By Nick Nelson

Even in the steadiest of times, content marketing can be a difficult field to project forward. The craft is fluid and fast-changing by nature. When customer preferences and behaviors are evolving, which is always, so too must the ways we reach and engage them.

Needless to say, predicting what lies ahead for content marketing is especially tough right now, as we wrap up a chaotic year of 2020 and stare into the uncertainty of 2021.

That doesn’t mean we won’t try!

As organizations lay out plans and strategies for the coming year, it’s vital to get a bead on trends and threadlines that will shape the terrain. Where should content marketers and strategists be setting their sights? Which challenges and opportunities stand out? What will be the keys to success?

Content Marketing in 2021: What Top B2B Marketing Influencers Foresee

To help you gain some well-rounded insight, we reached out to several leading B2B content marketing experts and influencers with a firm grasp on the discipline and its ongoing evolution. Here are their predictions for 2021:

1 — Ardath Albee: “Interactive Content will Become a Mainstay”

@ardath421

I wrote recently here that digital experiences will be a top priority for content marketers in 2021. Veteran marketer Ardath Albee, who currently serves as interim VP of Marketing at Modus, also sees this as a pivotal frontier for content marketers:

B2B has gone digital and it’s not going back. Buyers are relying on self-education more than ever. Engagement and experiences are critical for company growth. Interactive content will become a mainstay in Demand Gen and Sales Enablement programs in 2021 and beyond.

From virtual product tours to 3D virtual experiences, to value assessments and Digital Sales Rooms – marketers who want to facilitate the end-to-end buying experience with outcomes that prove contribution to revenue will increase focus on interactive content. They’ll up their game, moving beyond quizzes and surveys to content that resonates by getting buyers to actively pursue conversations with the companies that get them involved in what it takes to buy with confidence.

[bctt tweet=”“Marketers who want to facilitate the end-to-end buying experience with outcomes that prove contribution to revenue will increase focus on interactive content.” — Ardath Albee @ardath421″ username=”toprank”]

2 — Ty Heath: Accelerating the ‘Right-Brain’ Movement

@tyrona

Business decisions are made on the basis of both rational and emotional factors. Too often, B2B marketers have over-indexed on the former. Ty Heath, Director of Market Engagement for LinkedIn*’s B2B Institute, anticipates a collective push toward creativity and humanization:

For a long time, marketing’s view of the world has been very left brain rational. The pandemic will accelerate the shift to a ‘right-brain’ movement.

We will see more humor, more storytelling and emotion in B2B marketing in the coming year. We expect to see more brand mascots like Salesforce’s feral raccoon-child mascot, …read more

Source:: Top Rank Blog

      

Author: Aaron