Marketing in 2020: Content Marketing is dead, long live Content Marketing.

Well folks, 2019 is gone and what a year for (content) marketers! I think that I’ve never experienced such profound changes since I founded Rock Content in 2013.

And no, 2019 was not the year of AR, VR, Podcasts, Machine Learning or any new shining buzzword that us marketers love so much. Blogging, video and social are still the basic medium for content publishing on the Internet, so no big changes there.

And for 2020? Yes we’ll have more companies creating podcasts and video content, but that’s not what will define the future. And it’s not what excites me.

What excites me is that 2020 is the year content marketing starts it’s slow death. And that’s great. So:

Prediction #1: Content Marketing will start to die

There. I said it. And to explain that, let me go back a little, for context:

Content Marketing is a redundant, but necessary, term

Sorry, but I gotta say it: the creation of the “Content Marketing” term is a direct result of years of inefficient (or just bad) marketing. 

According to Wikipedia, content is defined as: 

“[Content is] the information and experiences that are directed toward an end-user or audience [...] something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing or any of various arts"

This is really, really broad, but tells us one thing: there’s no marketing without content.

Advertising? Content. An influencer using your brand? Content. A flyer? Content. Packaging? Your clothes? Well, you get the point.

So, if marketing (promotion) has always been, by definition, based on creating and delivering content, why was the Content Marketing term coined? 

It’s all got to do with content value and the fact that “content itself is what the user derives value from” (Wikipedia).

Marketing departments and advertising agencies had been using the same strategies for years: show a positive image of my brand and my product to as many eyeballs as possible and people will buy from you.

It worked, and everyone was happy. Except the audience.

Commercial breaks, recurring sales pitches, unsolicited mail and calls, banners, etc. 

This is all content, sure, but for most people they are so out of context and generic that provide basically zero value. 

So, after many years, the marketing messages became so deprived of value that they turned into “valueless content”. The interruption that stops us from enjoying the real content that we want to consume.

For a while that wasn’t a problem for marketers, of course, since the tried and true formulas still worked, but then this thing called The Internet appeared and everything changed. The audience was in control of what they will consume, where and when.

Bad news for interruption based marketing, right? That’s when Content Marketing started to appear as an essential part of every brand’s strategy.

And look how crazy that is: we had to put the content back in marketing, even though it’s always been there. The real distinction is “marketing with valuable content vs marketing with valueless content.

But things got so ugly, that I believe this was actually necessary, to emphasize the new strategy, help it spread and be adopted.

But now it’s time to kill it or, to be more precise, let it die.

It’s time to bring down the walls

One of the side effects of any new trend in marketing is that, for a while, they are treated as the true and final solution for every problem that we have. 

I’m guilty of that. In the early days of my company, I was the true definition of a preacher: if you didn’t have a blog, your marketing was doomed to fail. PPC? That’s for people with money, who don’t understand their persona. Organic traffic will save us all.

It’s 2020 and I know how ridiculous and naive all of that sounds.

Now I believe that we are finally ready to bring down the wall we built between traditional marketing and content marketing. 

Marketing is, more than ever, focused on bringing value to the customer. Valuable content is the one that delivers what the customer wants, at the right moment, in the right context.

If that’s a targeted Ad, that offers an useful product for a person at the moment she’s looking for a solution, that’s good content. The same is true for a blog post, social post, podcast or video, the traditional mediums of content marketing.

A good marketing strategy will mix every tactic in a single plan, centered on generating value for the customers across their entire buying journey. 

E-books and podcasts for the top of your funnel, that will help your brand be recognized and liked, will generate people interested in your product, that can be then retargeted with well placed Ads or an e-mail offer.

Soon every Marketing plan will have content as a foundation, to the point where differentiating what’s Content Marketing will become irrelevant. It will be simply marketing.

And that’s how the term Content Marketing will slowly die, in the same way that nobody says “Web 2.0” nowadays. It’s just the Web now.

And my prediction is that 2020 will be the pivotal year for this change, even though it will take way longer than one year for the final nail to be put in the coffin.

One thing is for sure: brands will need to create more content than ever, in a structured way, to attract their own audiences. It’s still a new world, and a lot will change! 

What will change? Here are my guesses:

(More) predictions for 2020

#2 The difference between Content and Inbound marketing will finally become evident.

Even though Hubspot doesn’t agree with me (for understandable reasons), I firmly believe that Inbound is just a subset of content marketing. 

While content marketing is broad and can have many objectives and strategies, Inbound is just one of them: a specific methodology that always focus on attracting an audience, converting them to leads and nurturing them.

It doesn't matter if it's a funnel or a flywheel.

It’s usually hard to differentiate both because they became widely used and talked about around the same time, but in a world where every marketing is about (valuable) content,

Inbound will still exist as one of the best, specific, strategies for generating leads and sales opportunities, but in a world where content is also used for many other different reasons, it'll be easier to understand how broader content marketing is.

Also, speaking of broad uses for content, expect a lot of if to be directed towards branding strategies.

#3 Branding will be sexy again

I remember in 2013, when I decided to start a whiteboard style series of videos on Youtube. It is something that I learned to enjoy, but back then, it always annoyed me that I couldn’t measure the ROI of each visit, view or click.

Well, fast forward to 2020 and I still can’t measure it as efficiently as our Inbound strategies, but boy, my mind has changed. 

Even if it was an afterthought, creating videos, online courses, webinars, etc, helped us create a brand that a lot of people really love. We were focused on generating value to our audience, always, and that’s why this happened.

But, on the other hand, we only measured Inbound metrics. We didn’t have a single person actually focused on our Brand, and that was really a mistake.

Your brand is powerful, it brings people to your site curious to know you. It gets people to talk about you. For early stage companies, Jason Lemkin created the definition of mini-brand:

“[A mini brand is]...when at least a handful of folks in your core, target customer audience begin to hear about you. Just some, just a few. And then, they start to come to you, to learn more.” - Jason Lemkin

Many professionals are noticing this now. In a world where Google gets more and more clicks on their search page and algorithms change all the time, your brand is what will make people look specifically for you.

So, for 2020, we’ll see more PR and branding professionals being hired and working together with the growth teams.

#4 Content will focus on creating and nurturing owned channels

The death of the term Content Marketing will free us to finally understand that everything is content.

And brands will need to create more content than ever before. Generating value for the audience will be the cornerstone of Branding strategies.

For 2020 you can expect companies to create more podcasts, more blog posts, videos, etc. That’s what always happens (and it’s one reason why I hate when people say that “year will be the year of [insert content format here]”.).

What will change is that as brands become publishers, they will invest in getting rid of the middle-men to reach the audience.

And that’s the smart thing to do. You don’t want to be always fighting an algorithm, or being caught off guard on a new change on the SERP.

For example, a research by Sparktoro showed that less than 50% of all the Google searches result in a click. So much for going all-in on organic traffic.

...less than 50% of all the Google searches result in a click. So much for going all-in on organic traffic.

 Everyday someone suffers on the hand of Youtube’s crazy content ID system.

Or a content platform where you created all of your audience could simply decide that they will change how monetization works, and you’re unable to make money there. 

That’s what happened earlier this year with Hacker Noon, a famous publication that moved out of Medium to create its own platform. It’s a great story that reinforces something that I always tell people: don’t build your house on rented land.

If you really want to succeed in marketing, don't build your house on rented land. Focus on owned channels.

An essential part of the branding strategy will be to use SEO, paid and social to bring the audience to their own channels. When someone subscribes to your newsletter or podcast, that means they like your brand and your content. That’s powerful.

And there’s no algorithm that will stop this audience to get the content they want from you.

To wrap it up:

In 2020 let’s expand our definition of content and create more and more value to our audience in new channels and formats, but focus on building your own channels.

Do that frequently and strategically and you'll get to success.

"Eighty percent of success is showing up." - Woody Allen.

Happy new year!

An I'd love to know if you agree or disagree with me in the comments!