It’s time for the content marketing conversation to evolve

There’s a moment in awkward conversations when you realise the person you’re speaking to isn’t really engaged with the moment. They’re just repeating the same old anecdotes, catchphrases and opinions as if on autopilot. You’ve heard it all before – but they don’t seem to care.

At times recently, it feels to me like the conversation around content marketing is entering this kind of awkward territory. And I’ll be honest with you: just like plenty of other people giving keynotes and writing blog posts, I feel like I’ve been part of the problem. Content marketers keep giving the same advice, pointing out the same examples of best practice, preaching the same crowd-pleasing mantras as if nothing has changed in the last five years. That can’t be right.

It’s time we acknowledged that we operate in the most dynamic media environment ever, targeting audiences whose habits and thinking processes are changing at an extraordinary rate, and that like every other area of marketing, we need to move forward. Steve Rayson of Buzzsumo is fond of saying that what worked for you last year as a content marketer, probably won’t work for you this year. He’s right.

Content marketing’s growing pains
Content marketing is entering its teenage period – and as we all know, that involves a lot of potentially difficult adjustments. For the first time, life is a lot less simple – and a lot less certain. You’ve got to start questioning things, in order to figure out who you really are.

Technically speaking, content marketing may be one of the oldest forms of marketing out there (Johnson & Johnson, John Deere and Michelin were all excelling at it by 1900), but the concept of content marketing as we understand it today is far, far younger. When Seth Godin famously declared, in 2008, that “content marketing is the only marketing left,” the definition of content marketing was still very much up for grabs. He’d barely even heard the phrase before – and his definition of content marketing was actually very different to that of many content marketers.

The Content Marketing Institute launched two years later, in 2010, as part of a movement that was seeking to put some structure around the concept and best practice of content marketing. Fast forward to today and the institute’s Benchmarks, budgets and trends report shows 91% of B2B marketers using content marketing as part of their strategy. That’s a very rapid rise. And it hasn’t allowed time for the content marketing conversation to evolve alongside the actual practice of it. We’ve been so busy defining content marketing, rolling out evidence of effectiveness and defending its value to businesses that we haven’t spent enough time discussing how content marketing itself is changing. We haven’t paused to question whether the things we were saying in 2008, 2010 or 2013 (when content marketing really hit the big time) still apply today. If we’re to move our discipline forward and keep it fresh and relevant, then we need to address that.

Separating the architecture from the execution
We could take a lead from how thinking around marketing itself evolves over time. Marketing is a social science with commercial consequences. As a science it has certain foundational laws that stay pretty much fixed. Marketing today may use platforms, techniques and technologies that nobody had heard of two decades ago, but it still revolves around product, pricing, distribution and promotion. It still involves the understanding and segmenting of markets, the positioning of brands, and the development of value propositions. These elements provide the architecture of marketing and marketing strategies.