A recent study shows that brands who are using content marketing are seeing a huge ROI to their bottom line meaning more sales and conversions. So where are we headed? At the start of the New Year (almost- in 2 weeks!), it’s always good to look at current trends and how they will impact our future success.
A study by Content marketing Institute and Marketing Profs on benchmarks, budgets and trends for North America indicated that for the first time, 44% of marketers have a documented content strategy and 73% have a person who oversees content marketing strategy. What was surprising was that the smaller organizations seemed to fare slightly better in having a content strategy in place. 48% of smaller B2B organizations (10-99employees) have a documented content strategy, compared with 41% of large organizations (1,000+ employees).
Let’s look at some interesting trends based on these studies and current SEO and social media trends. We’ll take a closer look so that you can shape your content marketing strategies accordingly as we head into the new year.

# 1. Social Media, newsletters and blogs will be the top content distribution channels

Although the use of social media is rising, brands are still not getting the message quickly enough as to how important social media is to successful marketing.

I think that in 2014 more brands will catch on and use social media as one of their top content distribution channels. In addition, corporate blogging will also be on the rise.

Ideas for content marketing success:

• Spend money on blogging, getting influencers to promote your blog content and hiring blogging tribes to review your products.
• Try Triberr’s new Influencer marketing campaigns that connect you to influential bloggers who would be willing to endorse your brand to their audience.
• Create a definite social media strategy in place to promote your blog posts, whitepapers, case studies and seminars.
• Increase your budget for using social media not only for content distribution but also as a way to increase customer interaction and engagement.

#2. Brands will need to market content to a multi-platform majority

For the first time, we’ve reached a point in the U.S. where more than 50 percent of Internet users are accessing the web using more than one device. A third of the average leading retailer’s monthly traffic now comes exclusively from mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. While an app may not yet be a “must have” for every retailer, a mobile strategy is essential for growing retailers’ market shares and reaching new audiences who might be more inclined to shop via a mobile device.

A recent comScore data study on multi-platform use in North America

Ideas for content marketing success:

• Outline a strategy that works for different devices.
• Create content that is shorter and more relevant.
• Have a responsive site so that every user can have a good experience.
• Create apps to improve the user experience and make it convenient for your users.
• Use geo-targeting and GPS to send customers the right rebates and discounts based on their location.

#3. Hummingbird will make conversational content more important

When the Hummingbird update was announced back in September, SEOs everywhere were wondering what the algorithm change meant for the future of SEO. Hummingbird is trying to ensure that Google understands the questions and long-tail queries that users are typing in (especially into their mobiles) but are also asking with voice search. No longer are we optimizing for single keywords but for the entire context of the conversation.
Hummingbird simply makes better use of conversational search and the relationship between words, which means that SEOs are now thinking more holistically about the relationship between different pieces of information on a page and how they are related.

Ideas for content marketing success:

• Focus on long-tail queries.
• Understand user intent and the questions that they are typing in.
• Make your content more conversational. This is especially true for larger brands that tend to speak corporate.

#4. SEO and Social Media will be intertwined

Previously, in the democracy of the web, links were the number #1 way for search engines to recognize the strength and value of your content. Even though links are still important, social signals are gaining importance. The more people that are sharing a piece of content, the higher quality it’s likely to be. It’s no coincidence that the top-ranking search results tend to have lots of social shares, while those ranked lower have fewer. Besides this, social shares can serve as a stamp of approval (ie, a trust signal) for visitors landing on a page.

Although social signals still don’t carry the same weight as traditional inbound links, it’s undeniable that they play a big role in organic search rankings these days.

I predict that social signals will become at least as important as links in 2014.

Google Authorship and author rank

Most experts are predicting that author rank will soon be included in rankings. Author rank is currently loosely determined by the number of +1s your content receives, your number of circlers and authority in non-google networks.

Google+ pages

A Google+ page has page rank and page authority. It’s also the #1 place where info is pulled out for Google’s knowledge graph.
For more info on social and seo see my article on Is Social Media the New SEO?

Ideas for content marketing success:

• Invest in some form of advertising on social networks be it Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
• Invest time and effort in growing your social networks.
• Use analytics to find out the networks where your audience hangs out.
• Set up Google authorship, if you don’t already have it set up.
• Have a Google+ page and invest time in making it grow.

#5. Conversions will become a more important metric in measuring content marketing success

Traffic is important but does not mean much without conversions. Most people are predicting a death of SEO. I predict that these two metrics will become more important in 2014: SEO and conversions. Both are directly related. The better your seo efforts, the more customers will find you and the more customers find you the better chances you have of converting them.
Brands will also become more aware of SEO in 2014. Let me rephrase that….brands will become more conscious of the new SEO and what that means with semantic search, Hummingbird and link-building.

Ideas for content marketing success:

• Increase page rank, page authority with link-building and producing strong original content
• Optimize for conversions. This means trying many different things such as a/b testing, Usabella and other tools to check heat-mapping.

What do you think of these predictions? Do you have any more to add? Please share in the comments below. Thanks.