Quality, tech and personalisation: the key issues for content marketing in 2016
At this year’s International Content Marketing Association’s annual conference held yesterday, three megatrends shone through – the drive to create quality content, the transformation of content by technology and the importance of personalisation.
Content marketing has triggered some seismic events in the marketing industry this year – with content publishers John Brown Publishing being sold to advertising group Dentsu Aegis and Hearst Magazines UK winning the contract to publish the Asda magazine. Next year is likely to see content marketing making even greater waves.
The conference set out to explore some of these trends and was titled “The ConTech Revolution”. It brought together a range of senior industry figures to examine how creative technology will transform content. They looked at the rise of mobile, the likely effects of the growing avalanche of data and some of the weird and wonderful developments which are around the corner such as virtual reality and augmented reality.
A diverse audience of 250 marketers attended the Summit, from global brand directors at multinational corporations to representatives from independent brands and media agency executives and creatives.
They heard that content marketing is the fastest growing area of the marketing mix – UK brands have spent some £5.2bn on content marketing this year and this figure is expected to grow by 25 per cent next year, according to leading industry analysts Enders Analysis.
Douglas McCabe, the chief executive of Enders Analysis, said everything points to an explosion of content marketing over the next few years: “For brands this critical route to market cannot be opened up quick enough”, he said.
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