It’s the beginning of 2016—and that means that it’s time to start thinking about your marketing goals for the year. Right now is a great time to take a look at your content marketing campaign and to make sure that it is going to fit your needs in the coming year.
There are a lot of predictions about what this year is going to hold when it comes to content marketing, what’s going to be important, and what’s not going to be important, and while these are speculation, they are based on observation. Here are some of the top content marketing trends that you should be watching in 2016:
Quality of Content
You already know that the algorithm hates poorly written, fluff-filled, and duplicated content. It’s going to continue to reward great content and punish content that is stuffed with keywords and little else. What does that mean for you? It means that if you’re looking for a page one page ranking (as most of us are), it’s time to stop thinking about keyword stuffing and obsessive link building and to start focusing on the value.
Yes, value is harder to measure. Search engine optimization was easy when all you had to do was include more of a specific keyword on a page than your competitor in order to get ahead. That’s just not the field we’re playing on anymore. Google is cracking down on the tactics content marketers have used to artificially prop up their content and instead going to be boosting content that has real, useful, well-written and well-formatted information for their searchers.
Ad blockers are also going to play a role in the battle for consumer attention. Content marketing is a good way to bypass an ad blocker, but that doesn’t mean that you can write a blatant piece of advertising copy on a landing page and try to pass it off as an informative article. Users who use an ad blocking plugin are more attuned to advertising and are more likely to bail from your webpage if they feel like it’s just trying to sell them something.
More Than One Member of Your Content Team
In the past, you might have needed just one writer and no one else in order to power your content marketing campaign. Now, it’s more likely that you are going to need an entire team to make sure you a providing the value that your readers expect. That may mean more than one writer, or it may mean and editor, strategist, writer, and marketer. These four together can decide what type of content to produce, produce it, make sure it is flawless, and then get it in front of the people that would find it valuable.
This ensures that the writer does not have the full burden of trying to develop the strategy, research and write the pieces, edit them, publish them, and then market them. For most businesses, this type of silo simply doesn’t work—there needs to be communication and cooperation in order to make content marketing truly shine. Regular meetings not just with the team itself, but with all of the people that have a stake in the success of content marketing, will help propel the campaign in the right direction.
At the very least, there should be someone who is an expert in content distribution. For big blogs and websites that already have a dedicated following of engaged users who regularly share the content posted to that blog/website, this might not be essential. For those who are still trying to find their content marketing foothold, getting help from someone who can give content the start of its viral spiral is important.
New Technology Will Make Content Creation Easier
Right now, most content is created the old-fashioned way—by people, sitting down with a word processing program open. Over the next year, it is more likely that there is going to be technology developed that makes it easier and 
faster to create content, that can then be distributed to a wider audience, even for those that have a small budget. Many brands will also be looking for custom technology that allows them to distribute their content in unique ways.
Content technology right now is trending towards an open resource format, which makes it very inexpensive for even small businesses to create and distribute their content. The more streamlined the process becomes, the less expensive the marketing method becomes. Companies will be able to get better data, better information, and better results using these tools.
Content marketing in 2016 will be all about producing value, quickly and easily, and getting it out to the right people. Watching technology and trends that help you do that will keep you at the
It’s the beginning of 2016—and that means that it’s time to start thinking about your marketing goals for the year. Right now is a great time to take a look at your content marketing campaign and to make sure that it is going to fit your needs in the coming year.
There are a lot of predictions about what this year is going to hold when it comes to content marketing, what’s going to be important, and what’s not going to be important, and while these are speculation, they are based on observation. Here are some of the top content marketing trends that you should be watching in 2016:
Quality of Content
You already know that the algorithm hates poorly written, fluff-filled, and duplicated content. It’s going to continue to reward great content and punish content that is stuffed with keywords and little else. What does that mean for you? It means that if you’re looking for a page one page ranking (as most of us are), it’s time to stop thinking about keyword stuffing and obsessive link building and to start focusing on the value.
Yes, value is harder to measure. Search engine optimization was easy when all you had to do was include more of a specific keyword on a page than your competitor in order to get ahead. That’s just not the field we’re playing on anymore. Google is cracking down on the tactics content marketers have used to artificially prop up their content and instead going to be boosting content that has real, useful, well-written and well-formatted information for their searchers.
Ad blockers are also going to play a role in the battle for consumer attention. Content marketing is a good way to bypass an ad blocker, but that doesn’t mean that you can write a blatant piece of advertising copy on a landing page and try to pass it off as an informative article. Users who use an ad blocking plugin are more attuned to advertising and are more likely to bail from your webpage if they feel like it’s just trying to sell them something.
More Than One Member of Your Content Team
In the past, you might have needed just one writer and no one else in order to power your content marketing campaign. Now, it’s more likely that you are going to need an entire team to make sure you a providing the value that your readers expect. That may mean more than one writer, or it may mean and editor, strategist, writer, and marketer. These four together can decide what type of content to produce, produce it, make sure it is flawless, and then get it in front of the people that would find it valuable.
This ensures that the writer does not have the full burden of trying to develop the strategy, research and write the pieces, edit them, publish them, and then market them. For most businesses, this type of silo simply doesn’t work—there needs to be communication and cooperation in order to make content marketing truly shine. Regular meetings not just with the team itself, but with all of the people that have a stake in the success of content marketing, will help propel the campaign in the right direction.
At the very least, there should be someone who is an expert in content distribution. For big blogs and websites that already have a dedicated following of engaged users who regularly share the content posted to that blog/website, this might not be essential. For those who are still trying to find their content marketing foothold, getting help from someone who can give content the start of its viral spiral is important.
New Technology Will Make Content Creation Easier
Right now, most content is created the old-fashioned way—by people, sitting down with a word processing program open. Over the next year, it is more likely that there is going to be technology developed that makes it easier and faster to create content, that can then be distributed to a wider audience, even for those that have a small budget. Many brands will also be looking for custom technology that allows them to distribute their content in unique ways.
Content technology right now is trending towards an open resource format, which makes it very inexpensive for even small businesses to create and distribute their content. The more streamlined the process becomes, the less expensive the marketing method becomes. Companies will be able to get better data, better information, and better results using these tools.
Content marketing in 2016 will be all about producing value, quickly and easily, and getting it out to the right people. Watching technology and trends that help you do that will keep you at the