In spring 2020, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella famously said, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”
Since then, there have been several major disruptions that need to be taken into account when planning your integrated marketing and sales strategies. These disruptions have resulted from advancing technology and social dynamics which have resulted in innovative ideas that have changed the social fabric of the world – creating what Accenture refer to as “the fourth industrial revolution” which will have a huge effect on both competitiveness and sustainability.
Shifting priorities of customers and brand legacy.
Many people talk about the goldfish theory – that people have less attention span than a goldfish, which is why they need videos that are fewer than four minutes long on social media and everything needs to be explained in the length of a tweet. Yet the ability of people to binge-watch Netflix or read thousand-page books at leisure suggests this is not the case. It is not attention spans that have shrunk, simply people’s patience to deal with interruption-based advertising and non-relevant information.
This lack of patience and ease of access to information has a significant effect on building brand equity and legacy. Organizations are now expected to work harder and be culturally relevant. In 1958, the average life span of a company on the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) was 61 years, according to McKinsey & Company. Today, it’s less than 18 years. And McKinsey believes that within five to six years, 75% of the companies on the S&P 500 will be bought, merged, or fail.
As more brands invest in content, quick wins have become harder to achieve. To stick out from the crowd, the most successful brands are investing in longer content with higher production values. 47% of buyers view three to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep and the top three organic content distribution channels for B2B marketers remains social media channels, email, and website. This might mean that marketing teams publish less content in the future, but that the content they do publish has a much greater impact and can be reused and reformulated in several different ways to provide greater return on investment.
Fundamentally organizations need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in. The use of big data is fundamental to this in order to create and share content with consumers that is contextually relevant to their interests and shown to them at the right time. At Hundred we analyze millions of millions of digital profiles and conversations happening across social media to find what and who your key stakeholders read, listen to, watch, follow, share, and talk about. By tracking the shifting moods and opinions of these culturally connected audiences, we learn about their attitudes, their needs and expectations. This helps us to work out how to position brand effectively, ensure messages resonate, and provide recommendations for how to better cater to your current and prospective employees, customers and investors’ needs to build brand loyalty, drive conversions, and generate revenue.
Digitisation and the move to a virtual and hybrid working world.
Covid19 has undoubtedly accelerated the move to virtual and we now see new preferences being developed as a result. Many are realizing that some things are best served in a non-physical representation, particularly within the marketing and sales space but also in relation to talent attraction as well. The notion of the Great Resignation is NOT new. If you look at labor statistics, the trend has been happening for the last 10 years but has been accelerated by the pandemic. More people now say, “I’ve come to value working from home,” We also ask more critically overall whether we need to actually go out or be somewhere physically.
This is having an effect on SEO where Marketers are making larger investments to create tailored experiences for website users. The shift in 2021 onwards is less about SEO optimization in general but instead focused on ways to simply appear in SERPs and create in-depth content that is unique, valuable, and different from what competitors offer on those same result pages. 71% of marketers report that their business’ 2021 tactic for SEO is capturing strategic keywords.
Another content marketing trend to watch in 2021 is the rise of podcasts. In October 2020, there were 34 million podcast episodes and over 1.5 million active shows. Podcasts often feel more like a conversation between the hosts and the listener. Rather than being talked at, listeners feel they’re being talked to and walked through the content in a more natural, human manner. It is also a great way to use content to establish your business as a source of industry authority, whilst speaking in an informal, authentic way.
Webinars have also become extremely popular over the past year, credited to COVID-19 health and safety regulations. Webinar platform BrightTalk reported a 76% increase in virtual events between March and June of 2020. As safety restrictions are lifted, webinars and virtual events are still here to stay with the global webinar market is expected to reach 800 million by 2023, up 253 million from 2015. The new hybrid working model that has come into force into many organizations also creates the convenience of attending an event from home and there is added value in being able to access content on-demand if they are recorded and shared.
As physical presence becomes more valuable, in-person events (once the most effective content marketing tactic) will be seen as a luxury. The time and effort people put in to attend these events means that expectations will be higher than ever and the content delivered has to be very high quality. There will be an expectation that people can join part or all of the physical event digitally as well.
This trend will also affect digital context experiences too, as expectations grow for virtual events and thought leadership to become more differentiated to cut through the noise. This is why we now see global B2B organizations like Salesforce investing millions to evolve their Dreamforce conference into a B2B streaming service to compete with Netflix and Amazon Prime. This underlines how important digital content experience have become and will continue to improve and evolve over the coming years for large B2B brands and highlights that at one level digitisation refers to the shift from analogue to digital computer-based systems – doing digital. At another it’s about disrupting value chains and being digital. The key to survival and success in the digital transition will be leadership. Businesses will have to intentionally collapse their value chains or watch competitors do it for them.
Disruption: Decline of trust and belief in fake news.
Trust in mainstream institutions is at the lowest it’s ever been. There is a significant amount of misinformation and widespread mistrust of government, mainstream media, businesses, and even non-profits – both at the organizational and leadership level. Whilst this highlights a larger cultural and societal problem on a global scale, this disruption also affects the future of content marketing significantly
Great content marketing creates or contributes to ideas and conversations that customers can emotionally and commercially invest in yet not all customer investment must involve a purchase of our traditional products or services. There is a real opportunity to build, develop and leverage the social capital that great content marketing provides – monetizing marketing in a different way through time, attention, referrals, data and brand loyalty. This intrinsic value creates a wealth of opportunity for accelerate growth for organizations.
The future of content marketing
The future of content marketing involves the need to create and categorise audience into differentiated digital and physical content experiences, based on patterns and trends delivered from big data in a way that creates a sense of trust.
The job of content marketing today is to create customers and passionate subscribers to trustworthy brands. As Philip Kotler notes, “Marketing is the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit.”
At Hundred we have a clear 3-stage portfolio optimization approach which we have successfully deployed with several major brands:
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