In its 2013 survey, Econsultancy found that almost 73% of digital marketers agree that brands are becoming publishers. Content-based outreach methods and tactics have become important weapons in a brand’s marketing arsenal. Content marketing is now regarded as the anchor of any inbound marketing strategy.
To give an example, a recent survey conducted by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs revealed that 93% of Business to Business (B2B) organizations use content centered tactics in their marketing campaigns. About 73% of the respondents admitted that they generate more content than they did previously.
These numbers are not stray figures. They indicate what we can expect in the content marketing world circa 2014.
The bottom line remains the same: even as consumers continue to blank out intrusive and traditional marketing communications, they love the category of genuine and customer centric information which content marketing delivers.
As businesses are increasingly investing their marketing dollars and efforts into creating engaging content, new trends in content marketing have emerged.
Content marketing defined
The theory of content marketing must be defined at the outset to obtain a clear prediction. Content marketing is all about the offering of valuable information to current as well as potential clients with the aim of building awareness, trust, branding and positive sentiment. An effective content marketing campaign installs you as the expert in your profession and subsequently lays the pitch for a longer term business relationship.
In a nutshell, the principal aim of content marketing is to build a relationship and not hard sell products and services. Many different types of content make up a marketing strategy. These include : ebooks, blog posts, PowerPoint presentations, Standard videos, social media posts, Webinars, Live presentations, white papers, guest blog posts, podcasts and micro-videos.
Now the big question is: where is content marketing going to go in 2014?
Businesses will define content marketing
It will be possible for businesses to define content marketing. In fact, almost 60% of all businesses are using some kind of content marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy. Content will align with their future business goals and have its own distinct importance
A Director of Content will oversee content efforts
An enlightened CEO who knows the value of content marketing would willingly invest in content strategies. Company wide support and bigger departmental support translates into more matketing dollars for the creation of content and its dissemination. Companies may also invest in content marketing managers.
If a company does not assign the creation of content and distribution to particular people or departments, it may struggle to keep up with competitors.
Mobile content will filter out the winners from the losers
One prediction that seems to ring true: smartphone use will overtake laptop or computer use two years into the future, if not earlier. A solid mobile content strategy is the need of the day and not an option. Google knows this and has launched “Hummingbird” , a freshly minted algorithm with full revocation of data from Google Analytics.
Creating “on the move” content will be crucial. It means pro-mobile formatting, actionable blog posting and shorter sentences, keeping in mind the devices that the potential audience uses to access the content.
Development of new SAAS software for content marketing calculations
As content marketing results are distributed over a period of time, tracking them and measuring ROIs is fiendishly difficult. Companies will attain the nirvana, that the results churned out of inbound marketing methods cannot be measured on a per case basis, but better calculated as complete, over a longer time period.
Best SaaS Lifetime Deals will emerge from the pixels to assist businesses in calculating the value of their efforts to promote their content, and a majority of CEOs who dive into content marketing will expect real confirmation of the efforts’ success. SAAS companies will, therefore, also flourish.
Businesses may try to automate content marketing and realize this is not such a good idea
Businesses will try to make content marketing more efficient and a lot less labor centric. This will result in content of much lower quality, causing strategies to go down in flames. Poor quality content will repel customers and the inevitable result will be bad sentiment and worse branding. The USP of content marketing lies in its customer focused and personal approach.
Slideshare and Google + will be leveraged by B2B content marketers
As per reports published by Content Marketing Institute, social media usage among B2B marketers increased in 2013 in comparison to the same in 2012. Therefore, Google + is expected to become an important tool for social sharing and content distribution. This is mainly due to Authorship and Google Author Rank, where it plays an extremely important role. It will be a dominant trend by the end of 2014.
Slideshare continues to go places in the world of content sharing. About 40% of all B2B marketers use it to distribute content at present, compared to 23% a year ago.
Location centric content marketing will deliver better ROI for physical businesses
With the smartphone population witnessing steroidal growth, phones with GPS will increasingly use personal preference information and location to offer flash deals centered on the user’s location at that instant of time. This technology commercially exists and will be ubiquitous by the end of the year.
Physical or real world stores which fail to tap into location centric content marketing techniques will suffer a sales decline as their competitors cannibalize sales with location centric offers, flash deals and coupons. Technologically proficient companies will capitalize on the smartphone trend when they implement their strategies for mobile marketing.
Elimination of spam content
Spammy content is not helping, and the big websites are cracking the whip on this one. The only way out is to generate valuable content which touch a chord with the customers.
In conclusion, 2014 will see companies increase investment when it comes to content marketing. The roadblocks for the creation and execution of content marketing strategy will decline as CEOs and other nodal decision makers understand the role of content marketing in meeting business goals.