What Does the Future of Content Marketing Look Like? Spoiler: Far Less Content
Content creators everywhere including YouTube stars, Twitter personalities, and journalists are all suffering from the results of peak content. Erica Berger captures the feeling of peak content perfectly:
Does it feel like you’re reading, watching, and listening to more information than ever before? Or alternatively, after spending the last few years too overwhelmed in the digital age, have you turned off Twitter, put away your devices, maybe even started to read some print papers and magazines again, on a newfound quest to find some sense of calm amidst the flurry of information? You’re not alone.
In other words, the information age is arriving at its natural conclusion and we’re all drowning in it. In 2015, Gartner’s “Hype Cycle” moved content marketing into the “trough of disillusionment” phase. With good reason — it’s getting harder and harder to get results with content marketing.
Last year Buzzsumo analyzed performance of one million posts. Here’s what they found:
- 50% of randomly selected posts received 8 shares or less
- 75% of these posts received 39 shares or less
But it gets worse. Not only is most content under-performing, it’s also getting harder for people who produce really good content to get attention. Engagement (measured by share count) is steadily dropping:
It’s not that this wasn’t a predictable conclusion. What’s happening in content marketing is really the same thing that happens to every marketing channel — they get less effective over time. Andrew Chen uses ad performance to explain this in “The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs.” Chen uses the example of ad performance. The first banner ever debuted in 1994 with an astonishing CTR of 94%. In 2014, average CTR on Facebook ads was .05%. Why? Because the number of internet advertisers skyrocketed, and that’s exactly what’s happening in content marketing land.
But there is hope, and it lies in the content marketing power law. In my last post, I shared some data around how the content marketing law played out in our content strategy at RJMetrics. All the data from both my analysis and the analysis done by other people essentially boils down to this one insight: a small portion of our content is responsible for an outsized portion of results.
So, if attention is getting increasingly scarce and most content isn’t creating any meaningful results for your business anyway, then why are we creating so much freaking content?!
What Peak Content + The Content Marketing Power Law Mean for the Future of Content Marketing
1. Content marketers will start to look (and act) more like product managers
Content marketing teams have traditionally been built by hiring an army of junior-ish freelancers or writers to put words on virtual paper. I anticipate the most successful content marketers of the future will look a lot more like product managers.
Product managers spend their time figuring out the highest-impact feature to build. They use data to understand the impact of a feature. They project manage. They coordinate a variety of roles to get the job done. They understand how the product, and the exact feature they are building, fits into the competitive landscape. Product managers are highly skilled at prioritization, they have to be — engineering time is too valuable to risk spending it on low-impact work. Content marketers will also build muscle in these areas, we have to — attention is too scarce to risk it on low-impact content.
Clement Vouillon writes about the product/content connection as it relates to discovering where your content fits into a crowded content landscape:
We’re at a point in SaaS where the low hanging fruits categories for content start to be really rare. By low hanging fruits categories I mean categories where the customers are craving for content / solutions to their problems and who are easily reachable.
For example a couple of years ago when not 80% of SaaS companies were doing content marketing, it was relatively easy to create an audience on social media. Now it’s much, much more complicated to catch the attention of readers who are bombarded with content.
Sam Mallikarjunan is also anticipating the content marketer as product manager trend specifically as it relates to measurement of content impact:
While they [content marketers] value the contribution of content consumers to the customer acquisition funnel, they also value the growth in reach that frequent readers provide. Those readers may not become customers, but they amplify the reach of your content in social media and on other websites.
This kind of content production and management will not be done by the junior marketers typically hired into content marketing roles, but rather by experienced marketing professionals. Content marketing has long been treated as a testing ground: write a few blog posts and see what happens! That approach will no longer work (if it ever did).
There will still be enormous returns in content marketing, but it’s not going to come from a spray-and-pray, quantity-based approach. And that’s going to take a different kind of person than what we’ve seen up to this point.
2. We’ll redefine what “high-quality content” means
Yes, I know we tell ourselves we create content that is both quality and quantity. But is your Ultimate, Epic Guide to Magical Results really all that epic? In the future we’ll need to hold ourselves to a higher standard of quality. Here’s the criteria I’ve started using:
- Do results grow over time? If your content stops generating leads and backlinks as soon as you stop promoting then it’s not high-value. High-value content is written using words that people actually use (keywords!) not your corporate jargon. People love it, so it gets backlinked and shared, which creates a lead flow that maintains and even grows over time (Thank you, SEO.).
- Would anyone pay for it? If you charged for your content would anyone pay? How much? $50? $500? If the answer is that they wouldn’t, then no, it’s not high-value. Content marketers have become skilled at optimizing for the lead form, our standard is most often, “Would someone give me an email address for this?” That’s a noticeably lower bar than actual $$$.
- Do people ask you when you’re publishing next? Are reporters calling you for quotes? Are people emailing you asking when you’re publishing the next version? Do people ask questions about and comment on what you’re writing? If you stopped publishing, would anyone care at all?
Under that harsh light, it’s pretty easy to see that most of what we content hustlers are pushing out just doesn’t pass the standard of “high quality”.
3. Content marketing will be more about brand than lead-gen
A new report by Drift and Mattermark sheds some light on the impact content marketing has on company growth. First, and I found this surprising, 20% of the fastest-growing B2B companies DO NOT maintain a blog and/or online publication. Hmm…this should make all of us question just how effective blogging is as a growth strategy.
Second, 16% of the fastest-growing companies offer ungated content. Over half of them don’t offer any downloadable content at all (gated or ungated).
Does this mean that we should all scrap content marketing? I don’t think so. But I do think it’s time to reevaluate the role of content marketing as it relates to growth. Content marketing (like any marketing tactic) cannot cover for an imperfect product or bad product/market fit. Slack? Mailchimp? These companies are awesome because their products are awesome, not because their downloadable content is so compelling (pretty sure neither of them have downloadable content).
I think there’s a good chance that content marketing in the future will look a lot more like branded editorial and a lot less like classic lead-gen. It appears that for the fastest-growing companies, this is already the case.
4. Content teams will be producing far less content, that’s far more interesting
All of this means that content marketing is going to become a lot more fun. Instead of content marketing teams being comprised of underpaid recent college grads churning out listicles and roundup posts we’ll see diverse teams working on really interesting problems. And this trend is already in motion. For example:
- Mattermark has distinct editorial and content operation. They recently hired a former TechCrunch journalist to run the editorial side.
- At RJMetrics, we hired a data scientist who spent about 50% of his time doing research for our benchmark reports.
- Unbounce is experimenting with on-demand video content.
- Baremetrics just released a really cool interactive benchmarking tool.
- Zendesk is building a compelling editorial brand with Relate.
These projects are ambitious and fun. They involve creative, talented people working together to solve problems in interesting ways. It means that content strategy will be much more than a calendar of blog posts. It also means that innovating will be harder than just brainstorming new snapchat ideas, but this is good. Content marketing teams in the future will have access to more resources and talent than we’ve ever had. It’s going to get fun.
September 6, 2016 update
This post has sparked an unexpected amount of interest and people are weighing in on the topic with some great commentary. Kevan Lee from Buffer wrote a piece about how he’s seeing companies currently (and successfully) solve for content shock. Steve Rayson wrote an excellent follow-up praising the merits of short-form content. Rayson’s post contains compelling data and is a solid counter-balance to the high-quality/low-quantity approach I advocate both in this post and my last post on rethinking content strategy (see below).
