The whirlwind romance is over: Content marketing predictions for 2014
While content marketing has been a buzzword for 2013, King Content’s Cameron Upshall says he thinks the whirlwind romance is over.
There’s no denying that 2013 has been an explosive year for content marketing in Australia. Recent research from the Content Marketing Institute revealed that 93 per cent of for-profit marketers in Australia are now using content marketing and 69 per cent are planning to increase their content marketing budgets in the next 12 months.
But, will Australian marketers’ love affair with content marketing continue in 2014? I’m sorry to say it, but I think the whirlwind romance is over.
Cameron Upshall
I think the old adage goes “If you build it, and it’s new, relevant, entertaining, zeitgeisty, useful, or in some other way part of the 0.1% of content made by advertisers that doesn’t suck immensely, AND you advertise the bejesus out of it with a strong incentive for people to come, they might come. But probably not. And if they do, they almost certainly won’t stay, come back, or recommend it to anyone else. If you’re lucky, if you slap a brand on it somewhere, people might actually remember who made it, and if you’re really lucky they might be more inclined to buy your product as a result. But probably not. Best not to count on it. Anybody for baseball?” I may have paraphrased slightly.
Great article about an area which is so evolving. As a writer I totally agree the short video message equals high impact. I’m not sure why you might think writers might need an apology on that one! I create for the appropriate medium and have enjoyed steering hard and fast text-column clinging clients to the screen-sense video.
Fantastic tips for the next year!
Computer screens. iPads. Mobile phones. TVs. It doesn’t matter what screen you advertise on (or put your content on). If you don’t create a provocative promise, readers/viewers/listeners will ignore you.
Hopefully by 2015 we will be calling “Content” by a more appropriate name: “stuff”, because that’s what it is. Cheap stuff churned out quickly to ‘engage’ people who are already buying your product.
Reading this just makes me think of Demand Media’s promise to the world 4-5 years ago. Content led, data driven, video etc. Am I missing something?
Nice piece Cameron, although I’m interested to know whether you have insights about the amplification techniques we’ll see next year that don’t exist yet.
To copyfiona: As a reader, I didn’t understand a single sentence you wrote! Also, are you allowed to reprint this whole article on your own website?
@ John R… too true. Heaven forbid a writer would pen clean, concise, credible copy these days. Sadly, what’s in vogue seems to be this dense, shrilly, opinionated guff the likes of a student magazine.
OK content but the style of delivery annoyingly folksy and patronising… ironic when the main message is know your audience
Disappointed not to find interesting discussion in this open forum about the topic. Teenage trolling, or perhaps ‘sledging’ for the older writers who fail to understand modern context, seems a bother for no purpose.
Interesting article.
It’s not very flattering to say that in 2014 amongst other things, content marketers will develop a strategy around content production and also look to their own internal customer data sources to unlock key insights.
Hmm. Harsh but probably fair.
Interesting point about content amplification. To me if the content is not targeted, relevant, shareable, fun, entertaining, unique in some way then no amount of content amplification strategies will have much impact.
In that case the content amplification sounds like spray and pray.