FutureOrganizations are producing a lot of content nowadays to reach and interact with consumers, be it with blogs, whitepapers, tweets, or other social media activities. And since content seems to be at the heart of every marketing campaign, the budgets spent on content marketing are generally growing.

Still, many marketers have to put more efforts into the quality of their content production, as well as data, automation and artificial intelligence, as all of it forms the basis for good content marketing in the future.

The study ‘The Future of Content Marketing’ by Oracle Marketing Cloud and Econsultancy provides answers to what makes great content or how the effectiveness of the actions can be measured.

Clearly the study shows on all accounts that good content marketing has to be data-driven in order to reach and please (potential) customers. It is best to make use of a personalized approach, as well as content that is adapted to customers’ current needs, besides focusing on how to reach them on the right channel. Companies can achieve this only with data obtained at all touch points.

Just presenting content isn’t enough

It is not just a matter of playing out content. Really good content encourages interaction and offers further opportunities to collect customer data that can then be used to derive valuable insights for further content production. The silver bullets are, after all, one-to-one conversations, such as chats, but automation for bots is generally useful, too.

Although automation is expedient in every phase of the content marketing process, it will be very interesting to see how automation will manage to handle one-on-one conversations in the future in real time when using chat bots. Companies like Apple and Amazon are already working with Siri and Alexa on how to use artificial intelligence to communicate with customers and how to earn their loyalty.

Furthermore, it is decisive that content gets tailored not only to individuals, but regions as well. This applies in particular to international companies and is both about considering the respective data protection guidelines, as well as managing content and data cross-border.

Content creation regards everybody

Many marketers are worried about the measured values, since creating mass-produced content without measuring results makes little sense. Indeed, that’s why the same measurement values must apply for content marketing, as for any other marketing measure. With the right technology, it is possible to map exactly which content is preferred by whom and where consumers are heading to.

And last but not least, the study shows that content creation has to concern the whole enterprise, meaning relevant content should be provided by all departments and is not only the issue of marketing. Since data, automation and new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, are the basis for the content marketing of the future, we just want to emphasize that customer information should be gathered at all touchpoints so that content can be personalized through the right channel.

By Daniela La Marca