Inaugurations, protests, travel bans and the Chinese New Year made for an eventful start to 2017. But what was the big news in content marketing?
A new year means new content. And for Content Desk, it means a new monthly round up of stimulating stories from this blog and beyond.
January generated a whole range of content marketing gossip, from innovative resolutions to predicted revolutions…
Personalisation and content marketing
The word on the content marketing street is that ultimate content personalisation is on the horizon. The demand for tailor-made content around the clock has grown as revolutionary new mediums like wearable tech make it more feasible than ever.
Increasingly, content marketers have the means at their disposal to supply this demand. The growing sophistication of companies’ analytics abilities allows content creators to funnel precisely the right kinds of content to their waiting public.
Hyper-personalisation sounds ambitious, but evidence suggests it pays off. Traffic segmentation on websites, for example, can boost sales by 89%. Despite the tricky process, content marketers are attracted by the potentially impressive yields from personalisation.
Read more:
How wearable tech represents a new frontier in content personalisation: Content Desk
Advertising
What is the relationship between content marketing and advertising? On the one hand they are mortal enemies, with content marketing increasingly seen as a more effective way of connecting businesses and consumers than traditional advertising alternatives.
Conversely they can be seen as complementary, with the growing content marketing sector well positioned to learn a lot from the more established advertising industry.
What’s certain is that the young content marketing pretender has forced advertising establishments to evolve and reassess. In addition to the growth of innovative advertising methods containing overlaps with content marketing, research suggests more traditional techniques – such as print – could see a resurgence.
Read more:
Summary of the content marketing vs. paid advertising debate (see part 1): Search Engine People
New research offers a surprising reappraisal of the most trusted types of ads: eMarketer
How print’s old-fashioned charms can boost your content marketing: Content Desk
Social media and platform usage
The new year witnessed a reappraisal of how to use social media most effectively. Debate raged in content marketing circles about the importance of adapting content to different groups of people by using different platforms.
Following the demise of Vine, confirmed in January, investigating social media’s evolution over the past decade has become a pressing task for content marketers. Many are rightly apprehensive about creating a content strategy around one social community, only to find the ebb and flow of social network users can render it redundant in a flash.
Read more:
Video illustrating the global evolution of social networking over time: Matt Banner/Vimeo
The danger of social media echo chambers in these polarised times: Content Desk
The growth of content marketing
In a marvellous stroke of meta-news, content marketers have turned the spotlight on themselves over the last month – with good reason, considering how far the industry has come in such a short space of time.
Research on rising salaries among content marketing professionals offers one objective indication of success. See also the increasing boldness of content marketing enthusiasts, who began the year by making all sorts of predictions for the industry ranging from the humble to the outlandish.
