Looking forward to 2017, content marketing experts share their predictions, observe trends, and highlight the most important issues for next year’s marketing success. We’ve reviewed recent opinions from three top content marketing authorities: Content Marketing Institute experts Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose; Marketing Profs’s Chief Content Officer, Ann Handley, and experts recently interviewed for Jay Baer’s widely respected blog, Convince and Convert.
Overall, content marketing through blogging will remain an important tactic for organizations in 2017. But the experts envision rising importance for visual content, and new ways for brands to create valuable, diverse formats using automation.
Here is our review of 5 expert predictions for content marketing in 2017:
1. Automation will help brands create valuable reusable content.
Content Marketing institute’s Robert Rose predicts that marketers will find new ways to use artificial intelligence and content automation to improve the value and impact of content.
AI and specialized technologies will have a greater future role in helping marketers with several aspects of content marketing. Automation can improve content creation, publishing and management.
For example, by turning a presentation into a tagged transcript, marketers could automatically draft white papers, posts and tweets from an original webinar. The technology already exists to transcribe audio recordings into text. Content marketers could build on this to make text-and-image output reusable on targeted platforms, with strategic use of markup and machine processing. Intelligent tools could take the tagged and edited webinar or whitepaper, and:
Turn the questions and answers in the webinar into separate blog posts
Compile the blog posts into a summary digest of the “top X things to know” on the original topic
Extract quotes and schedule them as social media updates
The trend toward more automation will help extend the reach and impact of original content by reformatting and redistributing it where it adds value. Rose notes that automating content creation requires “some significant education in the proper role these tools should play, so that they improve the value and impact of content — not serve as a stand-in for sound strategic practices.”
2. A documented content strategy will help brands create value beyond product-related content.
Joe Pulizzi believes that having a documented content marketing strategy will be one of the biggest trends in 2017. A consultant and widely traveled speaker, Joe frequently asks audiences whether their organizations have documented their strategy for content marketing; “Sadly, most do not.”
The future will highlight the growing importance for brands to go beyond talking about marketing campaigns, and product-focused content. By creating content that goes beyond product focus, brands can create value. CMI’s research shows that the use of a documented content marketing strategy is linked with greater effectiveness: “75% of the most effective enterprise marketers have a documented content marketing strategy,” Pulizzi reports.
Rose and Pulizzi share more future trends in their podcast episode, content marketing predictions for 2017.
3. Blogging is likely to continue to be a top tactic for content marketers in 2017.
Ann Handley, Chief Content Marketing Officer of Marketing Profs, shared her organization’s 2017 content marketing predictions in a report co-authored with CMI: The 2017 B2B Content Marketing Benchmark, Budget and Trends report.
Among the survey questions, the study asked B2B marketers about tactics they see as important to their 2017 content marketing success.
A majority of B2B marketers believe blogs will be the most critical to next year’s success. Here’s how organizations ranked their most critical tactics:
52% said blogs are the most critical tactic
40% email newsletters
38% ebooks and whitepapers
36% in-person events
30% pre-produced video
4. Lead generation and brand awareness are likely to be top content marketing goals.
For 2017, the top content marketing goal for organizations is almost a tie between two goals.
Among marketers in the MarketingProfs survey, 80% said their content marketing goal was lead generation. A close second, 79% of marketers said brand awareness was the content marketing goal their organization would focus on in 2017.
To measure effectiveness, MarketingProfs asked B2B marketers about metrics they use to track progress. By far the most popular metric was website traffic, tracked by 78% of organizations. Marketers also track sales lead quality (57%) and social sharing (57%).
5. Visual content, including video, will gain importance in content marketing.
Convince and Convert’s guest blogger, Joei Chan asked 5 experts to share how they think content marketing will evolve in 2017.
Brands will move beyond written types of content to embrace different formats in order to rise above the noise. That’s a prediction contributed by Rand Fishkin, marketing technology expert and founder of Moz.
Visual content will add more value as shorter forms gain popularity with readers. The search-engine value is likely to improve for visuals. Artificial intelligence makes image content analysis possible, as Google shares its image processing technology, which can identify the content of pictures. Developers can now improve tools that can process images to learn what websites and visual content is about.
This is not to deny the importance of text-based content. Tactics that involve blogging, whitepapers and ebooks will “continue to prevail” in content marketing, says Chan.
However, Chan’s experts agree video will bring in the highest return on investment. Trends on social and search platforms bear this out. Facebook is reported to give native Facebook videos a greater reach than photos. YouTube videos can provide a great boost to SEO results. When tagged with keywords with a certain search volume, Google will display videos optimized for those keywords high in search engine results.
Chan sums it up this way: “Having more videos also improves SEO, as Google—which owns YouTube—favors them in search results.”
Takeaway: The Primary Importance of Strategy
Though content marketing trends predict automated content and visual content will gain importance, writing original content is still valuable. Blogs, newsletters and email will still have critical roles in content marketing. However, CMI experts stress that a content marketing strategy is of primary importance.
Joe Pulizzi cautions, “if you don’t build in a strategy that makes sense for a user experience or leverages technology in the right way, we are all doomed.”
What is the experience you want your brand to create for consumers? A data-informed view of trends can provide objective answers to your strategy questions. Your strategy will inform your choice of tactics, formats, and the metrics that empower you to monitor and manage effectiveness.
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