Content Marketing saw massive expansion in 2014, with businesses investing more in providing readers with good, informative material. A big part of this increase comes from seeing how companies who bought into the content marketing game early managed to acquire huge returns on their investment. With more companies making the investment than before, those looking to stay ahead of the curve now need to become even more creative if they wish to stand out. Here, we’ll detail some of the trends that are emerging in the field of content marketing to make sure you can stay ahead of the curve.
Social Media
There is no understating the value of social media in marketing efforts, ESPECIALLY when it comes to content marketing. My philosophy is that there is no content marketing without social media. This is our company’s most essential content amplification tool. It does not matter how many websites you can get to host what you produce, or how well-crafted that content is. Without social media to boost your content, you are missing out on hundreds, if not thousands, of views that could potentially become customers.
However, this is nothing new: yes, social media is important, you know that. The emerging trend is not that social media is being used, but how it integrates with content marketing. There has been this tendency in the past to put marketing into a series of silos: you have conventional marketing in one silo, SEO in another, and social media in another, with each operating independently. This is something that is going to change. Social Media and content marketing will soon become indistinguishable from each other.
Businesses will soon have to, if they have not done so already, merge their content managers and social media managers into one cohesive unit, and the two will have to closely coordinate their actions. If new content goes live, it cannot be advertised on social media simply “when the social media manager can get around to it”, it needs to be advertised right away. On the inverse side, the content manager cannot post their content “whenever”, they must time it with when your audience is online and looking for content to consume, something the social media manager would be intimately familiar with.
Content Creation Focused Positions
In the past, content creation suffered a shortage of professional writers. Often those responsible for this job had other responsibilities and could not devote their full attention. Even more damning, content created for SEO purposes was often of low quality, written by writer who wasn’t being paid enough to put more than 10 minutes worth of effort into the job. The idea of having a full-time writer on staff was still restricted largely to news and entertainment venues, with marketing departments simply making writing one of a myriad of responsibilities that the content creator had.
In 2015 I believe we will see a trend where full-time content creators will be a more common fixture in businesses. This comes from the increasing demand for high-quality content that can only come from somebody who can sit down and write in a distraction free environment. Marketing departments that have not done so already will find themselves searching for full-time writers, editors, graphic designers, and more. They will also recognize these individuals are more valuable when allowed to focus on creation, and will delegate management responsibilities to others. The need for high-quality content means we will likely see a surge in positions that are writing and design heavy. This is good news for good writers who have long felt their skills to be undervalued and bad news for those who haven’t learned to write more than five-hundred words worth reading.
Personalized Content
As content marketing evolves, it must also become more targeted. In warfare, attempting to defend everything means you defend nothing, and attempting to market to everybody means you appeal to nobody. Providing personalized content will require, first, learning exactly who your customers are. This means engaging with them and learning on a personal level their likes, dislikes, interests, and more.
The goal of personalization is to appear as more than just “a brand” to your customers. You want to be something special. This is why brands looking to gain an edge will have to start micro-targeting. They will narrow their targeting even further. This will require even more content to be produced to target each of these various buyers. This need for personalized content will come from the combination of internet search and traffic largely being geared towards what the end user wants to see, and the marketers wanting to be seen. As search engines become more sophisticated, and users more adept at browsing, marketers will have to become cleverer and more intimate in order to get their message across.
Greater Emphasis on Entertaining and Informing
A big part of content marketing is remembering that it is ultimately about telling a story. It is no accident that good content marketing is beginning to closely resemble good story telling. This recognition that advertisement must become entertainment is not actually unique to the digital era: there is a reason why Super Bowl Ads are as much of a draw as the game itself. And no good story can be told without characters, and especially not a protagonist: and you want your company to be the protagonist in your brand’s “story”. Going forward, you’ll see businesses either producing more content with the intent to be thought-provoking and fun to read, or injecting themselves into places that are already thought-provoking and fun to read.
As part of this emphasis on making people want to engage with your content, I believe that a greater emphasis on episodic content will also come to the fore. If you’re entertaining already, and people want to consume your content, then you can keep them coming back for more. Just remember that you’re still a marketer, and that all content should still drive towards a particular goal (conversions, lead generation, thought leadership). As such, you’ll never be a full blown entertainment or information venue, but you CAN get close. If all else fails: mixing your content in with something produced by a full-blown entertainment or information venue will be incredibly useful.
Taking Stands
This is probably the item that many in the field will disagree with, and I’ll be the first to admit I could be wrong here. However, I believe that this will be the logical result of the way content marketing is going, the current political climate in the developed world, and the general attitudes of my generation which is now finishing college and, in some cases, well along their career path. I see 2015 as being the year companies start to take stands, and if it doesn’t reach full steam this year, it will reach full steam by 2016.
Lobbying is nothing new in business, but to date corporate lobbying has always been affiliated with causes that have a direct business interest. Company values of tolerance and equality are often tied with the business interests of that company, knowing that appearing racist or sexist is a good way to lose customers. While I’m sure Human Resources departments and business owners genuinely believe in these causes, remember that they did not become common in companies until after decades of activism provoked change in government policy that then trickled down to businesses, and many would argue we still have a long way to go.
What I expect to change is that businesses will take stands on issues that do not appear to have any ties to their business interests (at least, not to anybody outside the marketing department). While certain issues will likely always remain closed due to their highly volatile nature (I’m sure the one that popped into your head starts with the letter “A”), others are a good way to make your company stand out. By associating your company with a cause, you can get people to buy not out of any real desire to own your product, but merely by affiliation with a cause. However, one has to be careful with the timing: while having a brand recognized as being “ahead of its time” can be a good thing, you don’t want to be so far ahead as to alienate your consumers.
Taking a stand on something everybody agrees with is easy of course, the tricky part comes to those issues where a consensus has not yet been established. In these cases, your marketing department has to really analyze the target markets, and try to establish what the consensus is now, or what the consensus will be later, and determine what causes are important to them and what stand to take based on that data. This is a difficult endeavor, and certainly falls under the category of “high-risk, high-reward”. I will break down the best way to approach this tricky quagmire in the next post, for now though, remember that courting controversy can be a very good thing for your marketing goals. The entertainment industry has already thoroughly proven the value of controversy to sales, and I’m confident 2015 will prove it can work elsewhere.
