Content marketing has changed a crazy amount in a very short period of time. Marcellina Mardian walks you through the four waves in content strategy you’ve been witness to, probably without noticing.
Even if you don’t care to admit it, it’s possible that back in 2010 you listened, at least once, to Justin Bieber’s hugely successful track — ‘Baby’. Perhaps you were never acquainted. The YouTube clip broke a record with 246 million views. A mere four years later, and less avoidable, was PSY’s ‘Gangnam Style’, which broke that record with a staggering two billion views. Like sand through the hour glass, so are the waves of digital content.
Brands have been creating content for their consumers since the dawn of the humble printing press allowed them. This content has evolved throughout the years from window posters to newspaper advertising to multi-million dollar campaigns. If people watch, read, click or listen to something, you can guarantee that a brand will be there. Few industries change as rapidly as marketing. What is innovative and cool one month is typically passé the next. Which is why we wanted to unpack the digital content revolution and show how it has shifted across four distinct waves.
1st Wave: The Text Age
Google changed the game in the digital sphere in more ways than one. With their complex and ever changing search algorithms, everyone had to follow Google’s lead or risk not being found online. This saw the advent of the first wave of digital content marketing: Text.
Brands would use their websites, blogs, and later, their social media platforms to publish unlimited written content laced with ‘keywords’ in order to increase their page rankings via search. This first wave of content marketing successfully encouraged brand discovery, but it was purely a one way dialogue allowing for little to no interactivity from consumers.
2nd Wave: The Visual Age
When social media started to challenge Google’s monopoly on delivering content to consumers, it wasn’t long until brands started to cater to individual preferences. Visually-rich content began to replace long form text. Each social media channel had their unique format, so content needed to be square, 140 words or very clickable. This new content approach solved the increase of distribution channels. The old ‘word of mouth’ tactic had never been easier with likes, re-tweets, shares and re-pins.
It was in this stage that our friend Bieber was king, and views became a valuable commodity. Brands were investing heavily in visually rich content that utilised traditional storytelling techniques to make the view count metre sore. A great example of a brand who took their content to the next level is the popular food chain restaurant Chipotle. Nearly 14 million people have enjoyed the cinematic animation and a haunting soundtrack of ‘The Scarecrow’. Despite the massive investment, the message may have fallen on many unqualified consumers as Chipotle only have stores in the USA, Canada and UK. It wasn’t long until brands began to realise that a million views are worthless, unless those millions do something.
3rd Wave: The Big Data Age
Between the second and third wave of content marketing, there was a huge increase in the amount of content produced. For brands, it presented the challenge for them to break through the ever increasing noise. For the users, this meant that finding content that was useful and relevant became a tiring, arduous task. Subsequently, the high volume of mass-produced content available created a demand for ‘better’ tailored content.
Big Data was the silver bullet that marketers across the world were waiting for. It helped brands to stop throwing the darts blind and push their message out only to those who were actually relevant. By this stage, Google and Facebook had collected a swath of consumer data. One only needs to install Ghosteries onto the browser to see how many companies were watching their every move.
Researchers at Cambridge University in the UK and Microsoft developed a model that could predict if a man was homosexual with 88% accuracy, predict ethnic origin with 95% accuracy, religion with 82% accuracy, political affiliation with 85% accuracy and whether they used addictive substances with 75% accuracy. And that was only through using Facebook ‘likes’. Using data like this, the content that could be broadcast was almost unfathomably specific.
Big Data and new technology created a monster that was so connected, so well-informed, and connected with fellow users, that personalisation wasn’t enough. The high content saturation in the media led to more immunity to the ‘noise’. Marketers slowly began to realise that while ‘who’ was extremely important, ‘where’ was becoming more and more important.
4th Wave: The Content Engineer Age
When you wake up in the morning and pick up your phone, do you want to read a 1500 word news piece on the deterioration of the Great Barrier Reef? That can wait till the train. At that moment, you only want to flick through beautiful photos of the Great Barrier Reef on Instagram. The context in which an individual is consuming content is the fourth and final wave of content. Consumers expect that brands not only to tailor to any device, but to the channel and to the time of the day.
And so came the birth of the Content Engineer, who understands how to adapt content to a specific context. Head over to our interview with Nick Atkinson from Hardie Grant to hear more about Content Engineering and how you really can get two bites of the cherry.
Smartphones have redefined the term ‘local’ from your neighbourhood to your immediate radius. And you can’t get more immediate or local than your body. In 2013, Google launched its Google Glass and next year Apple will join an already populated wearable technology market with its release — the Apple Watch. How to serve content to these new devices will be the next challenge marketers will face across the world. How, when and where we use wearable technology is not yet known, but given the iPhone was first launched in 2007, we know things change fast.
At the end of the day, there is no uniform formula when it comes to utilising content marketing to engage with users and create a unique, personalised user experience. However, it is now more crucial than ever for brands to stay up-to-date with digital technology developments, pay close attention to user behaviour and work with existing data to establish smart, effective digital content strategies.
Marcellina Mardian is a Producer at Deepend and lover of all things sweet. Check out her thoughts and travels on twitter @celia141.
Design by Deepend’s Digital Designer Elliot Midson. Hit him up on Dribbble or his website for more of his stuff.
