What Happened In Content Marketing In 2015?

Blink and you’ll miss a development taking place in content marketing. Changes are happening so quickly, content marketers are creating new tools and strategies so fast, and businesses are moving so rapidly to make use of them that if you look away, you can be left behind. In this post, we’re going to look at the four big trends that hit content marketing in 2015 — and in the next three posts, we’ll explore the trends we can look forward to over the following year.

1. The Purse Strings Loosened

At the end of 2014, a third of marketers surveyed told Contently that the lack of a budget was their biggest obstacle to creating effective content. More than half of B2B marketers said that they planned to reduce that obstacle by increasing the funds available for content marketing.

Last year, those firms allocated an average of 28% of their marketing budgets to content and B2C companies spent nearly a third of their marketing money on it. They may still have some way to go. Studies have shown that the B2C companies with the best results from their marketing had spent 42% of their budgets on content. For B2B companies, the figure was 38%. The money went largely on risk mitigation and on lead generation, nurturing and scoring.

During 2015, as audiences started to use smarter ad blockers, VPs of Marketing increasingly understood the value of content in creating and keeping customers. It’s no surprise that Contently’s 2016 report found that 77% of B2C marketers and 76% B2B marketers will be pushing out more content marketing in 2016.

2. Content Firms Snapped Up Sponsored Content

2015 was also the year in which publishers came to recognize the effectiveness of sponsored content. 75% of publishers and media buyers are now publishing sponsored articles, offering content to their audiences that match their publication and which also build relationships with brands. On Buzzfeed, that can take the form of a listicle; on The Atlantic, it could be an interactive infographic that’s as clickable as it is beautiful.

More importantly, audiences are getting used to it. The percentage of readers who reported feeling deceived by sponsored content fell by fifteen points between 2014 and 2015. Content marketers are getting better at delivering targeted content that appeals to audiences, and those audiences have now come to understand that even on quality content sites they can expect to see embedded brand messages.

3. Mobile Content Continued To Grow

2014 was the year in which mobile Internet use overtook desktop surfing. That gap grew in 2015: 51% of time online is now spent on a mobile device and 42% on a desktop/laptop. 89% of that mobile time though is spent on an app where content can be reconfigured, redesigned and finely targeted. It’s made Facebook the current content colossus. Of its 1.01 billion daily active users, 894 billion of them visit the site on a mobile device. For content marketers, who spend most of their days creating content at their desks, remembering that consumption will take place on much smaller screens has become increasingly important.

4. Video Content Became More Vital Than Ever

In a live Q&A in June 2015, Mark Zuckerberg answered a question from Arianna Huffington about the way journalists and news organizations would present their stories over the next few years. He talked about the conflict between speed and accuracy but much of his answer focused on video:

“We're seeing more and more rich content online. Instead of just text and photos, we're now seeing more and more videos. This will continue into the future and we'll see more immersive content like VR. For now though, making sure news organizations are delivering increasingly rich content is important and it's what people want.”

That’s been happening. Video now makes up 50 percent of all mobile traffic and nearly 7 out of 10 marketing, sales and business professionals have used video marketing. Until VR technology is ready, those figures only look set to grow. We’ll explore how in the next post.

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