Content Marketing Trends for 2016 & How to Prepare for them

content marketing

It’s that time of the year again. No, not (only) the time when you calculate your Christmas presents budget, but that when savvy marketers start preparing for next year. They amass all the information they can get their hands/eyes on and start thinking about how to divide next year’s budget. If you are a regular investor in content marketing (and you should be!), then these are the trends you need to be prepared to integrate in your strategy.

  1. Focus will shift from “We” to “You” even more. Gone are the days when a savvy ad tagline brought in customers. With people being bombarded with more and more ads in every media, they have become immune to them. Even more, there are hundreds of marketers out there creating thousands of pieces of content that compete with yours directly or indirectly. If you want yours to stand out, then you have to make it about your customers: what do they want/need and how can you solve that? Answer these questions in your first lines if you care about engagement and lead conversion.
  2. Distribution will matter more than ever. Yes, yes, we all know it, “content is king”, but this doesn’t really matter if people don’t get to see their king or hear about his great deeds. Metaphors aside, great content is not enough anymore, you also need to have great distribution channels for each piece of content that you create. Here’s an idea to fuel your 2016 strategy: start researching the best channels for your content; where do your customers take their information from? If you know that, then you already know where you must be, too.
  3. Even more of your time and resources will have to be spent on social media. With Facebook launching Lead Ads category, you can create entire lead pages in a Facebook ad. This new feature had been designed with mobile users in mind and it is supposed to cut the loading time of a regular landing page. Users will now have the option to fill in the fields of your “landing page” without leaving Facebook (with some of the fields pre-filled in using their account info). The only question is: can your copy be as compelling in a Facebook lead ad as it was in your lengthy landing pages? If not, you better start polishing it while you still have time (the option has not yet been rolled out for desktop users).
  4. Shifting from SEO to valuable content. Don’t worry, SEO will still matter, but not as we know it. Even Google, through its last updates, made it clear that it will rank valuable pieces of content higher. Plus, you clients (especially the B2B ones) already know that there is A LOT of free content there, so you will need to work extra hard to make yours relevant and valuable. How do you do that? Well, first you need to re-read the first point of this article: make it about your customers, not yourself.
  5. Content will get more and more visual. Cisco already predicted that by 2017, 69%of Internet traffic will be accounted for by videos. Plus, all new smartphones feature a stunning video camera, so user-generated video content will also be something that marketers will hunt. Sadly, we all know that a video costs much more to make than an article or even a white paper. So what is there to be done? I, for instance, plan to make great use of free webinar platforms and even turn some pieces of content into short, budget-friendly, but engaging videos. As long as I don’t need a stunt man and a professional video camera, my budget will be just fine.

Can’t figure out how to efficiently integrate these trends into your strategy? No worries; that’s what we’re here for. Drop us a line using the contact form and we’ll be more than happy to help. All you need to do is click on the button below. We’ll take it from there.

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Adriana Tica is an expert marketer and copywriter, with 10 years in the field, most of which were spent marketing tech companies. She is the Owner and Founder of Idunn. In October 2019, she also launched Copywritech, a digital marketing agency that provides copywriting, SEO content writing, and strategy services to companies in the tech industry.