Marketing in 2020: Content Marketing is dead, long live Content Marketing

[zakiyatasnim]

Well, folks, 2019 is over! What a year it was for (content) marketers! I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such profound changes since I founded Rock Content in 2013.

And 2019 was not the year of augmented reality, virtual reality, podcasts, algorithms, or any other brilliant cliché word that we marketers love so much. Blog, videos, and social networks are still the basic means to publish content on the internet, so there weren’t many changes in this direction.

And for 2020? We will have more companies creating podcasts and video content, but that is not what will define the future. And that’s not what excites me. What excites me is that 2020 is the year when Content Marketing begins its slow death. Which is great. So:

Prediction # 1: Content Marketing will start to die
Here it is. I said. And to explain, let me go back in time a little bit, to contextualize.

Content Marketing is a redundant but necessary term
Sorry, but I have to say: the creation of the term “Content Marketing” directly results from years of inefficient (or just bad) Marketing.

According to Wikipedia, we define content as:

“[Content is] the information and experiences that are directed toward an end-user or audience […] something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing, or any of various arts.”

This is very, very broad, but it tells us one thing: there is no Marketing without content.

Publicity? Content. An influencer and their brand? Content. A flyer? Content. Packing? Your clothes? Well, you got my point.

So, if (promotional) Marketing has always been, by definition, based on creating and delivering content, why was the term Content Marketing coined?

It all has to do with the value of the content and the fact that “the content itself is where users get value from” (Wikipedia).

Marketing departments and advertising agencies have been using the same strategies for years: show a positive image of your brand and your product to as many people as possible, and they will buy from you.

It worked, and everyone was happy — except for the public.

Business breaks, recurring sales, emails, unsolicited calls, etc.

This is all content, but for most people, it’s so out of context and austria cell phone number list generic that it provides no value.

So after many years, Marketing messages became so deprived of value that they became “worthless content.” An interruption that prevents us from enjoying the real content that we want to consume.

For a while, this was not a problem for marketers as the tried and true formulas still worked. But the internet came, and everything changed. The audience was in control of what they would consume, where, and when.

Bad news for interruption-based Marketing, right? It was then that Content Marketing started to appear as an essential part of any brand strategy.

And look how crazy that was: we had to put the content back into Marketing even if it was always there. The real difference has become “Marketing with valuable content vs. Marketing with worthless content.”

Things got so ugly that I believe it was necessary to emphasize the new strategy, to help it spread and be adopted.

But now is the time to kill it or, more precisely, to let it die.