As 2013 is drawing to an end and we will soon enter 2014, we need to prepare and analyze what content can do for us and what we need to change in 2014 to make it better. All over the world people have embraced content marketing and used it to drive sales, build relationships, retain customers, gain new ones, and have worked hard to reach people and not target audiences. Customer engagement is essential for customer acquisition and retention and yet,
Simple. Go ahead and do those face-face conversations you weren’t doing before, do the online conversations, and get everyone on board! Yup, I’m talking senior management; middle and lower levels even the customers on board! Choose the right channels to do that.
Facebook is deemed to be the no .1 global social networking platform with a whopping 11 million users! 51% of which is Australian penetration and 21% belonging to Australian users in the age group of 25-34 (marketingprofs.com). B2C use these channels,
- Youtube
- Google+
- Blog
- Tumblr
- Slideshare
- Yelp (for online reviews, it is vital)
LinkedIn is best for B2B.
TRENDS FOR 2014
According to Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends research report; content marketers are using more tactics than ever before! They’ll be using more of customer testimonials, in-person events, social media, blogs, videos, Articles , e-newsletters and case studies.
Using lesser of podcasts, printed ads or material in newspapers and microsites. Here are the trends I predict will happen in the year 2014 and why:
Trend 1: More Customer Engagement – Better, Richer content with more companies using content marketing
Trend 2: Using Social media channel mix– Blogs; Social Media will be used more effectively and efficiently.
Trend 3: Community driven content
Trend 4: Influencer becomes more influencing– Better engagement leads to the influencer doing more of the influencing. Good old’ word of mouth tactics using the social feedback cycle.
Trend 5: Increased budgets for content marketing- if companies were allocating about 20% of their marketing budgets towards content marketing before,that will change leaps and bounds now. Why? Because they see that content marketing is driving more traffic to their websites than SEO.
Trend 6: More custom branded content – Absolutely! A perfectly healthy mix of custom created/branded content along with a smattering of other content will prove more effective in terms of cost and time. You can create content that is yours and repurpose it across channels to create a better mix. This will save you hours of time and keep fresher ideas pouring in.
Trend 7: More companies will be using whitepapers as a content marketing technique – Most of the white paper is generally content, but a small fraction of a white paper consists of direct marketing material. A blog might take a while before you generate leads, so white papers will be faster. Use white papers to generate leads, Referrals, sales presentations to clients and for directing followers to your website.
(Axonn Research)
What’s the bottom line?
There is a widespread awareness of content marketing!
Make the most of content marketing: It doesn’t really need big budgets or expert writers in order to effectively reach your audience, just a good content strategy, planned calendar of events and goals as well as how they can be re -purposed or repackaged to suit the need.
This is my take on the upcoming trends on content marketing to look out for. I’m sure that they will have it’s own set of challenges which I will talk about in the next post.
If you’ve predicted other trends or have faced challenges with content creation, I’d love to hear about it!
Let me know!
On All Things Social 
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