Everything points to content marketing exploding in 2013. 95% of businesses claim plans to increase content marketing activities this year. Great, huh? Should keep me very busy (and reasonably well paid) with all the new and eager clients beating on my door, right?
But anyone who knows me at all also knows cynicism runs through me like the word Blackpool through a stick of rock.
Don’t misunderstand me. Yes, content marketing is hitting the tipping point. Some would argue it already has in the U.S. and U.K., powering forward to sweep aside previous marketing hypes du jour such as SEO and social media. Forget those collections of diminishing tricks and tools standing in for strategy. Content marketing is the real deal!
Except, of course, when it isn’t.
2013: The Year Content Marketing Explodes
Towards the end of last year, the Content Marketing Institute invited me to submit my prediction for 2013. The resulting e-book includes forecasts and comments from many of the best minds in the industry – people like Joe Pulizzi, Jay Baer, Robert Rose and Brian Clark – with a plethora of positive, insightful ideas on how 2013 will be an exciting year indeed.
Reading it back now, I can tell I was grumpy the day I wrote mine.
This is the year everyone starts calling themselves content marketers; SEO agencies becoming content agencies while delivering the same keyword-stuffed landing page copy; social media gurus rebranding as content marketers to grab some of the buzz while not actually doing anything different. Just as the term “cloud” became confused and distorted under the weight of opportunistic IT marketing, it’ll become tougher to keep content marketing a clearly defined and understood discipline.
“A grumpy person”
Never mind glass half full or half empty; while everyone else celebrates the glass filling to the brim, I’m complaining that it’s going to overflow and stain my tablecloth!
Crap: The Single Biggest Threat to B2B Content Marketing
But I honestly do believe content marketing is actually under threat. And, I’m not alone.
This absolutely wonderful Slideshare from UK agency Velocity Partners explains far more eloquently than I why the huge explosion in content marketing could quickly become a poisoned chalice if we’re not careful.
Maybe the fault is ours. Maybe Content Marketing is just too broad a term. Maybe it’s too easily co-opted by anyone with an infographic tool and a Twitter account. Or maybe, just maybe, 2013 is the year we work hard to clearly differentiate to clients why our words, pictures and videos over here are infinitely more worthwhile than those words, pictures and videos over there.