According to the Content Marketing Institute, 69% of marketers are creating more content now than a year ago. Content marketing is obviously a powerful tool for telling your story while engaging your audience. Let’s review the top content marketing trends that have shaped content marketing over the past year. While we do, you might take stock of where you need to focus your content marketing efforts.
1. Quality
Instead of creating new content at a breakneck speed, we’re seeing content marketers focus on quality. This is good news because content saturation is on everyone’s mind. Instead of creating content just to create content, your goal should be to publish quality content on a consistent schedule. You can get some great tips toward focusing on quality content in the social media realm in our post “Social Media Quality vs. Quantity: What’s Your ‘Social Q’?”.
2. Adaptive Content
“Adaptive content is a clean base of presentation—independent, well-structured content that you have designed from the start with the intent that you may want it to go out and live on a wide variety of platforms,” says Karen McGrane, managing founder of UX consultancy Bond Art + Science. It requires a new way of writing and a new way of thinking about content, one that releases hold on the ultimate control of the presentation of content. Toward that end, it involves creating chunks of content that can be reused in various combinations on different devices, platforms, screen sizes, and resolutions. It’s branded content that’s ready to go anywhere and everywhere. You can learn more in our recent post “How Adaptive Content Makes Your Lifecycle Marketing Better.”
3. Visual Storytelling
The demand for visual content continued to rise in importance in 2015. In part because wireless connections and Internet speeds are also increasing, allowing users to access images and videos on the go on visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. Plus, users’ attention spans are becoming increasingly shorter, requiring ever shorter forms of communication. Check out our blog post on how to craft great visual content to make the most of this trend.
4. Mobile
Mobile has changed what we expect of brands. The proportion of content viewed on mobile devices is still on the rise, and this trend looks set to continue. To keep pace, you need to focus on ensuring that your content looks awesome across all mobile devices—especially the ones your target audience uses. With Google’s mobile algorithm in April and the ever-expanding Internet of Things, i.e. smart, connected devices, it’s highly recommended that you move toward creating adaptive content that focuses on the usability of content on a variety of screen sizes in order to enhance user experience.
5. Customer-Centric
Consumers are now driving the conversation with brands. They will only engage with content they really want to see. As a result, we’re seeing segmentation and personalization becoming more important than ever. Marketers are building buyer personas and creating content for people at various stages of the customer lifecycle, including beyond the purchase. These tools allow us to focus on building relationships with our customers and meeting their needs.
6. Content Co-Creation
We’ve touted the benefits of user-generated content (UGC) for a long time. 2015 saw this trend finally taking off, especially in its intersection with visual storytelling on platforms like Instagram. Instead of creating content, brands are creating experiences that inspire customers to get involved in the creation of their brand. They’re creating opportunities for conversation.
7. Analytics
If you haven’t yet invested in analytics, now is the time. Now more than ever, brands are realizing that analytics is critical for creating effective campaigns, and they’re make use of good data—meaningful and analyzable data that maps to strategic business objectives—in order to understand and optimize how customers interact with their brand digitally. To get started, check out our article “Web Analytics: Where to Start.”
8. Increased Integration
2015 brought increased integration between content and social and between SEO and social. As marketers woke up to the fact that social media is an ideal platform for content amplification, they began creating different kinds of content solely to be used on various social channels. They also increased their usage of social media as part of their content distribution plan. We saw a move toward integrating email and social, too. As for SEO and social, we saw tweets displaying in mobile SERPs starting in February of this year and then real-time tweets showing up in Google in May.
9. Influencers
The role of online influencers matured in 2015 with the increasing professionalism of vloggers and Instagrammers and the creation of formal ways for brands to engage with those influencers. Influencer marketing has a lot of power to build customers’ trust and amplify messages. And it shows. According to Augure’s 2015 State of Influencer Engagement report, of 600 marketing and communications professionals surveyed, 93% consider influencer engagement an effective strategy to build brand awareness, and 84% had planned to launch at least one program involving influencers. Beyond collaborating with authentic, self-made internet influencers, brands are also looking to their own employees to act as brand advocates via social media.
10. Distribution and Amplification
Brands now know that creating great content is only the first step in digital marketing. In order to meet their business goals, they must strategically deliver content to the right people in the right places. Strategic content distribution is a key component of a content strategy. Along with this, we’re seeing a focus on content amplification, be that through influencer marketing, social media or native advertising. Now more than ever, it’s important to have a documented strategy for both content distribution and content amplification.
Content marketing is about telling stories, building relationships, and growing your audience. We see these current trends continuing to shape content marketing in 2016.
What do you see as the most important trends that have shaped 2015? What trends do you predict will take off in 2016? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Learn more about Filament and how we can help you create and implement a content marketing strategy for your business.
