Each year, Chief Market Technologist Scott Brinker publishes his annual super graphic that shows the market for technology products and services.
It’s sometimes called the “Martech 5000”, but you can clearly see the incredible growth in technology over the past eight year, from 150 up to 7,040.
Along with data management and social media, content marketing is just one aspect of the overall landscape.
What technology trends are affecting content marketing today?
These are the trends you should be aware of:
Artificial Intelligence
Voice Search is taking over
Mind the Skills Gap
Don’t forget the Golden Oldies
AI (Artificial Intelligence), Bots and are both in fashion and will make it easier to personalize your content. AI (Artificial Intelligence), can quickly gather large amounts of data and interpret it in seconds. This allows content marketers to better understand their audience and deliver the content they desire.
Talk walker has added a market-leading AI technology feature for their social listening platform. This allows clients to track brand mentions in both video and text.
Voice Search is gaining popularity. For a comprehensive overview, please see our article on voice searches statistics.
However, new technologies can often lead to a skills gaps as the workplace is unable to keep up with technological advances. Content marketers need to be able to embrace and use the latest technology.
The golden oldies are still relevant, even though new technologies are constantly emerging. The CMI Tech Marketing found that established technologies are often used by tech marketers.
Social media (85%).
Email marketing (82%)
Analytics (77%)
Marketing automation (68%)
Workflow/project management/calendar software (60%)
Content creation/optimization (56%)
Content management (56%)
What can your company do to keep up with these trends?
Let’s look at the technology trends that can be used by your business.
Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Artificial Intelligence can help. We won’t be taken over by artificial intelligence.
AI can be used to create customized content based upon demographics, interests and shopping behaviour, location, etc. Elise Dopson has a helpful post on how to maximize AI and Content Marketing.
Voice Search
People are increasingly using digital assistants such as Alexa and their mobile devices to find answers to their questions. This means that they get their answer from the top ranking result, sometimes without even seeing it or clicking on.
Voice Search Queries are more complex (3-5 words) that text searches (1-3 words), and are primarily questions.
Think about what type of questions your users might ask when you create content. Then answer them. Ann Smarty explains that spoken search queries are frequently:
Long
Spontaneous
Comprise of complete sentences (usually questions).
Optimize your content.
Consider the Search Intent as the root cause of a search query.
You want featured Snippets to be found. These are the search results that you will see more often than the regular search results on Page 1 of Google.
Use Schema-Structured Data – The media rich snippet between URL and description. It includes images, ratings, authors and votes. Also, you can include cooking time and calories.
Content marketing goes beyond blogging.
It is easy to believe that content marketing means blogging. This is not true.
You can use different formats and media to reach your audience and achieve your objectives.
Social media
Not only is it about choosing which social media platforms to use but also how you want your content formatted. Instagram, for example, regularly releases new features that allow users to share content and interact with their followers, particularly Stories.
Instagram Stories grow 15x faster than traditional ‘Image and Caption’ posts. It’s not surprising that the network had 500,000,000 daily active Stories users around the world in January 2019:
Email marketing
Although not a new technology it is still very popular. Email marketing campaigns have a tremendous ROI. In the US, it’s $44 per $1. Automation can help you deliver timely and relevant content, which will increase your return on investment.
The email marketing benchmarks report by Get Response reveals that automated emails have higher open rates and click-throughs than regular newsletters.
Video Marketing
It’s no secret that video is a big part of online life.
Youtube hosts almost 5,000,000 videos every day.
Facebook now has more than 8 trillion video views per day.
Video marketing is a great way to educate and engage your audience, whether you use live video like Facebook Live, or create product videos for YouTube.
Podcasting
While not everyone has the time or ability to read blogs, they can listen to it while on their commute to work, or while doing household chores. Podcasts are becoming more popular and content marketers use podcasts to convey their messages.
Statista data shows that 70% of Americans know the term “podcasting”, and more than half have listened to a podcast.
Learn more about Podcasting Stats & Trends.
Augmented Reality
YouCam Makeup is an award-winning AR beauty app by YouCamApps that lets users test out different types of makeup.
If you are looking for real creativity, why not make an Augmented Reality Business card?
LinkedIn user Vandana (Didi), created a posting saying.
What is the future of content marketing
What will the industry look like in five to ten years with all these new technologies? There are three things you can do in your content strategy planning.
Optimized Content
The future of content marketing is uncertain. Right now, content production outweighs demand. We are at risk of losing it all unless we make changes. @justinleejw said:
Instead of creating new content, optimize existing content. Take this example:
Refresh meta titles, descriptions.
You can improve the quality of your copy by including headlines or CTAs.
Verify that both internal and exterme links are up-to-date and functioning properly.
Enhance images, videos.
User-generated Content (UGC).
Consumers are looking for authentic content so they can expect to see more user generated content (UGC).
Personal and useful content
Artificial intelligence and bots are advanced technologies that can help us create useful content that people desire. These technologies can be used to complement our efforts to make content more personal and, ironically, more human.
Final thoughts
Every day, new content marketing technologies emerge. It is important to decide which technologies you want to use for your business, and to make sure that you have the necessary skills to do so.
You want your content marketing campaign to be a success.
Your content should be useful and authentic.
Different types of content can be used.
Learn from the past to quickly adapt to the future.
