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Content Strategy Trends for 2020

By Victoria Palmer

As 2019 draws to a close with popping champagne corks and New Year’s resolutions, inevitably thoughts turn towards new innovations, ideas, and concepts for the upcoming year.  The world of content strategy is not any different in terms of understanding what and how new and emerging trends for 2020 will have an impact on the way content strategists will address strategy development and implementation.

Content is getting better because organizations and businesses are becoming savvy and smarter about how to leverage, research, create, and publish content. Content marketing and SEO will continue to be collaborative partners in the content strategy conversation.  While an effective content strategy is not limited to organizational size, type, and or scope, it should be agile and flexible in the application of new and emerging trends to promote organizational alignment and drive businesses’ strategic goals.

The following trends are on pace to take a prominent place in content strategy plans:

  • Niche content
  • Video as storytelling
  • Content for voice activation
  • Content provider as thought leader.

Niche Content

Building from the past few years, content creation has become more useful, usable, and technologically engaging.  It has also better aligned with user behaviors, preferences, and search needs. Content strategists will need to work across business units to align the various strategies into a cohesive and effective strategic plan, which will ensure that the right content gets to the right reader at the right time in the user journey. This will include working with the Marketing and User Research to determine the audience personas and their motivations. Conversations will center around what is the organization’s niche, what is the content that audiences will respond to. Content strategy will need to determine and facilitate a comprehensive approach for creating and maintaining niche content that is measured in interactions and engagements, instead of page per views. Niche content will make a greater impact for organizational branding and present an opportunity for audiences to gain access to information that cannot be found elsewhere, as well as enhancing SEO and cementing organizations as thought leaders.

Video as Storytelling

Research studies are forecasting that video will account for almost 80 percent of total Internet traffic by 2020. As more businesses and organizations use video content to foster engagement to educate and inform their audience base, visual storytelling in the format of video presents an opportunity to leverage interactions that written content is not able to do. This may take the form interviews with thought leaders and subject matter experts, live streaming of conferences, product launches, and Q&A sessions. There needs to be a concerted effort to include video in any content strategy and not be an afterthought. By working with the marketing and strategic communications business units to determine an editorial calendar or collaborating with the IT department to determine the best possible video management system to house video content.  YouTube’s function is outreach and sharing, and not as an asset management system.

Content for Voice Activation

Any content strategy in 2020 will need to think about creating content for voice activation.  It cannot be considered as optional or one of user experience. There has been an increase in smart speaker adoption in 2018.  According to the Pew Research Center, in 2017, almost half of U.S. adults, 46 percent, stated that they used voice assistants to gain access to content via smartphones and other devices with voice activation on computers and tablets, increasing from 14 percent of users. Content strategists will need to understand how to structure content to leverage machine based learning and artificial intelligence, as well as focusing on how this may inform data analysis to power search engines and audience search queries to better understand and anticipate audience preferences and behaviors, as well as the context of what audiences want in relation to what tasks they are look to complete.

Content Provider as Thought Leader

Businesses and organizations may be lulled into complacency regarding their brand perception. Most often, content strategies underestimate to impact of trust and reputation.  One of the trends that will shape content strategy in 2020, is thought leadership. In a Forbes article from 2019, audiences look to expertise, critical insight and ways to improve. It’s about offering information and encouraging engagement and feedback from the audience in a way that establishes trust.  This could be the form of video content, live streaming, and real time interactions for conference proceedings, webinars, and product or service launches. Business units within the content strategy ecosystem will need on-going conversations to determine content longevity and the type of content that is helping to drive and meet the goals of both the audience and the organization.

The Future is Now

As 2020 comes into view, one of the primary challenges to content strategy will be working to mitigating the effects of the silos and territorial mindset among departments and business units.  What is evident is that the world of content is becoming more integrated in terms of the application of emerging technologies, such as AI and machine learning.  Content strategists are well positioned to build those cross channels to create an effective content strategy and  demonstrate how emerging trends in content and success metrics may equip organization to better align with strategic goals and drivers, as well as more effectively collect and apply research and data analysis to inform content decisions which will help to bolster the content strategy.

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My fellow content marketers, we need to talk

Ugh. “We need to talk.” Nothing good ever seems to comes after that… But seriously, there are some things we need to sort out together.

Let’s start with the good news: Content is hot. Positively en fuego:

● 90% of organizations market with content (source)
● 67% of surveyed B2B companies reported marketing content a top three or higher priority within their overall 2015 marketing strategy. (source)
● 78% of CMOs think custom content is the future of marketing. (source)
● 54.1% of marketers are prioritizing hiring for marketing content above all other marketing sub-groups. (source)
• CNNMoney even ranked content strategist among the 100 best jobs in America for 2015. Not a bad environment in which to be a content creator or content strategist, huh?

But with rapid growth come growing pains. And that’s the part that we need to sort out together.

We need to clearly define what content strategy is and who does it

• In 2014 the Content Strategy Alliance (CSA) conducted an international Content Strategy Survey. Out of 1,255 respondents, 72.3 percent identified “defining content strategy, best practices, and skill sets” as a concern they’d like to see addressed.
• The CSA also learned that a solid quarter of professionals engaged in content strategy have only 2-3 years of experience, and a full 80% are self-taught.
• Moreover, of the 90.5 percent of respondents who reported doing content strategy work, fully 61.7 percent did not hold the title “Content Strategist.” Not surprising, really. Graphic artists, copywriters, editors, brand strategists, SEOs, and public relations specialists all engage – even specialize – in content strategy and content marketing.

We need to practice teamwork

With so many professionals playing important roles in content strategy and marketing, it’s easy to end up with a bad case of too many cooks in the kitchen. You probably have a war story of your own about a content project gone horribly wrong. Please, share it with us.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s this: the problem isn’t how many cooks are in the kitchen – it’s how well we work together.

One project exemplified this for me.

A marketing consultant I know was helping a customer modernize their web presence. The customer engaged a separate web development firm to redesign their site. Six months into the project, the new website was going nowhere fast and the customer was growing frustrated. So, my friend hired me to diagnose and fix the problem.

What I learned was that while the marketing consultant was convinced the web developer was incompetent, she was actually waiting on him to deliver content – content he didn’t even have. It had to come from the customer directly. Simply put: these cooks couldn’t even agree on the recipe.

Ultimately, I was able to get the project back on track and finished in no time simply by facilitating some much-needed communication.
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And that’s what it’s all about, my friends: communication. Particularly, when one customer hires multiple contractors (or multiple firms) to develop content.

Smoothing out the wrinkles in content projects

I have a 3-step formula for fixing some of the most frustrating problems that arise in content projects.

Step one: talk to each other

Ahead of time.

Let’s engage in networking to get to know each other. Find out what other professionals are struggling with when it comes to content projects, and what kind of support we can lend each other.

Step two: talk to each other

At the beginning of each project.

It sucks to be the last one brought in on a content project. Like the copywriter who has to figure out how to sell a product in just three lines because the design is finished and that’s all there’s room for.

Let’s not do that to one another. If a customer hires you to do design/copywriting/social media/whatever use the network you built in step one to get everyone involved from day one.

Step three: talk to each other

During the project.

Let’s face it, customers don’t always understand what goes into a content project and consequently kinda suck at coordinating their contractors. So it’s up to us to work together as a team.

Having learned this lesson I’ve begun offering project management services, taking the lead to make sure the SEO gets consumer insights from the market researcher, and the copywriter gets keywords from the SEO, and the designer gets copy from the copywriter . . . you get the picture. This kind of coordination results in higher quality content projects that finish faster with fewer headaches all around.

How you can get involved to improve content for everybody

The Content Strategy Alliance (CSA) is working to support content strategists and content marketers everywhere. They’ve begun assembling resources like Content Strategy Tools & Templates: A Best Practices Handbook Tools & Templates Handbook, a mentorship program, and an upcoming certification program to aid and educate the industry.

But the CSA needs help. They’re looking for smart, enthusiastic volunteers like you to shape the future of content strategy. Become a member to get involved and have your voice heard.

About the author:

Alexa Steele is a copywriter and marketing consultant specializing in digital communications. She has been writing premium marketing content since 2009, and is now available to manage your content projects from concept to completion.

Connect with Alexa on LinkedIn.

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Content Components

By Khaled Aly
CSA Member

Content components are modular information units, marked up according to XML rules. XML is a meta language that supports content structuring by enforcing a grammar to each communicated dialect. Documents, service specifications, or messages… Content servers communicating to human users, or cross-communicating provisioning (web) servers… The content lingo is not free form but rather well defined so that machines cannot miss any semantics and publishers can maximize utility by reusing it within a typed context. That is, each piece of information, regardless of its length and hierarchic composition, has a named (transformable) type and ID to associate with.

Content components mainly refer to text documents that may contain media resources by reference. So, resources are there to visually and/or audibly enhance content deliverables, which when well assembled produce an information product of focus value to a business group/objective. As standard types and transformation technology broadens, components become unrestricted to source information. Rather, they may be recyclable targets that can be transformed differently by other engines to serve other purposes, keeping in mind conditional source transform processing that is becoming abundantly possible as platform suppliers have embraced its prominence.

Omni-channel publishing involves temporal, end-user device-dependent, selection and arrangement of content components, to deliver the right information, in a suitable form to the requester, at the right time.

compnent content

 

 

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Template of the Week – The Content Model

By Kevin P. Nichols

(This is part of a series of articles highlighting the templates from Content Strategy Alliance Tools & Templates: A Best Practices Handbook.)

In the book, The Language of Content Strategy, Cleve Gibbon defines a content model as “a formal representation of structured content as a collection of content types and their interrelationships.” That is exactly what a content model is, a list of content types used within a content experience, such as a website, and the rules for those content types and the content within them.

In my book, Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide, I note the importance of a content type, and I aver, “All content experiences start with a content type!” And a content model starts with a list of content types within an experience.

There are different levels of content model fidelity, some more conceptual and some more specific to every piece of content within an experience. This post features the detailed or what we call the ‘final content model.’ This content model starts as a more conceptual model and evolves into a comprehensive detailed blueprint for a content experience.

A content model is a powerful tool, and in addition to listing the content types within an experience, it helps with any type of component-based content management system, documenting the rules for each component within a content type, any intelligent content rules, personalization rules, and any other types of business logic in how content surfaces. It can also capture metrics and metadata, and information such as character lengths for fields such as a header or sub-header areas.

So a content model is a tool that captures a series of decisions made concerning content types, the modules or components that comprise each content type, and any special rules for each. Often, this document lives in a spreadsheet and is created by a content strategist with possible inputs from a business analyst and used by a technology team to implement within a platform, such as a content management system.

For Content Strategy Alliance Tools & Templates: A Best Practices Handbook, Jacqueline McAndrew and I worked together to create the structure for this content model; she then iterated upon it to create what you see today on the site. She then created the content model example, so that you can see how it appears populated. I believe this version of a content model is a strong example and is useful for many types of projects rolling out new content experiences.

I hope you find this tool useful and I welcome any feedback on how you have used it or how you think we could improve it!

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Content Strategy in the Classroom

(Updated 5-31-19)

A number of courses in content strategy have sprung up. Below is our list – anyone have anything to add? Write to us.

UNIVERSITIES

  1. McGill University, Content Management and Architecture; Steven Grindlay, Instructor
  2. University of California (UCR) Extension, Professional Studies; Content Strategy
  3. Langara College, British Columbia; Content Strategy, Usability and Information Architecture; Melissa Breker, Instructor
  4. University of British Columbia; Social Media, Content Marketing; Melissa Breker, Instructor
  5. University of Washington iSchool – Content Strategy and Information Architecture; Misty Weaver; Instructor
  6. University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education; Certificate in Storytelling and Content Strategy; Tizzy Asher, Peter Luyckx – Instructors
  7. Kent State – Master of Science in Information Architecture and Knowledge Management with a concentration in User Experience Design (UXD) at Kent State University; ; Hilary MarshContent Strategy 1 & II, Instructor
  8. Centennial College. Toronto, Canada – Interactive Media Management Program at Centennial College; Pamela Kostur, Program Coordinator
  9. FH Joanneum, University of Applied Sciences; Graz, Austria; Masters of Arts in Social Sciences, Content Strategy at Department of Media & Design; Kickoff Workshop: What is Content Strategy; Content Modelling and Style Guides; Heinz Wittenbrink, Program Director; Rahel Baillie, Doris Eichemeier, Lisa Moore,Ursula Krenenberger, Sascha Stoltenow, Margot Bloomstein, Instructors
  10. Northwestern University, Chicago, IL; Design & Strategy; Content Strategy specialization; Advanced Writing Workshop, Social Media and Content Curation, and Persuasion
  11. Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, Free online content strategy course; Candy Lee and John Lavine, Instructors
  12. Syracuse University– Online Content Strategy & Application; Kelly Lux, Jenn Pedde, Instructors
  13. University of Washington – Content Strategy for the Web; Andrea Zeller, Instructor
  14. Full Sail University, Winter Park, FL; Internet Marketing, Bachelor of Science, Content Strategy, Development and Marketing
  15. The University of Kansas, William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication is launching its first online master’s program in Digital Content Strategy and students will be able to earn certificates in data interpretation and social media strategy, beginning in August 2016. Learn more at its
  16. Columbia University, New York, NY, School of Professional Studies, Strategic Communications, Master of Science; Content Strategy: Achieving   Business Goals Through Content; Content Strategy: Fundamentals, Techniques, and Tools; Margot Bloomstein and Christopher Collette, Instructors
  17. Royal Roads University, Garth von Buchholz, Instructor; Social Content Strategy: Getting the Right Content to the Right People at the Right Time; Social Content Strategy for Environmental Professionals; and Search Engine Mechanics: Google Basics for Social Content
  18. University of Wisconsin, School of Continuing Education, Building an Integrated Digital Content Strategy

OTHER COURSES/WORKSHOPS

  1. MediaBistro, Digital Content Strategy http://www.mediabistro.com/courses/digital-content-strategy/new-york/8956/; Jess Adamiak, Instructor
  2. School of Visual Concepts, Seattle WA; Content Strategy for the Web, Paula Land, Instructor
  3. ADMCI – Applied Content Strategy, Rebecca Steurer, Instructor
  4. Content Marketing Institute – offers courses on content strategy tasks such as creating personas, finding keywords, etc.
  5. The Publishing Training Center – Content Strategy for the Web, Sue Davis, Instructor
  6. Firehead – Introduction to Content Strategy
  7. Digital Content Academy; Content Strategy 2 Day Intensive; Rahel Baillie
  8. NN/g Nielsen Norman Group – Content Strategy Full Day training course,New York, NY; Catherine Toole, Instructor; September 15, 2016. London, England: November 09, 2016; Omnichannel Journeys and Customer Experience – Full Day training course; Kim Flaherty, Instructor; Toronto: July 15, 2016; New York, NY: September 16, 2016; London, England: November 10, 2016
  9. EConsultancy – Digital Content Strategy Training; Tim Fidgeon, Instructor; London, England: August 11, 2016
  10. Emarketeers – Digital Content Strategy Training; Anne Caborn, Instructor; Clerkenwell, London: September 16, 2016; November 2, 2016; and December 14, 2016
  11. Webcredible Training Academy – Online Content Strategy Training; Felice Hawley, Instructor
  12. Isentia, Australia; Digital Content Strategy
  13. Certificate in Online Business, LTD (COB); Content Strategy: Content and Customer Experience Training
  14. Association for Data-Driven Marketing & Advertising (ADMA)  – Planning a Content Strategy (Online Module) 
  15. Meritus Media; content strategy training for businesses 
  16. QA, Berkshire, London – Digital Content Strategy (One-day classroom course)
  17. Coursehorse, New York, NY – Digital Content Strategy
  18. Imparture – Social Media Content Strategy
  19. Knowledge Engineers – Content Strategy and Distribution Course (One day)
  20. George Brown College, Toronto, Ontario – Digital Content Strategy (Continuing Education Certification)
  21. Divvy HQ – On-site Content Strategy Workshop (Two Day)– (for those using Divvy HQ software)
  22. Content Strategy Workshops – Eileen Webb, Lisa Marie Martin and Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Instructors
  23. Content Academy; courses include Applied Content Strategy
  24. General Assembly – Introduction to Content Strategy: What to Create, Why to Create it, And How to Show It to the World

Past Courses/Not Currently Being Taught

  1. University of Strasbourg at CAWEB – Master’s Program, Web Content Strategy; Destry Wion, Guest Lecturer
  2. Agencyside – Content Strategy: The Critical Link for Digital Success; Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Instructor
  3. University of Toronto – Treating Content as an Organizational Resource
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