Every industry and niche will publish a few of these pieces outlining trends. Some industries – like content marketing – will publish several dozen “Trends for 2018” round-ups.
This is all well and good, of course. I don’t mean to bash an article format that almost always gets clicks and shares. But it’s an odd commentary and there are already dozens of articles about 2018 content marketing trends that have already been published.
This overabundance of content isn’t exclusive to the content marketing as a topic. The whole world is publishing content at a feverish pace. This is what gets published in just one minute:
So no wonder our audiences are overwhelmed with content.
Fortunately (for me), this points directly to the first trend I expect to see:
1. There’s going to be even more content published this year.
You didn’t need me to tell you this, of course. Every year we all publish more content.
If you look at the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs “Content Marketing Benchmarks Budgets and Trends” report, there’s never been a year when marketers didn’t say they were going to create more content.
So you don’t need a crystal ball to predict this.
What you might need the crystal ball for is how all that content is going to affect marketers, content creators, and audiences.
Here are a few educated guesses:
For marketers:
The more and more content we create, the more of a job it is to manage. So expect more widespread use of content analytics and content management software.
There’s also going to be even more pressure to prove that all this spending is producing results. (More content = more spending). Hopefully, some marketers will realize they can reuse old content... this is a proven tactic that can save a lot of money.
For content creators:
If content marketing is going to produce business results, content teams will have to produce more content for the middle and the end of the buyer’s journey. This is mentioned in several of the top content marketing trends articles already published. As Neil Patel says, “Rather than focusing too heavily on top-of-the-funnel content to fuel your customer acquisition, your strategy should switch to supporting every stage of that buyer’s journey.
For audiences: Consumers simply can’t take in all this content. So they’ll look for ways to winnow it. One way is to expect more personalized content. Another way is to just unsubscribe from all fluff-filled, salesy content (which is really sales collateral masquerading as content marketing).
Another way is to use better filtering tools. Witness the success of so many “curated newsletters” that help people skim the best content from the week.
One last consequence of more content? There will be less engagement. BuzzSumo recently published an interesting (yet chilling) analysis of how the more content that’s published on a topic, the less engagement it gets.
This echoes another study done by TrackMaven last year that found the same thing. Fortunately, BuzzSumo’s research found that this “more content/less engagement” formula does not apply to every niche.
So sorry, marketers… you should expect to see lower engagement rates in 2018, unless you can make your content exceptional in some way.
Speaking of which…
2. The dominance of text-based content will continue to fade.
I’m not going to say blogs are dead (it’s been said before). And I’m not going to say this is the year of video (that’s definitely been said before).
But if you’re only doing text-based content, it’s time to change.
Video – live video in particular – is expected to be the darling of 2018. But don’t underestimate voice search, either. Many of our little Internet of Things devices are voice-based (Alexa, I know you’re listening).
Also witness the continued popularity of images. Instagram is basically Facebook 2.0. And note how popular interactive tools like quizzes and polls are. Many B2B companies have figured out that interactive tools can be awesome for lead generation.
3. Trust is the secret sauce.
I’m echoing many other content marketing professionals by bringing up the issue of trust. Some of them call it “transparency,” but whatever you call it, Sales and Marketing lives and dies by trust.
Trust takes a lot of forms, too.
There’s the trust you build (or burn) by deciding to teach rather than sell in your content. Then there’s the inherent trust our audiences have for user-generated content, whether that content is a shared photo on social media, or an online review, or a word of mouth recommendation.
Trust is at a premium today, and it will only get more precious.
Conclusion
All the trends talk is fun, but I hope you’re spending this time of year not just tossing around trend-talk and sipping lattes. You (and me, too) should be talking all these trend predictions and weaving them into our content marketing strategy.
Having a documented strategy is actually one of the predictions some of my peers have made. And I hope it’s true. According to one survey, “Marketers who document strategy are 538% more likely to report success than those who don’t.”
So maybe put down all these trends articles and go write down your content strategy for the year. Even a back-of-envelope version might get you dramatically better results.