Content Marketing buzzwords you will hear more often in 2016

What Content Marketing buzzwords will be all the rage in 2016? We asked ourselves that question and came up with the following guide for your perusal. Even if you don’t use them yourself, we guarantee you will hear them lots!

What Content Marketing buzzwords will be all the rage in 2016? We asked ourselves that question and came up with the following guide for your perusal. Even if you don’t use them yourself, we guarantee you will hear them lots!

1. Content Shock

The net is being blasted with content and no one can read it all. It’s getting harder and harder to engage your customer and we are all suffering Content Shock! American author and social media consultant Mark Schaefer coined the phrase in a blog post, which has since been hotly debated.

According to Schaefer, anyone who wants to avoid the unspeakable Content Shock has some options, including:

focus on a niche
spend more money on better Content
spend more money on content distribution
rely on new types of content and channels that the competition (not yet) uses

What is clear is that bland and boring Content has had its day and a bolder time is dawning.

2. Holistic Content Marketing

A holistic approach means less reliance on keywords and more on subject matter, quality and readability. Many SEOs concentrate on the keyword density approach, which is of course still relevant, but Google is working hard to put the consumer experience at the forefront. Content should not only be relevant for a keyword, but to a topic and its related terms, and thus for users with different searches.

Holistic content is well researched, deals with a subject as comprehensively as possible and includes relevant terms, variants and synonyms, forming Content clusters around individual keywords.

3. Data-Driven Content

If there’s one thing the internet can do, it’s generate data. But how can we collect and use data to create content relevant to our target groups? Luckily, data does not eliminate the need for common sense (admittedly the most uncommon of all senses), so evaluating data from all relevant touchpoints (another great buzzword) and applying this knowledge still presents companies with great challenges. For this purpose, there are a number of tools available, depending on the analyses you require.

4. Native Advertising

With native advertising, the content of an enterprise is subtly embedded in a strategic location of a webpage, such as on the margin of articles on a news site like the New York Times. This content is adapted to the design and layout of each page so that it hardly differs from the remaining content at first glance, which can lead to confusion as to what is part is the journalism and what is the advertising. Nevertheless, it is deemed effective and gaining in traction.

5. Content Discovery Platform

Content Discovery platforms like Outbrain crawl the web for content that you, and only you, might be interested in. They recommend thematically matching contributions from many sources to users. Readers are therefore recommended content strategically on a topic, such as blog posts, videos or infographics. For companies, this offers the ability to distribute their content through channels other than their own and thus to increase their reach and attract new users.

6. Promoted Post

Alas, organic growth of reach via social media is declining. That changes abruptly, however, as soon as one digs a little deeper into their pockets. Whether a sponsored update on LinkedIn, a promoted tweet on Twitter or a boosted post on Facebook, anyone who wants to reach a lot of users in the future must implement this option next to high-quality content.

7. Influencer Marketing

Alongside Content Marketing, Influencer Marketing become increasingly more important, as more companies rely on cooperation with experts who have something to say to their respective target groups. Tools like BuzzSumo and NinjaOutreach that help identify appropriate opinion leaders and build a relationship with them are also gaining in importance.

8. Storytelling

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I guess you could say that storytelling has been around as long as people, but Content Marketers never tire of trying to improve their storytelling game.  As before, the goal is to tell stories so that they get under the skin and stay in your memory. Through social media, video, data, etc., storytelling has changed, as it has become interactive. Engaging your target audience, and in turn getting them to engage with you, is the name of the game.

9. Personalized Content

To deliver customized content that depends on the user’s interests and reaches them at the right time and the right place; this will be a big issue in the future. The better the content of a website is geared towards the individual user, the higher the conversion rates companies can expect. As such, more and  more companies will concern themselves with individualized content perfectly suited to the particular needs of their readers. Sounds like a challenging task too!

10. Content Performance

Content Performance should be interesting not only to number-loving CFOs. Whoever wants to understand which content delivers results and which doesn’t must measure the performance. Nevertheless, measurement of content success remains a major challenge for companies. What metrics a company uses always depends the respective goals.

According to the CMI study, the most important metrics used by UK businesses for measuring the success of content are currently the quality of the leads, the number of sales and the conversion rate. Despite this, many companies’ approach to measuring success is still simply the search engine rank and website traffic.

Conclusion:

New year, new and old buzzwords. The Content playing field becomes more even, but the challenges steepen. The general trend looks to be that the winners will have invested more in their Content Marketing. The only questions is: In what part of Content marketing do I invest?