Content Marketing Trends for 2017

(This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would)

2016 was an interesting year for content marketing. As the landscape is always evolving, we’d expect 2017 to follow a similar pattern. So here’s our look at the upcoming trends in the content world across the next 12 months.

To start with, I think there’ll be a bigger focus on content promotion. The Content Marketing Institute reported that the percentage of marketing spend on content, a few years back, was 80% and 20% in favour of creation over promotion. I’d expect us to see this percentage gap decrease even more into 2017, as businesses and brands realise the importance of having a PR team and how this can help content as a whole, whether that’s introducing content and promotion and outreach teams within their setups and their structuring departments. I think that’s the first thing that we’ll see.

Next up, virtual reality, VR. So it’s amazing to see there are so many brands out there, big brands that are engaging in this and immersing themselves in the full world of VR. Volvo and National Geographic are just two examples of companies who are doing this really, really well.

Now, obviously, they are big brands with big budgets. It doesn’t mean to say that if you’re a start-up or a small to medium organisation you can’t still talk about VR as a subject. But I think on this one, it’s important to realise where this trend is going to take us in the next five years as opposed to actually getting involved with it now. It might be something that you do later on, especially given how far we’ve come in the last 5 years and the last 10 years. I think that trend will only improve, especially with more money being ploughed into it, and technology companies and marketers are getting really excited about where VR can take us.

Number three, influencer marketing. So I’ve seen a lot of brands and businesses, I think, that are starting to now feel more comfortable with actually using this form of marketing, as opposed to talking about it, which is, I think, apparent a couple of years ago. So things like using celebrities or if there’s an influencer in a particular industry or field, they now more feel confident to use them, and it’s really about that person, that influencer having the affinity and the connection and association with the brand and then passing traffic through to the site so that users can understand more about their service offering at different stages in the sales cycle and the sales funnel.

And finally, video and more video-based content, similar to influencer marketing, I don’t think that these are anything that’s particularly new. But I think a lot of people are under the impression that you need to spend a lot of money and have a big budget to do video content. That’s not the case at all. We’re here, we’re doing a Koozai Quick Vid. We’re doing two to four-minute videos. So as long as you have a regularly consistent theme and episodic content, it’s easy to do. I’ve even seen brands and businesses using iPhones or iPads to shoot footage and then go away and edit it. So I think more of a focus will be put on video as a form of content, and it can work really well and, obviously, ties back into the first point about more time spent on content promotion.

So there are my tips for 2017. Thanks for watching. If you’d like to leave us any comments below, we’ll get back to you.