It’s not just the explosion of interest in audio (with Alexa and Siri etc.) that’s pushing the boundaries of content marketing – new research and insight into reader psychology suggests we may be able to unlock unseen potential for text-based content.
As a journalist, the seemingly insatiable interest in, and desire for content in B2B marketing gives me a warm glow. For obvious reasons, I’m naturally predisposed to believe that more people reading and writing is a good thing – the fact that my wife is an English teacher at a challenging high school in London, where literacy is one of the top priorities, only serves to reinforce this feeling.
So I’m slightly unsettled by rumblings about the future of content, and the frankly heretical notion that writing, in its strictest sense, isn’t necessarily always the key to great content.
Of course, mediums like video, infographics and webinars are very much part of the firmament in B2B, and have been for years, but I’ve not seen any evidence that they have replaced text-based content, only supplemented it. They perform different roles, typically in collaboration with more traditional text-based content. At the same time, I don’t know if anyone tracks the number of PDF whitepapers produced annually by B2B companies (what suicidaly tedious job that would be!) but I get no sense that these are reducing, in either volume or frequency of output.
Is trust the new frontier for content marketing?
But beyond these, I’m getting the sense that we’re starting to see evidence of a broader transition in how B2B buyers consume information – and consequently the content types that B2B brands are creating. The most obvious of these, and the one that’s most in the public eye, is the migration to voice – Alexa and Siri are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our lives, with far-reaching (and potentially alarming) implications for how we access information and the level of trust that we place in the likes of Google to make decisions and both filter and feed us information.
Whether we believe the more cynical or dystopian visions of the ultimate implications of this transition, at a more mundane, less frightening level, they do both signal and enable a new era for audio in marketing. True, once more, we’ve had podcasts for years, but at best at a low or niche level. They’ve never truly gone mainstream, but our growing acceptance of an audio-led form of engagement, via digital assistants, could change all that… as they become more and more ubiquitous. The fact that my 75-year-old father just bought an Amazon home speaker suggests this may be happening faster than we might expect.
A new psychology for content?
However, on a more down-to-earth level, there’s also more thought being put into the importance of visualisation within content, particularly desktop content, both alongside and separate to text. In particular, I’ve enjoyed reading insights from our friends at content platform Turtl, for whom thinking differently about content is built into their very DNA. One of their recent reports, Content Psychology 101, explores what goes on in our brains when we read, and how we create meaning by visualising a picture – all without us even realising it. For me, this was one of those truths that you intuitively know is true from the moment you read it, but you didn’t really appreciate its implications.
Turtl goes on to delve deeper into ‘reader/viewer’ psychology, exploring the different mindsets that we inhabit when consuming content, and how these inevitably influence how these are received, absorbed and how compelling we find them. Most important of all, Turtl concludes by demonstrating the increasingly experiential nature of content that has the potential to transcend mindsets, and to deliver new levels of engagement.
Whether you’re worried by the dystopian threat to our decision-making/autonomy posed by the rise of voice-related search, or just striving to do move beyond the PDF download, the one thing all B2B marketers have in common is the understanding that content is changing, and that we need to re-evaluate and raise our games to continue to compete. Whilst we’re undoubtedly all producing more content, we also need to strive to produce better content, and that may require us to challenge what we think we know, and make bold and possibly uncomfortable decisions – or risk getting left behind as the transition accelerates.
