Pretty much all of us would agree that 2020 was a dreadful year.

Thus far, its successor seems like it is moving in a much healthier direction (knock on wood), but the fact remains: There’s plenty of bad news to go around.

Do not believe us? Just turn on the news or switch over to your Twitter feed.

For your content marketing efforts to succeed, you may need to double down on problem-solving potential, inspirational messages, and anything that helps people feel good.

At this point, it feels like the height of cliché to talk about how COVID-19 has changed everything.

To that end, I recommend a value-focused content marketing campaign that will provide something relevant and useful to search engine users, and thus find the favor of Google’s algorithms.

In short, consumers crave uplift, and that is something a good content marketing plan can deliver.

As you begin to feel a little optimism, a sense that COVID is finally beginning to fade, channel that optimism into your content marketing.

So, even as most of us get vaccinated and shift back toward our pre-pandemic patterns, there are some significant ways in which content marketing will bear COVID’s imprint.

In fact, the companies that have been the most honest and forthcoming with their customers, showing real candor about how they have been handling the pandemic, are the ones that have seen the greatest groundswells of support.

And even now that people are feeling more comfortable in brick-and-mortar stores, a lot of consumers still prefer to do their research in advance, Googling around for local businesses to verify that they are still open, that they have good reviews, and that they seem reasonably safe.

Content that is negative or pessimistic in tone is increasingly at risk of being tuned out, while content that’s more positive in its tone stands a greater chance of breaking through.

The alternative is to risk finding out just how little patience people have for content that obfuscates or beats around the bush.