UPDATED 1 December 2016

Content Marketing has never been more important than it is now, and its significance is continuing to grow. Websites use content marketing to communicate with and acquire new customers, by creating and sharing content in a variety of formats, including: articles, news, videos, photos, guides, blogs, e-books…to name a few. Along with there will be some changes to content marketing as we know it.

First of all content marketing is likely to become much more expensive, at least high quality content marketing is anyway, and in order for content to be quality more time needs to be taken over insuring it is engaging and unique, it is captivating to its audience but informative and related to the objective of the website.

Traditionally emphasis has been placed on the quantity of content, this is changing, whilst quantity is still important it is the quality of the content that is most important. If the content is not unique it not only becomes less appealing to the audience, but it also won’t help you with rankings, search engines do not like duplicate content. Now there is an abundance of content on the internet, people have started to tire of seeing the same thing, now people want detailed, researched, well-executed pieces of content. Further to this, it is going to be more difficult to make content stand out from the crowd and grab the attention of the target audience.

Though quality is most important, quantity is still extremely important, larger websites produced hundreds even thousands of pieces of content each day, ‘Buzzfeed’, for example, in one day adds at least 373 pieces of content.  and each day a whooping average of over 92,000 articles are posted on the net” . This is something that smaller websites simply aren’t going to be able to compete with.
It doesn’t end here, the most successful pieces of content tend to be much longer that they used to, according to Neil Patel the average page that ranks on page 1 of Google has 2000 plus words. Now, that’s a lot of content!

Video content has also started to become popular, the audience find it much more engaging and less work than reading, video content is easier for the audience to take in so the point is made more effectively in most cases. Furthermore, it is easier for businesses to connect with their audience through video content. Video content has become so popular that YouTube is now the second biggest search engine. Videos are also beneficial in that they are easily sharable, allowing people to share them with friends, family or colleagues and thus widening the audience of the video and the website. Videos are, however, more difficult to create than written content, it requires specialised skills and a designated budget in order for it to be achievable, which is why more companies will choose to invest in a professional video production company.

Content will also need to be personalised much more effectively than it is now, it should be available in every language, or the option to translate it into the native language of the user, should be given. It will need to be available on a multi-channel, i.e. desktops, mobiles and tablets, and phone apps should be made available to engage more users. The multi-channel nature of a content will be ever increasing, it will be important to cater for all devices. Not just desktops, mobiles and tablets but also crossing the online – offline boundaries. 

As Content Marketing becomes more  significant, so does the need to see how effective our content is, this has already lead to analysis tools and software being developed, a market waiting to be expanded upon.

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