Content Marketing Trends of 2021

The recent Pandemic has seen marketers switch gears, refocus, and redefine their objectives and strategies across all industries. People around the world suddenly had to change their habits, seemingly overnight. The way they have predicted the customer behaviour to interact and consume content has changed. Over the past year, we have seen the rise and fall of certain media channels, as well as a change in how consumers want their content presented. For example, bit-sized or lengthy, how frequently they consume it, their interest in the tone and topics of conversation they presented with, and more.

Major Drivers of Change 

Coronavirus Pandemic

An unpredictable 2020, forced new digital habits. It has forced us to break through our limitations of communication to build real-time connections across the globe. This means the way content is presented, curated, crafted, and thought of, will completely change and needs to be seen in a different way. As a result, marketers need to push harder than ever to gain attention from the consumers who are in the midst of personal and professional chaos already. Content, therefore, will take on a new avatar in 2021 marketing strategy.

Content Marketing’s need to wear multiple hats

As content will become ever more central within the marketing strategies, content marketers can expect an expanded job responsibility in 2021. It may not be good enough to just create great content that serves the internal demands of sales, demand generation, account services, or the C-suite.

“Content marketers will be also expected to understand the myriad of new skills like content operations, digital asset management, measurement, and even paid media.”
– Robert Rose, Content Marketing Institute.

Role of Technology in Driving Immersive Experience

From a technology standpoint, we are seeing four trends around content that are emerging and support your content’s ability to stand out: enablers.

Hybrid Content

The first megatrend is that we’re moving to the world of hybrid content. The traditional print versus video versus digital versus event distinction has clearly blurred, and the content needs to live across multiple modalities.

Reuse and Repurpose

In the low budget for the marketing environment, reusing and repurposing your key content themes becomes important. That means designing the content from the very beginning so it’s optimised to be shared across multiple channels that you own.

User Experience

First impressions and the digital experience is now the message, it’s no longer just the medium. The digital experience is the only experience that’s left. So, when all the content is the same from a digital experience perspective, you are obviously not going to stand out, so there’s an opportunity now to influence how you make people feel while they’re connecting with your ideas.

What Technology to Buy

There’s a shift in how people are buying technology to address this. That world of “we’re going try and integrate this into our broader stack, and we’re going to have a year-long buying process” is gone. Larger
companies like Accenture and Salesforce are moving incredibly fast in this environment at looking at ROI a month or even a week into the purchase.