This year looks to be when content marketing truly establishes itself as the wave of the future, if it hasn’t already. It will dominate the world of marketing, public relations and communication, and marketers will continue to ditch traditional forms of advertising in favor of informative, compelling and engaging online content.
These are predictions the Hana Abaza of the Content Marketing Institute is making for 2014, based on the trends we saw at the end of the last year. CMI, one of our industry’s content marketing thought leaders, has a few key takeaways regarding what’s to come in the next year:
- Growth of content directors: As organizations look to take full advantage of the power of content marketing, more marketing departments will hire or promote professionals to the position of “content director” (or something similar). In other words, upper-level executives will be in charge of overseeing content — it’s that important.
- Multichannel strategies: Marketers will need to make their content as accessible and simple to navigate as possible, namely through more responsive design.
- Link earning over building: Google Hummingbird has changed search engine optimization (SEO) for good. The bottom line is that it will be increasingly important for brands to provide something of value to readers to earn links, such as long articles or informative white papers.
- Back to journalism school: The line between marketing and journalism is becoming blurred, and many former news reporters are finding that they can continue to provide credible, helpful information to readers — just in a different way. People with journalism backgrounds will be a hot commodity as marketing departments bring on new hires.
As Abaza points out in her article, more than 90 percent of marketers are implementing content marketing strategies, with even more brands expecting to increase their content marketing budgets in the next year. If you haven’t yet engaged in this strategy, it might be time to start creating rich blog content, articles, press releases and social media content that informs your readers and helps position your organization as a thought leader in your field.