If 2021 taught content marketers anything, it’s that the pandemic had changed consumer habits and made content even more critical in marketers’ strategies. With the rise in content marketing spend in 2021 expected to continue into 2022 and beyond, brands and agencies are committing to content because it works.
Successful brands and agencies now have documented content marketing strategies, measures to quantify its success, and have come to value the creativity and craft in its creation and production.
Trends to look out for
So with content clearly at the heart of modern marketing strategy, what should we be looking out for in the years to come?
Curated content is going to play an ever-larger role in improving the customer experience. In a marketing landscape where digital-first strategies are increasingly becoming the norm as more and more of our lives are spent online, content has to speak a language that consumers understand and care about. So content will not just be targeted carefully, it will tie each part of the customer experience to a coherent and complete narrative if it’s to engage and retain. This will make the role research and planning play in targeting messages more important than ever.
Interactive content is also on the rise. Gamification, for example, has proved its effectiveness in engaging audiences and harvesting data for marketers, so interactivity seems likely to creep into ever-earlier touchpoints between brands and consumers – right up to landing pages. Indeed templated tools for interactive, customizable content are becoming more common.
Video content’s surge will continue. With 76% of marketers already claiming it’s their most important content format, 25% also say it offers the best ROI of any content medium. Videos themselves are shortening, however, as consumers’ attention spans dwindle in a digital space that’s inundated with messages. To keep customers engaged, this is another format that’s seeing a rise in interactivity.
Another symptom of shortening attention spans is the proliferation of infographics. As human minds process images more quickly than text, infographics are the optimal way to impart a lot of information quickly. It’s no surprise they’ve been popular for some time, and that’s not going to change.
As societies loosen restrictions on meeting in person, events designed to position brands as sector experts – an important tool in contemporary content marketing strategy – should start to happen in real spaces once again. However, the habits formed during the pandemic are going to stick, and the hybrid event format will now be the norm. Many people now actively prefer to attend events online rather than travel, and of course organisers can increase attendance by making sure their event is accessible from anywhere. The idea that many events will ever return to solely in-person attendance seems highly unlikely.
Content’s rise in importance over traditional marketing models looks set to continue and even accelerate in 2022 and beyond. It’s clear you need content that works, and does so at scale, to succeed in a crowded marketplace – see our blog entry for some insights on how to produce it.
Talk to We Are Amnet to find out how our Smartshoring® model can help you get your content out there, saving you time and money in the process.
