There is a pretty good possibility that you are already using a content marketing strategy that is integrated in the overall marketing strategy you use for your business. We need to look at this as being a vital part of inbound marketing and the majority of online businesses will use some type of inbound approach in 2014.
Defining Content Marketing
We can say that there is no worldwide accepted definition for content marketing, although everyone is talking about this at the moment. It is expected that some type of definition will appear this year but until that happens, content marketing strategies typically include:
- Guest blog posting
- Blog pots
- Email newsletters
- Podcasts
- Ebooks
- Vine videos and regular videos
- Posts on social media
- Webinars
- Live presentations
The Director Of Content Appears
We already see many businesses that employ a director of content and this trend will surely continue in the following months. Managers will want to invest in content strategies and the budgets allowed for content dissemination and creation will increase.
Google is constantly making changes to the algorithms and removes keyword data so that the old search engine optimization methods will clearly be attacked in the near future.
Mobile Content Marketing Will Be A Necessity
Many believe that mobile traffic will be higher than desktop traffic in around 2 years. Even if this does not happen, it is obvious that mobile traffic is nowadays very important. Content marketing firms already took this into account and the firms that will not consider mobile traffic will lose out a lot. It is really important that you create content that can be viewed while “on the go” so mobile friendly formatting is a necessity, together with actionable and short blog posts.
New Companies And Software To Appear On The Market
Content marketing results are always spread over a period of time so tracking a return on the investment made is obviously difficult. Since you cannot measure inbound marketing technique results, companies and SAAS software will most likely appear in order to help businesses to calculate content marketing ROI.
A Difference Will Appear In Companies That Automate Content Marketing And Businesses That Do Not
You cannot fully automate content marketing and so many companies will try to reduce the amount of work that is to be done. The problem is that this automatically leads towards low quality content. Any automated content marketing strategy will eventually fail and would lead towards bad branding.
Some sort of automation will surely appear but content marketing strategy strength will surely be connected to the customer-focused and personal approach that a company will develop. Those firms that go towards automation will surely end up with results that are not as great as the competition.
Google Plus Becomes Vital For Business To Business Content Marketing
Google Plus is definitely growing in popularity and it will be a tool that will be highly important for the purpose of content dissemination. That is because of the Google Authorship and Author Rank implementations. Many think that the entire search engine optimization industry will be dominated by this by the end of the year.
Brick And Mortar Companies Will Gain From Location Based Marketing Strategies
The increase of mobile device use and the development of GPS technology make it easy for mobile device users to find brick and mortar establishments. Even if we do have access to this technology, it is still not used as strong as it will soon be. The local storefronts that do not adopt a content marketing strategy that is based on location will end up with a decline in sales as other businesses start to use offers, coupons and flash deals.
Conclusions
The year 2014 will surely see businesses invest more money in content marketing and those people that take the final decision will understand how important such an investment is. You surely start to notice this and it is quite clear that the entire inbound marketing industry is shifting towards the development of high quality, relevant content that is really useful for potential customers.
What do you think will happen in 2014? Share your views in the comment section since we can all become a lot stronger together. Content marketing is constantly growing. That is a certainty!
