippets. Come up with a good, concise answer that can be read in response to a query.

Use query clustering tools to better understand how to explain your topic in a meaningful, yet concise way (as well as optimize for an array of related queries). I explain in detail how to do that in this article. Serpstat’s clustering feature lets you break any topic into subtopics to create takeaways based on what people search for.

Clustered keyword lists also help you create more in-depth and better structured content.

3. Conversational marketing

Conversational marketing is nothing new. Two years ago, a study by Twilio, the developer-centric communications platform, revealed that 90% of consumers wanted to use messaging (i.e., texting, Facebook Messenger) to communicate with businesses.

Another study claims that 40% of millennials say messaging apps are their preferred means of customer service and purchase help. Finally, on average, a smartphone user checks Facebook about 14 times a day: That’s a lot of interaction.

While conversational marketing has always been primarily useful for lead generation and customer support, it can be used successfully for content distribution.

Conversational marketing uses real-time messaging chatbots to deliver content to users based on what they ask. Conversational marketing is:

• Highly personalized
• Instant – leads don’t have to wait for an email reply or a phone call
• Non-disruptive – users are being delivered content when they ask for it

How to embrace the trend?

While conversational marketing is based on real-time conversations, it is scalable. A few solutions allow content marketers to easily add conversational marketing to their content distribution strategy.

MobileMonkey is one solution that includes a powerful content marketing feature. It allows you to create Facebook Messenger bots to engage your customers in real time and serve your brand-owned assets once they ask for them. You can set the bot to serve content that matches user intent by enabling a trigger using “broad-match” keywords to serve users the brand-owned content when they are asking for it.

For example, you can prompt users to your on-demand webinar sign-up whenever they are typing “webinar” when chatting with your business on Facebook:

Technology poses challenges for content marketers who are struggling to keep up. Luckily, tools and plug-ins allow you to embrace new trends quickly and efficiently.

And which content marketing tactics are you planning to embrace next year? What new content distribution trends are you excited about? Please share your thoughts.

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute