The great fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent once remarked that “fashions fade, but style is eternal.” There are certain trends in copywriting and digital marketing that come and go - in the 2010s, it was stuffing as many keywords into a document, the human reader be damned.
Now with refinements in PageRank, Google’s search engine results page algorithm, that’s frowned upon (and rightly so.)
As technology shifts, demand changes with it.
With that in mind, what are the top five copywriting trends that will emerge in 2022?
What are you doing, hovering? You’re ruining my flow.
Voice Search
According to SERPwatch, there are 4.2 billion digital assistants such as Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa in use around the world - and copywriters have to learn to write how they talk (which is how it should be, according to Joel Saltzman.) Tailoring content to natural spoken language search instead of simple keyword search will become more common as voice becomes the dominant way of searching for content. That means “best bakery Melbourne” will be spoken as “OK Google, what’s the best rated bakery in Melbourne?”
AI Assisted Copywriting
Yes, the robots are taking over. AI is assisting us with pretty much everything, copywriting included. TechRadar’s roundup of the best AI copywriting assistants doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll go the way of the Dodo - AI is only as good as the algorithms it contains, the data it’s fed, and the “awareness” it has. AI writers have been used to hilarious effect to write the “perfect” Hallmark Christmas film, The Christmas on Christmas.. AI can prove useful in automating certain tasks (we’ve been using AI spell-checking since WordPerfect) but as for replacing the humble scribe? I think we’re a way off.
Podcast Scriptwriting
Podcasts are everywhere. The Joe Rogan Experience podcast is so popular, it dwarfs the viewership of major news networks. Writing scripts for podcasts, especially story driven podcasts, will increase in demand throughout 2022 and beyond. Also in demand will be researchers and editors - so it might pay to learn how to write clearly and succinctly for broadcast - and warm up those vocal cords!
Online Course Copywriting
Online courses will be how we skill up from now on. The corporate e-learning industry will be worth $50 billion USD by 2026, according to Business Wire. Online sites like Coursera, Brilliant, and Skillshare (hey, I have a course on Skillshare! Get one month free by joining here) make it easy to publish your own courses - though using ClickFunnels and software such as Kajabi, an entrepreneur can keep 100% of the profits and potentially reach millions more people. Knowing how to write for education - and in an easy to understand style - will be a boon.
Long Form Content
400 words? 800 words? 1,000 words? What’s the sweet-spot for the best SEO score? With Google implementing Passage Ranking, which assigns PageRank to sections of a page as well as the entire page, long-form content rich in information will find itself in a renaissance once again - known in the biz as the “skyscraper.” Great for readers like me!
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