The dramatic changes of the last 18 months will affect your plans. Here's how to shift your thinking to get ready.
That quote from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella perfectly captured the upheaval the pandemic caused in 2020.
But the changes didn't stop in 2020. Here's a look at three major disruptions that will likely affect content and marketing in 2022.
By Robert Rose
“Companies are waking up to the power of content marketing due in part to the pandemic,” Stephanie Stahl recently wrote of the latest findings of CMI's annual research.
I agree, and I want to add some observations based on consulting and advisory work with more than 30 brands over the last 18 months. I've spotted several trends that stand to change the way companies approach content and marketing.
Identifying the implications of these disruptions will help you adjust your strategies for what comes next.
CMI Research Director Lisa Murton Beets talks about the changes in how companies value content marketing and other findings from B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights for 2022.
Wow, that sounds important, doesn’t it? It’s just a fancy way of saying things are moving faster, and people have a lot more choice in content.
You’re no doubt familiar with time-shifting in the way people consume content. But let’s finally put the goldfish theory to bed. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s the idea that humans now have less attention span than a goldfish.
Of course, this isn’t true. People have way more of an attention span than goldfish do. People have no problem binging Ted Lasso, Game of Thrones, or Squid Game.
It’s not attention spans that have shrunk – it’s patience.
And it's not just patience with interruptive-based advertising that's shrunk, it’s patience with any interruptive communication.
For example, a recent study found Americans answer less than half of all calls on their mobile phones.
Not only do people dislike interruptions, but they also know they can skip to something else with a click or tap. Don’t like that TikTok video? Swipe up. Don’t like that Netflix show? Close out of it and dive into something else. Don’t get the answer you need within eight seconds of that search result click? Click back to try again.
The brand half of this disruption fascinates me. That lack of patience and the ease of acquiring replacement content takes away some of the ability to build a brand legacy.
In 1958, the average life span of a company on the Standard & Poor’s was 61 years, according to McKinsey & Company. Today, it’s less than 18 years. McKinsey believes that within five to six years, 75% of the companies on the S&P 500 will be bought, merged, or fail.
With that rapid evolution, product and service brands have become more like startups, fashion, or media in how quickly they launch, rise to fame, gain trust from an audience, and then fall out of favor or get replaced by another.
The content brands launched or acquired by these companies are becoming as important to the business as its products and services are.
That gets to the second disruption we see.
One thing we've all realized in the last 18 months is how special physical presence is. There’s nothing like the absence of something to make you realize how much you value it.
Interestingly, this forced scarcity triggered new preferences. People have realized that some things are better served in a non-physical representation.
Consider the so-called Great Resignation. If you look at labor statistics, the trend has been happening for the last 10 years. But there’s no doubt that it's accelerated as a result of the pandemic.
More people now say, “I’ve come to value working from home,” or “Is my physical presence at my job site worth more than it was before the pandemic?”
And this change doesn't apply just to work. People consider whether they need to go out or to be somewhere in person more carefully now.
Over the next year or two, demand will rebound for in-person presence at restaurants, business meetings, sporting events, concerts, and more. But in-person presence might remain a supply-induced scarcity for some time.
How will that scarcity affect marketing and the importance of content in marketing?
As physical presence remains precious, in-person events (once the most effective content marketing tactic) will become luxury items. So the content at these events has to be better and different to coax people to attend.
More immediately, this trend puts increased pressure on digital content experiences. Why? Digital content platforms now act as a physical presence proxy.
All digital content (virtual events, thought leadership, email newsletters, and so on) must be differentiated. Audiences expect more – and content competition will get exponentially crazier.
When you see Salesforce, a B2B company, investing millions of dollars to evolve their Dreamforce conference into a B2B streaming service to compete with the likes of Netflix or Amazon Prime, you can see how important digital content experiences have become.
It feels as if the world is more divided than it's ever been. And honestly, it’s hard to know if that's true.
But we do know that trust in mainstream institutions is the lowest it’s ever been.
Whether it’s government, mainstream media, businesses, or even non-profits, people are awash in an epidemic of misinformation and widespread mistrust of all institutions and their leaders.
While there is much to discuss that's bigger than business and content marketing, this disruption is a direct and pointed opportunity to help shape the future of marketing.
When the bar is so low, marketers have an opportunity – and perhaps even a responsibility (a discussion to be had over a good whiskey) – to create trust and truth.
Great marketing convinces customers to invest in something that creates wealth for the business. But not all customer investment must involve a purchase.
You can monetize marketing in a different way – through time, attention, referral, personal data, and brand loyalty – even trust.
And all of this can be converted into wealth for the business.
When you put these three disruptions into context, you can see a future of marketing if not the future of marketing. Marketing's future involves:
Content and marketing are evolving. Again. But, this time, content strategy and content marketing as a practice are becoming more valuable and more enriching to the business.
What if content marketing as a practice and its output were treated as if they were as important as your organization's products or services?
What if marketing were seen as a profit center where the primary function is to create experiential products for audiences that can be monetized in multiple ways – only one of which is the expanded or ongoing purchase of the traditional products and services?
Put more simply: What if the content marketing approach to adding value, monetizing audiences, and treating content as a product is the future of marketing?
The quickest way to get into trouble is to predict the future. But we can shape it.
As Dennis Gabor, a physicist who won the Nobel Prize, wrote more than 50 years ago in Inventing the Future:
"Rational thinking, even assisted by any conceivable electronic computers cannot predict the future … All it can do is map out the probability space … Technological and social inventions are broadening this probability all the time …. The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented."
In CMI’s research this year, we say the “giant has awakened.” I say, “Yes, and look out – because we are the future.” CCO
Robert Rose is the founder and chief strategy officer of The Content Advisory, the education and consulting group for the Content Marketing Institute. He’s provided content marketing and strategy advice for global brands such as Capital One, NASA, Dell, McCormick Spices, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Follow Robert on Twitter @Robert_Rose.