Content marketing never stays the same for long, and it’s changed drastically since 2011.
2011 was a big year for content marketing thanks to the release of Google’s Panda update, which greatly rewarded sites with high-quality content and penalized sites with content spam. Though content marketing already existed, this turning point caused an explosion in its popularity, forcing the inbound marketing community to shift gears.
But how has content marketing changed since 2011? What kind of evolution has it seen?
- More isn’t better. For a while, quantity was enough to earn you a return on your content investment. Every post you wrote added to your domain authority, gave you a new page, and increased your overall web footprint. These days, quality matters more than ever, and one excellently written post is worth more than a dozen “decent” ones. More is no longer better.
- Visuals are essential. Visual content marketing has seen a major increase in popularity, thanks to more advanced tech for viewing images and videos and higher demand among users. Even if your main content is mostly written, you should at least include a header image to help attract more clicks for your content.
- Competition is rampant. Content marketing has grown more popular, but that means everybody is facing stiffer competition. There’s almost no industry in the world that doesn’t have several dozen top authorities competing for space in the content industry. As a result, people are seeking more specific niches and less competitive opportunities.
- Mobile demand has skyrocketed. More readers are using mobile devices, which adds secondary considerations for all content marketers. How does this content appear on mobile? Is it easy to engage with?
- Quality is polarized. Finally, content quality and effectiveness have become severely polarized. Rather than adhering to a linear distribution, the vast majority of produced content is borderline worthless, producing no links, no shares, and only a trickle of inbound traffic. In opposition, roughly 10 percent of content is extraordinarily successful, generating dozens to hundreds of links and shares and overwhelming traffic numbers.
These are just some of the ways content marketing has changed in the past several years, and these changes are only the beginning. As technology develops at an ever-accelerating pace, we owe it to ourselves as content marketers to keep up with these changes and stay one step ahead of the competition. Keep watching for more content marketing news, and if you’re ready to start a campaign of your own – contact us.
