People, devices and the future of content marketing

We have never created or owned a device that is as personal and powerful as the smartphone. Our relationship with mobile devices has become so intimate we even experience separation anxiety if we are detached from our devices for just a couple of minutes. Through mobile technology, we can buy, sell, pay, communicate, collaborate, learn, entertain, search, play, monitor our health, document our own lives and more. It allows us to do so much with a single touch or swipe.

Technologies and devices also change the way we create, consume and promote content. All these changes signal a fundamental shift in our behaviours. Behaviour, in turn, drives marketing requirements and strategies. So here are four important areas that are crucial for marketers to understand.

Wearables

Having one intimate mobile device is not enough. We constantly pursue smaller and more innovative form factors such as Pebble, the Apple or Samsung watch, Google Glass and other wearables. Although these devices may seem rudimentary right now, more and more useful features will be incorporated into such devices until they become indispensable and change our behaviour. While initial PCs in the 1980s offered only simple functions and were therefore only useful to a limited subset of consumers, today’s machines offer far superior capabilities. Phones have followed a similar trajectory. Expect wearables to follow suit.

Impact on content marketing
With smaller form factors, long form content may not work well. Form, design, copy and user interface play much bigger roles in content creation for wearables. You may need to customise content for different devices. Content may be much harder to scale from one device to another. Responsive design may not completely work for different wearables, since form factors and infrastructures of devices are different.

Voice recognition and gestures

We create content for our eyes only. As technologies continuing to advance, we can expect increasing interaction with content through voice and gestures. Marketers will need to create content that is activated with voice commands and hand movements. Content consumption is evolving to enable multiple forms of input and output rather than just simple keyboards and screens.

Impact on content marketing
With the introduction of input and output devices tuned to multiple senses, content creation can no longer be in only written form. Interaction with your content needs to be available in multiple formats to take advantage of touch, gesture and voice capable devices.

Search

Google continues to refine its search algorithms, which impacts the content that will be displayed to audiences. A few years ago, results were limited to relatively simple matches to a user’s queries. Current search results already take into account when, where and how in an attempt to anticipate your needs and deliver more appropriate responses by evaluating contextual information including your location, past search history, calendaring and other relevant clues. In the future, search engines will continue this trend in an attempt to act like an artificial intelligence assistant.

Impact on content marketing
Instead of spitting out thousands of links, search will anticipate our needs and propose the most relevant content pieces based on its understanding of us at that time. Search will not only filter or select content on our behalf, but also deliver up the content we need based on a human-seeming understanding of available data about the searcher. Because of this, the content that marketers create should anticipate users’ needs. Instead of creating large-scale finished pieces of content, it will be more effective to create modular pieces that can be used as building blocks to quickly create targeted content in reaction to changing needs, requirements and behaviours.

Big data and personalisation

The proliferation of connected devices and our dependence on technologies and tools has created a massive amount of data. Every time we touch any device, there is the possibility that our actions are being recorded by the companies that provide the service, app or tool. Even offline activities, like taking the subway, are being recorded by security cameras and become data. Regardless of the implications to personal privacy, the abundance of information allows companies to understand what makes individuals unique and allows us to tailor content to individual needs as well as identify previously hidden opportunities.

Impact on content marketing
With big data to understand your customers better, personalised and customised content becomes not only possible, but essential. Your customers expect you to know them better. We need to manage and create content differently in order to take advantage of available information and efficiently use our budgets.

Imagine a system or set of applications that are format agnostic and treat different source content as units of raw materials in a big database. Properly cultivated and created content can then be assembled to target very precise customer segments – eventually even customer segments of single individuals.

So, what should we do differently now?

Let’s consider our predicament for a moment and go back to basics. Why do we create content? To grow business. We create value by creating helpful, educational and entertaining content to grow business. No matter how technologies advance, how sophisticated search algorithms become, how big data enables personalisation of our content needs, everything comes back to the following:

Start with a great product and service;
Start with the mindset of helping your customers;
Plan and strategise your content;
Create relevant content to serve your customers;
Promote and syndicate your content where your customers will find it;
Establish the process to measure and optimise your content.

No matter how the world changes and technologies evolve, some fundamental marketing principles stay the same and continue to serve as our compass.

Pam Didner is a marketing strategist, author and speaker – follow her on Twitter @PamDidner and find out more about her latest book, Global Content Marketing, here

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