From being just a buzzword in 2011, content marketing has become the number one priority for the marketing department in 2017 and accounts for 26% of a marketers' entire budget.
According to the 2017 benchmarks and trends report published by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, more than 60% of B2B marketers said their content marketing strategies were more effective than it was one year before; success being attributed to better quality of the content, a well thought out strategy, and sound investment in content distribution.
With companies seeing success in their content marketing efforts, companies that made a consistent investment in content marketing may begin to get complacent.
Content marketing trends will continue to adapt and evolve in 2018; giving companies opportunities to sustain their success. As B2B marketers, to stay ahead of the game in the constantly evolving landscape, look out for these three predictions in content marketing.
Content created by Artificial Intelligence – Google's Digital News Initiative (DNI) supports innovation in European digital journalism. In 2017, Google invested more than $800,000 in the Press Association's initiative to generate news stories solely through the use of AI.
In this initiative, while journalists will be involved in spotting and creating stories, AI will be used to assist with massively increasing local stories that would otherwise be impossible to provide manually.
While content and creation and ideation are still not fully automatable, platforms like Quill and Wordsmith are offering some amount of automated content generation.
New formats of content – With consumption of content increasing on mobile platforms, the need of the hour is to develop a content strategy that is more refined and creates better customer engagement.
Instagram stories, Facebook and Snapchat videos are all new formats and are using motion graphics and animations in ways never imagined before.
Brands that come up with short dynamic content and ensure that the highly sought formats of ebooks, white papers are optimized for mobile platforms will see success in their omnichannel marketing strategies.
Interactive Content – The internet of things (IoT) has brought content to us through voice-controlled technology.
Through a deep understanding of consumer demographics and the way they want to use content, voice-activated software like Alexa and Siri are rising phenomenally in importance.
In order to experiment with this fairly new trend, brands need to consider if their audience is an adopter of voice-enabled devices, if they can consistently produce high-quality audio content, and if they are looking for a new channel to reach their audience.
Many of the content marketing trends such as those listed above are already impacting our lives. Keeping abreast of the trends and aligning the objectives of the business with the evolving needs of the consumers, identifying the right partner who can help brands achieve such desired outcomes is what will result in a successful content marketing strategy.
Mobile infographics might become more popular by creating better engagement with the customers.
Brand differentiation will continue to dominate 2018
We will see at the end of the year which predictions were right and wrong.
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