With publishers and advertisers shifting tactics, online content marketing efforts are accelerating at an unprecedented rate. But with more brands turning to these strategies, content-marketing efforts are becoming saturated.
Here are seven content-marketing trends that you should keep an eye on in the next 18 months.
1. Guest video posts
Videos are the next generation of guest posts. Guest posting (text articles) is a standard content-marketing strategy and has quickly become oversaturated. The problem is, most guest contributions don’t cut the mustard and waste a lot of the editor’s time.
Guest videos will be a natural evolution in guest contributions. Not only will it allow contributors to produce videos and get their faces on screens all across the globe but it could also bring in additional revenue dollars for publications. The key to guest videos will be producing high quality, scalable content for publishers. In other words, expect to see a lot of kinetic typography, motion graphic, and white board videos being guest contributed.
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2. University-style resource centers
Resource centers are being re-birthed in the form of "online universities." University-style resource centers offer courses, quizzes, interactive content and lessons. These specific resource centers will enable websites to:
- Crowdsource content from experts
- Create a new revenue stream
- Produce hundreds of high quality evergreen pages
- Focus on user experience
Expect to see more and more niche specific university-style resource centers throughout the web covering anything from personal finance to insurance.
3. Data curating
There are more than 27 million content pages produced and shared each day. This enables brands and companies to collect or tap into large databases of information to curate the data into valuable content.
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For example, I managed one of the largest home-security review sites that collected specific data on more than 150 home-security companies. I used that specific data to create a “home security quality index” that measured the quality of specific home security companies against the entire industry.
As more and more information become available, look out for companies who mine and repackage it into awesome content.
4. Extremely high-quality content
Content competition is heating up faster than ever. More than 71 percent of marketers intend to increase their content-marketing budgets during 2014 according to a report from Curata.
Outsourcing content to foreign countries like the Philippines and India will not produce the same results as a few years ago. Expect to see more brands increasing their budgets to produce wildly useful and engaging content for their audiences. This high-quality content will focus on design, media, content and engagement.
Related: How to Grow a Site Into a Successful Venture With Just Content
5. Custom-content feeds
Custom-content streams are a great way to aggregate content from across different mediums into segmented packages. The idea is to allow users to select content, categories and social networks to display on custom pages or streams. These streams help visitors better consume more information on websites. Companies like Flipboard have already started to implement this capability.
6. Interactive videos
Video will play a major role in the future of content marketing. Like all things, video will evolve to a more interactive experience. By producing these types of videos, companies will be able to engage more with their audiences, causing conversion rates to increase. Two areas where interactive videos will likely become more prevalent are in ecommerce and news. Video-software companies like Rapt Media and The Mad Video are at the forefront of this trend.
7. Influencer Content
Influencer engagement isn’t a new idea. However, brands leveraging influencers for content-marketing strategy is and will continue to be. With more people building their personal brands, companies will continue to seek out major influencers across different networks like Instagram and Twitter to produce custom content for their sites. This rise of influencers across almost every niche is paving the way for small brands to access their clout.