Content Marketing World 2013 has just wrapped in the US and the web is now awash with wrap-ups of key speakers, trends and themes. Here’s seven content marketing buzzwords likely to dominate in the coming 12 months.
7 Useful content
Jay Baer has been on a one-man campaign trail this year to put ‘useful content’ front and centre of content marketing strategies. A key speaker at Content Marketing World, he continued his message that content which is useful to consumers equals content that is effective for brands. Called Youtility, his message (and book) all about the value of useful content looks set to continue as a key theme for the year ahead.
6 Epic content
Speaking of book launches, Content Marketing World founder and all-over content guru Joe Pulizzi is about to launch one – which means we’re about to hear a lot about it. Called Epic Content Marketing, it will make the case that brands should aim to create “epic” content marketing. While I don’t really know what that means yet, something tells me I will soon (and so will you). Pulizzi’s 6-point heads up on the concept, published on the weekend, is here.
5 Visual content
As both still and moving image continue their rise on the web – YouTube is now the world’s second largest search engine – so visual content is becoming a key trend. PR 20/20’s Allie Gottlieb summed up her visual sessions at the conference thus: “The brain processes images 60,000 times faster than it does text. With the clutter of content and marketers fighting for attention, images communicate a company’s message quickly and simply.”
4 Strategic content
It starts with knowing who you’re talking to and what they want, and it ends with analysing how well your efforts are going down. Call it what you will, the conversion of big data with behavioural targeting and tracking technologies is big news and will only rise in import. Devin Harper’s wrap at Search Engine Journal.com expressed it succinctly: “Content is king, creative is queen and Big Data is the knight.” He adds it’s about “Reaching a user with messaging that is relevant to what they are doing in that very moment.”
3 Emotional content
This isn’t exactly the word that people seem to be using for what I mean here, but it encapsulates what they’re talking about (and I’m sure someone will come up with a better name soon!). It’s content that people care about, that connects with them, that cuts through because it stirs an emotional response. As Roslyn Atkinson writes in her Malab Media conference wrap, “Speak to your audience in their language about what’s in their heart.” She was quoting Jonathan Lister, VP North American Sales, LinkedIn.
2 Remarkable content
Producing content for content’s sake is no longer enough – that’s certainly a dominant theme in content marketing. So what to replace it with? We love the word “remarkable” at Talking Brand (we’ve written a white paper based around it) so happily latched on to writer Maggie Jones’ conference takeaway thoughts. As she writes, “As many of CMW’s presenters demonstrated, one of the best ways to create emotionally resonant content is to 1) do something remarkable, and 2) document yourself doing it.”
1 Storytelling content
Here we have it: my prediction for the key theme ahead in the next year. The “story” of the power of storytelling has been on the rise in marketing of late and its trajectory looks set to continue skywards. As the team at King Content reports back from the show, “Marketers must think like editors and become storytellers for their audience. In his mini-keynote address Randall Lane, editor of Forbes magazine, shared the three key elements of storytelling: authority, audience and authenticity.
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