What Does 2016 Hold For Content?

Whereas PPC continues to be the beast that will not be abated, SEO has to constantly evolve and adapt due to pressures put on it by ranking algorithms, and Social finds itself becoming more and more important in an increasingly connected world, where does content’s role lie in all of this?

No doubt you’ve heard the phrase ‘Content is King’ a million times, and it has become so oft-repeated and taken out of context that it has almost become a fallacy in 2015.

While first uttered by Bill Gates in 1995, twenty years later we are in a state of content overload with every minute on the internet seeing YouTube users uploading 300 hours of video, Facebook users sharing 684,478 pieces of content, Instagram users sharing 3,600 new photos, and Tumblr seeing 27,778 new posts published. So what does that mean for content production in 2016 and how can it be streamlined? Check out a few of our predictions:

Less Is Definitely More

At its heart, developing content and content marketing as a whole is about telling a story, building a relationship, and growing a potential audience-market. For this reason, content for contents sake – oft-produced to arbitrary word-counts by an inexperienced pool of freelancers – will only lead to unengaging work which will be ignored by your audience or market. Getting smart about your content, and picking and choosing how and when it is produced and targeted to, is the smart way forward.

Direct Publishing Will Continue To Grow

LinkedIn Pulse, Twitter Moments, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News. All of these social-content curation tools have disrupted the traditional model which digital publishing is built on and allowed individuals to curate their own news.

A content creator’s number one resource is attention, and as Direct Publishing continues to grow people will realise that users don’t necessarily want to be redirected – they want to read the content there and then. This is only going to see the power balance sway from publisher to platform and if the publisher hopes to keep a readership on site they will have to re-establish brand loyalty.

Content-Strategy Is King

Slapdash content production to boost SEO rankings will slowly lose its viability as more and more businesses understand the importance of having a bulletproof strategy to back it up. Developing objectives, goals, and measurement tools to go hand-in-hand with content production will see businesses start to find a real benefit in content and see them move away from a desire to fill their blogs with monthly content that has no direction. Speaking of which…

Content ROI Will Become More Obvious

The stumbling block for content and its intrinsic use to businesses has always been its lack of a tangible way to track ROI – PPC can be tracked through click-throughs and conversions, SEO can be tracked through reporting, but with content it has always been difficult to offer exact hard evidence of its benefits. As tools for measuring the effectiveness of content become more and more sophisticated, with them will come transparent results, and this will see content marketing budgets grow.

Native Advertising Will Become More Prominent

The constant war between ad blockers and ad providers goes on and on, and with the difficulties that come from this as well as with trying to achieve reach through organic search, the spotlight will fall on content as the means to connect and engage with potential customers.

Similar to the advertorials you see in newspapers and magazines, native advertising will grow in prominence as a way for businesses to gain more viewers and click-throughs than traditional targeted adverts can achieve. This will be an increasingly effective way of reaching new audiences without them feeling like they are being hard-sold to.

These are just a few of the ways we see content taking on a more prominant role in digital marketing in 2016. What do you think the future holds?