It wasn’t that long ago that content marketing was all about chasing long-tail keywords with daily blog posts. When B2B brands could get away with a publishing a massive annual report loaded up with stats and calling themselves “thought leaders” even if no one ever actually read the whole thing, much less thought about it.
Then Google started insisting that we actually make the stuff that people found in those searches good. And readable on mobile. Marketers adapted, stepping up their game with higher quality content and adapting for smartphone audiences. So, now what? Here’s how content marketing leaders are predicting the field will evolve this year.
An Escalating Fight for Attention
The idea that brands should compete with publishers for eyeballs was ambitious to begin with; it becomes especially so in our current political news cycle.
“For a while now, the incredible upticks in production of content have meant marketers are scrambling for clicks and eyeballs,” says Erica McGillivray, events manager at CMX and a marketing consultant. “What hasn’t happened before, at least in the U.S., is constant trending political news consuming feeds.”
If brands aren’t careful they run the risk of doing foolish things to stand out in that environment, she says. “I worry about brands trying to leap into the news cycle to appear relevant,” McGillivray says. “I also worry about brands who need to jump into it being completely unprepared. 2017 may shape up to be the year where your content must be top-notch to break through the noise and the news cycles.”
That doesn’t mean it’s OK to retreat to mindless topics either. “People are finally realizing that ‘top 5 toppings to put on your waffles’ isn’t good content. No matter how much you love waffles,” McGillivray says. “Yes, people still want and desire cute cat photos, recipes for waffles or talk about the Oscars. However, there’s less of an appetite for completely valueless content.”
A Focus on Utility and Usability
This flood of content also has people hungry for information they can actually use in the moment.
“People are clamoring for sheets they can print out, fill in and generally have a more than one-time-only use — forms that go beyond the standard drop-downs to reveal more of the prospect’s wants and needs, checklists and tip sheets that can be pinned to a cubicle wall,” says Maren Hogan, chief marketing brain at Red Branch Media.
“Executives are depending more on summaries and less on long white papers that few have the time or energy to read. I see a shift toward more useful, tactile pieces that help professionals do their job TODAY.”
And findability has become more important than ever before. “Imagine needing to solve a specific issue and then having to search for stats to prove your case, download a white paper to get a more cogent view, find a checklist that’s not mired in vendor specific data and finally, build your own checklist or plan for what needs to happen,” Hogan says. “The search for the answer becomes as complicated as the problem you’re trying to solve in the first place.”
These usability concerns extend to other aspects of content promotion and engagement as well. Content marketing was originally envisioned as being relatively unobtrusive, but the drive to convert audiences complicated that vision. ”There are still way too many sites out there trying to cram content down people’s throats,” McGillivray says. “The pop-up ads of old seem quaint compared to sites wanting to know your location, asking for push alerts in your browser or delivering pop-ups that try to crush your self-esteem if you click ‘no’ on signing up to their newsletter.”
Readers today are pushing back against these tactics, and cutting-edge marketers are responding by ungating content and pushing toward ever simpler formats and delivery channels. “It’s sort of like the difference between a Farmer’s Almanac and a tear-off-the-date calendar with a pertinent fact on each page,” Hogan says. “The research is the same but the way the information is delivered is seemingly faster and simpler.”
Goodbye, Static Editorial Calendars?
This accelerated pace will continue to put an enormous amount of pressure on brand marketing teams, forcing them to change how they get their work done.
“As the role of mobile and video continues to grow, content teams must become more and more responsive in near real time to engage with their audiences,” says Andrea Fryrear, editor in chief at The Agile Marketer. “There’s no more room for static, yearlong content marketing plans and multiweek publication cycles. We’ve got to have our ears to the ground listening to what’s going on in the moment and join in those conversations with our content. Agile, real-time content production is what our audiences expect and demand.”
Fryrear also argues that this shift will push day-to-day execution of most content work back in-house, rather than being farmed out to agencies and freelancers. “The biggest trend I’ve been seeing is a realization by brand marketers that while they can easily outsource content creation or content strategy, the ongoing, sustained effort that is content marketing is far more challenging to shift outside of an organization,” she says.
“Freelancers and agencies will always have an important place in marketing, but the trend for successful teams seems to be moving towards a more self-sustaining arrangement with external sources used as a supplement,” Fryrear says.
This pressure will be strongest on those organizations who are also executing an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, Fryrear says. “The popularity of account-based marketing has surprised me, given the difficulties that many marketing teams have with scaling their content marketing efforts. Exponentially increasing the audiences we’re trying reach by adopting this one-to-one approach seems a bit foolhardy if we can’t effectively manage current production levels,” she says.
“When done right it can certainly be effective, but for many teams I think ABM introduces another layer of complexity that keeps them from getting the basics of content marketing right. It’s vital to get really good at content marketing fundamentals before taking the next step.”