This year, it’s all about embracing tech and eliminating barriers. That tech includes everything from video marketing to virtual reality experimentation. The barriers could be the ones between content and social media; content and email; or just about anything else that includes cross-platform promotion.
So what are the biggest changes coming our way in 2017?
We’ve noticed 10 changes that we think will have a dramatic impact throughout the year. There are more — but these 10 will have the biggest impact.
1. Content hyper-saturation
The secret is out — content marketing is amazing.
As a result, companies are rushing full-force into new content strategies that’ll add to a saturated information market.
That’s not necessarily bad. Some industries still have a lot of breathing room when it comes to quality content, and competition typically spurs innovation.
But the content marketplace has been saturated for at least a year now for popular industries, especially in the tech field.
That kind of hyperactive competition — where companies pile on top of already-established niches — is more indicative of a bubble than regular competition.
We’ve talked about market bubbles before, but let’s apply that lens to content marketing.
First, we have to establish the five major events of a financial bubble.
· Displacement – The creation of an idea & its early success.
· Boom – The mass adoption of that idea.
· Euphoria – Earning & popularizing an idea; the “golden age” of a bubble.
· Profit – Forward-thinkers earn from bubble, ditch assets, and start looking for next idea.
· Panic – Those left behind don’t earn nearly as much as before; idea is ditched en masse.
Most of these steps sound good on paper. But they all lead to the same end result — a burst market bubble.
In terms of content marketing, displacement occurred when Google got so good at recommending search results that companies realized they could write information, publish it on their site, and get new customers for practically no cost.
The boom happened when people started talking about it. Everyone wanted in on this new-fangled content marketing idea.
Euphoria occurred when everyone was making money off of content. It was the golden age that also saw the rise of third-party specialist companies like Content Marketing Institute — kind of like how SEO spawned Moz.
Profit is happening right now. Lots of companies are earning off of content marketing, and a lot of them are ditching text-based content altogether in favor of new marketing strategies (or at least new content formats).
With that in mind, panic is on the horizon. That’ll be when the value of content — especially text-based content — stops earning returns.
Considering how easy it is to write content, this panic moment is probably closer than marketers would like to admit.
In fact, you can already see thought leaders changing their content strategies.
2. Content refinement
Content is popular, and everyone wants to get theirs while the getting is good.
But only 6% of content marketers consider themselves to be “sophisticated” in their methodology, according to a study from Content Marketing Institute.
22% say they’re mature about their methodology, 35% say they’re adolescent, 26% say they’re young, and 10% say they’re in their “first steps.”
That top 6% is in a prime market spot to jump to the next big thing in content marketing and leave their competitors behind. They’re probably the marketing agencies and big brands that have dollars to burn.
The mature 22% is probably doing a little experimentation of their own. They may not have the big budgets of the top 6%, but they’re getting along just fine and enjoying the profits of their work. But, just like the 6%, these companies are also looking for the next big step in content marketing.
They just want someone else to test everything out first.
With that in mind, the bottom 72% will be hit hardest by a burst content bubble. They’re the ones who are lagging behind the most, and they probably won’t have the budgets to jump to the next phase of content marketing like the trailblazers before them.
The bottom 10% — those taking their “first steps” — are in the most danger of losing out. They’re attempting to break into a hyper-saturated content market when major thought leaders are thinking of ways to get out.
On the one hand, that may reduce the content market’s saturation so that smaller brands can actually get recognition.
On the other hand, it opens the doors for more advanced forms of content to decimate the bottom 72% — especially if that 72% is only using text- and image-based content.
But there’s still one big question: What are thought leaders doing now that others aren’t?
3. Video is the new content king
Over the past few years, video has exploded onto the content marketing scene.
Video has a number of natural advantages over text — it’s easier to consume, it’s easier to show, it has the potential to go viral, and Google loves it.
Since then, we’ve seen some outstanding results when targeting high-value keywords. We even outrank Moz, Search Engine Land, and Forbes for some keywords, which is pretty good for an agency in small-city Pennsylvania!
We’re not the only ones enjoying the benefits of video, either. Look up your industry’s major keywords in YouTube, and you’re sure to find someone talking about issues related to your business.
If you haven’t started a video marketing strategy, the time to start is now!
4. Streamlining strategies across the board
As any Six Sigma participant can tell you, every step of the production process has waste. It’s a universal truth that applies to everything from thermodynamics to marketing. At some point, you’ll lose money, energy, and other tangible needs required to do what you want.
The goal is to lose as little as possible every time you invest in a new initiative. If you want to stick to Six Sigma Black Belt rules, you want to strive for 99.96% efficiency, or 99 cents of each marketing dollar going straight into an initiative.
In marketing, waste happens whenever someone has to take their time away from promoting your business. That happens most often because someone doesn’t have the resources or planning to fully follow through with their ideas.
The general solution is to provide as much time and as many resources that your marketers will need to complete a task.
This is a challenge, depending on the marketing medium you’re using.
Text-based content is pretty easy since it’s mostly based on data and a marketer’s writing talent.
Graphics and video can be more difficult since they may require collusions between your marketers and freelancers (or at least one more person at your business).
For initiatives like SEO, PPC, and email marketing, it gets harder to identify points of waste. That’s because they require more data collection and analysis than other marketing strategies. That makes it a lot harder to say you only want to invest in X amount of hours of SEO and PPC optimization.
In those cases, it’s a lot easier to identify waste in hindsight, record it, and look for it in the future.
For example, if someone on your team spent hours optimizing the text of an AdWords ad in an attempt to lower bounce rate, you can almost certainly identify points of waste. A high bounce rate points to a problem on an ad’s landing page since a user has already clicked the ad — the text is probably fine.
While it doesn’t help to hover over every marketer’s shoulder as they’re working, identifying points like the example above can help you both save and earn money by spending it more efficiently.
If you find enough areas of improvement, you might be able to hit that Six Sigma benchmark with your marketing team.
5. Personalization
Personalization is a multi-tiered strategy based on appealing to a specific person instead of a grouped demographic.
That includes using someone’s name and speaking directly to their needs as a customer. It’s a little tricky to get started, but the right personalization software can make the difference between average and exponential growth.
Personalization starts early.
By examining a user’s IP address and cached browser data, high-powered personalization software can serve tailored pages to different people in different industries.
In general, personalized pages earn somewhere between a 10% to 15% increase in conversion rate, which is huge for any business. Whether you work on quick sales or lead generation, not one business would say they don’t want a 15% increase in conversions.
That’s why personalization is such a big deal for this coming year. Like content, marketers have discovered how powerful personalization is, and now they’re using it to grow like never before.
So if personalization is following the same steps as the content “bubble,” this is probably the boom phase.
In other words, if you haven’t started using personalization yet, start today.
Read Also: All About Re marketing & How Google Re marketing works?
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