Inbound Marketing Age

It’s been a few years since content marketing became one of the most popular and successful strategies in B2B marketing. 

In the beginning, it was enough to publish content. And companies did – in great quantities. More must be better was the thinking.

Once there was a mass of content out there it soon transpired that it was quality and not quantity that was becoming important. Prospects and buyer were looking for high-quality, useful content. Now the trend was for high-quality, extensive articles covering subjects in depth. 

With high-quality content available, the new battleground became authority and thought leadership. This information seems useful and helpful – but can we trust it? Who is publishing this content and can we trust them?

In a podcast last month, marketing gurus Neil Patel and Eric Siu raised the question:

Should you even use Twitter in 2020?

Discussing whether Twitter is still worth it from a marketing perspective, they mused that while Twitter posts don’t always result in significant amounts of traffic to a brand's website, the quality of traffic it does attract is really high, particularly in the B2B realm.

They also considered Twitter’s value as an engagement tool, concluding that the micro-interactions between brand and potential customers is very powerful, and difficult to replicate in the same way on other social media platforms.

The conclusion was yes, marketers should still be using Twitter in 2020. But it came with a caveat. To make it worthwhile, they considered that brands need to be taking a more thoughtful and strategic approach to their Twitter activity.

"How do you morally work in marketing? You're just manipulating people into buying things they don't actually need."

Believe it or not, this was the argument I found myself on the other side of a few days ago.

It turns out, some people still think of marketers as sleazy, suited men huddled in musky conference rooms, drinking whiskey while conjuring up clever ads to trick the public into the buying things they don't really need. 

But this isn't the 50s. We're not promising the public it's ok to smoke our cigarettes 'because doctors do', or that 'if you use our soap you'll become pretty.' (Yes, these were actual, real ads.) 

Not only has the ethical side of marketing tightened up, but so has our relationship with our audiences. 

Widely touted as the biggest change to the Google algorithm in years, the BERT update has been the subject of much media attention. But what is it and should content creators be worried about it? 

What is the BERT update?

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, of course. It’s a technique for NLP (Natural Language Processing) pre-training, developed by engineers at Google that’s now being harnessed to improve the quality and precision of our search engine returns.  

Sadly, despite all the pictures of Bert and Ernie adorning the top of SEO articles - it has nothing to do with Sesame Street.

You might not think this is a necessary read just yet. But as the adage goes: preparation prevents poor performance. And the way you plan the next five years of your business could be largely determined by new ideas, insights and preferences of the next generation: Generation Z.

Generation Z will account for over 30% of UK and European customers by 2020 and 40% of online customers. And with the oldest members of the cohort celebrating their 24th birthday, Gen Z are slowly creeping up the B2B ranks and may even be perched on a (remote) desk near you very soon.

We are in a digital era of marketing where increasingly impersonal interaction takes place online and marketing automation is seen as the answer to a range of issues.

In contrast to this, customers and marketing pundits are driving the need for personalisation and customisation of content and customer experience. 

These two driving forces in contemporary marketing are, at first glance, seemingly irreconcilable and imply a potential future in which customers relate only to pre-programmed algorithms.

Following on from my commentary of Brian Halligan's keynote presentation at Inbound 2019, let's reflect on key insights from fellow Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh Shah's presentation.

Dharmesh took a very different focus: 5 business fears you need to over come to grow bolder and better. 

He started off his keynote with some light-hearted anecdotes introducing us to his biggest fears: low phone battery, eye contact and water. He went on to explain that while we all have fears, it's overcoming them that defines our business' future. Which, according to Dharmesh, is more important than ever.

Dharmesh talks about the 5 fears both he and co-founder Brian Halligan needed to overcome in order to grow bolder and better, resulting in the renowned, international success of the HubSpot platform and brand.

Voice search is growing at a rapid pace. By 2020, 50% of all search queries will be initiated by voice.

This trend is hardly surprising. Voice search is fast (3.7 times faster than typing) and convenient. Plus, with the best systems now operating with 95-97% accuracy, it’s becoming increasingly reliable.

Most smartphones are equipped with some form of voice-assisted search function, such as Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. At home, smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home are becoming integrated into family life.

For content marketers, the aim is clear. In order to boost your SEO rankings and gain traffic and leads, you need to be creating great content. But anyone who writes regularly will be familiar with the fear factor an expectation to repeatedly produce great content can bring.

Not only does your content need to be high-quality, compelling and relevant to the audience it’s trying to reach, but it also needs to stand well apart from the myriad of mediocre content floating around the digital sphere.

You may be familiar with the book The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s a book about how small actions at the right time, in the right place, and with the right people can create a ‘tipping point’ for anything from a product, to an idea or a trend.

Gladwell describes the tipping point as “that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behaviour crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”

Although the book was first published almost 20 years ago, there are a number of opportunities it affords for content marketers today wanting to reach more prospects and grow their business.