3 Content Marketing Predictions for 2013

Now, as 2013 kicks off, it is clear that corporate and B2B brands will join consumer brands in the pursuit of content marketing success. In fact, rather than just experimenting at content marketing, brands will continue to invest millions of dollars into strategic content marketing campaigns. They may hire in-house to do this, or they may outsource the job to one of the many content marketing agencies that have emerged over the past few years. Here are three more content marketing predictions for 2013:

#1 – The Website will Become Secondary
While the company website will always be necessary, it will become less important than that company’s social media properties, as those have become the primary distribution channels for content creation. Now that users curate their experiences across multiple social media platforms, that is just the reality. This is best summed up by search marketing expert Li Evans, who said, “Content doesn’t win. Optimized content wins.” As a small business owner, you can apply this principle by finding out exactly where your audience is (Facebook? Twitter? Pinterest?) and targeting your efforts to those channels, which can then drive traffic back to your website. That is what we mean by the website becoming secondary.

#2 – The Most Committed Players will Win Big
Content marketing is no longer something to dabble in. In 2013, it will not be about how long you have been “doing this” so much as it will be about how dedicated you are to it right now. You’ve no doubt heard about the “24/7 media culture” – well, guess what? That doesn’t merely refer to television, but also to social media, which never sleeps. Producing content that targets all markets, all day long, from local to national, is what smart content marketers will do this year – and the rewards (leads, sales and brand recognition) will be theirs.

#3 – Brands and Publishers will Join Forces
Now that the line has diminished between traditional publishers and brands, there will be new alliances formed that will be designed to engage, inform, and…sell? That’s right. One good example is the native ad. Native ads are essentially online advertorials; they are merged with the “real” content on a publisher’s site, but are monetized so that brands can become part of the story. They are a form of advertising that has been around for decades, converted into a scalable format for the web. In 2013, they will become even bigger than they already are.

Those are our content marketing predictions for 2013. Do you have any of your own?