The End of Content Marketing

One of my favorite platitudes is "if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority." As to the state of 2020 content marketing -- if everyone produces content, no one produces content.

According to the World Economic Forum, this year our digital universe is expected to reach 44 zettabytes. Never heard of a zettabyte? Me neither. But to frame this number for you, it means that there will be 40 times more bytes than there are stars in the observable universe.

From the visual capitalist

Yeah, thats a lot but not all of that is "content" in the classical sense - so lets get a bit deeper:

Websites: 6 new websites are published every second (the indexed web contains at least 5.26 billion pages).

DJs & Producers upload 12 minutes of audio per second.

Redditors write 41 comments per second.

Spotify Artists & Labels upload 46 tracks per second.

Bloggers publish 116 posts per second.

YouTube creators upload 500 minutes of video per second.

Instagramers share 1,099 posts per second.

Facebook users share 4,050 photos per second.

Twitter users post 5,787 tweets per second.

WhatsApp users send 752,314 messages per second

Despite the commitment to content marketing, the difficulty in crafting an effective content strategy, having the appropriate subject matter expertise, bandwidth, and content integration all contribute to the inability to find a content needle in the content needle stack.

It's time for something different.

Welcome Singularity Marketing.

History is full of cases in which a new and groundbreaking technology, or a collection of such technologies, completely changes people’s lives. The change is often so dramatic that people who’ve lived before the paradigm shift have a very hard time understanding how the subsequent generations use these solutions. These kinds of dramatic shifts in thinking are singularities.

Ray Kurzweil

2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence. I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created.

Marketers can't wait until 2029. We need to dramatically alter how we go to market now. We need to do things fundamentally different from ever before - dramatic and unrecognizably effective from our prior marketing efforts - Singularity Marketing.

The core elements of Singularity Marketing include:

1. Multi-brand Customer Experiences. In Singularity Marketing, Customer Experience Management evolves beyond the borders of your brand to encompass multiple brands which a customer has affinity. It's no longer management of customer interactions through each physical and digital touchpoint - rather management of a holistic journey across brands to deliver both personalized and emotionally satisfying experiences. These Joint Venture brands offer something to a customer that neither can offer on their own.
2. Self-service ABM. Prospects and customers require the ability to assemble their own custom content based on the core content building blocks you provide - whether through pre-published templates or completely personalized. Externalization of your content technology, workflow and repositories will accelerate a prospect through the customer journey. Imagine a customer self selecting three unique pieces of content to create a personalized marketing tactic they wish to share with their superior. This Self-service ABM extends the power of ABM by placing it directly in the prospects hands which accelerates the buying cycle.
3. RESTful Marketing Organizations. In the same way that REST APIs make it easy for a variety of applications to easily integrate and synchronize with one another, your marketing organization will now be able to more easily share a representation of its efforts to all departments in a GTM function. This type of synchronicity integrates marketing, sales, customer success, product management and marketing into one unified yet fluid organization that re-assembles in unique ways based on the objective.
4. Content Natural Selection. Content types naturally evolve into novel 'organisms' that will thrive in certain customer ecosystems and fail in others. In the same way that random DNA mutations eventually find a path to superior behavioral and functional capabilities, the same happens with content. For instance, more of us are using augmented reality, virtual reality and interactive content - but novel combinations of emerging and existing content archetypes provide unique approaches to delivering a content message. An example -- You're marketing a General Ledger application as part of your financial management SaaS solution. You decide to take the traditional day-in-a-life approach to messaging but rather than tell that story in the third-person, you enable the customer to actually live the life of a transaction. Utilizing virtual reality the prospect can experience a transactional flow as if they themselves are the transaction. Why is this an important aspect of Singularity Marketing? It provides your prospect with a completely differentiated and emotional experience of your solution.
5. B2X marketing. The distinctions between B2B, B2C or B2B2C marketing continue to melt away. These efforts are now driven by a common set of behavioral economic strategies to optimize returns on your efforts.
6. Quantum demand programs. In the same way that light acts as both a particle and a wave, demand programs are constructed and function as a brand platform as well. These programs share both common and unique metrics dependent on the audience and how the program is perceived (brand, demand, both etc.)
7. Radical automation. Not just marketing automation in the standard sense but integrating all automation platforms - program, content, analytics, storage, Cx into one. This radical integration not only increases the effectiveness of your overall programs but will dramatically improve targeting, personalization and speed to market.

Like all paradigm shifts there are those that embrace, those that deny and those that fear. But elements of Singularity Marketing are here today. Others are in development. This is the future of marketing and we all need to evolve or end up on the marketing evolutionary trash heap.